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Growing Tomatoes

Why aren't my Tomatoes turning red??

10 years ago

I have several tomato varieties that are doing pretty well - Purple Cherokee, Ace 55, and Carmello, and they have pretty nice foliage and plump green tomatoes. Seems like I am waiting forever for them to "blush". Even the Sungold cherries seem really slow.

They are growing in partial sun, because I have a lot of trees, but that isn't any different than previous few years.

Anybody ideas why tomatoes would be so slow to ripen??

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Comments (8)

carolyn137
10 years ago
You don't live that far from me, same gardening zone, and with exceptions of a few days and nights it's been COLD, COLD, and that slows down ripening. Night temps in the high 30's to mid 40's and Monday the high was only near 60 F with cloudy weather.

Carolyn
sue_ct
10 years ago
I have been in the same boat! Talk about a late tomato season!
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Probably it is too much rain. With some apparently healthy tomato plants, you will have flowering but no fruit in periods of high humidity, which we definitely are having this year. The rain and humidity make the pollen 'sticky' so it clumps together and, consequently, pollination fails to occur. Some varieties are worse about having sticky pollen than others. In my experience here in southern Oklahoma, Brandywine is one of the worst for being slow to go from the flower to fruit stage. To increase the odds of getting fruit, shake your plants gently. This is easy to do if you have them in cages or if they are trellised or staked. Just grab hold of the cage, stake or trellis and shake it a little. The shaking might loosen up enough pollen to cause pollination to occur. It is a little harder to shake them effectively without breaking a stem if the plants are sprawling on the ground, but you can still do it. There are a couple of other ways to help increase pollination. You can use your fingers to 'thump' each blossom several times. This is pretty easy to do if you only have a handful of blossoms per plant, but if you have tons of blossoms, it can become time consuming. On the other hand, you don't hve to thump them all. Or, if you have your plants caged, staked or trellised.....and if you have an old tennis racket or badminton racket sitting around, just walk down the row of plants and give each cage, stake or trellis a couple of fairly hard whacks with the racket. That whack may shake the plant hard enough to induce pollination. The only other option is that your plants have too much nitrogen so their energy is going into leaf production and not fruit production. Since you have flowers, though, I doubt that is the problem. You should get great watermelon production IF the rain eventually stops. Whether the watermelons have good flavor will be the issue. Watermelons that ripen when it is extremely wet often have a noticeable lack of good flavor. Just like tomatoes, watermelon varieties have a certain brix (degee of sweetness) they generally attain. If excessive rainfall occurs, the flavor is essentially 'watered down' and you can't do anything to prevent it, except pray for the rain to stop before the watermelons hit the ripening stage. Unfortunately we are at the mercy of the weather and this is just a really awful weather year. I hope the rain stops and the production of the plants improves. Dawn
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seysonn
10 years ago
New England weather. I know, I have lived in CT for over a decade. But then you are going to have the most beautiful fall.All those maples, oaks, .. turning color. B-U-T-full
thirsty_dirt_77
10 years ago
As I have learned this year, temperature plays a huge part in when a tomato with ripen.

My greenhouse was full of mature green tomatoes that refused to ripen. As soon as the weather cooled they all started to change.

See the attached article.

Here is a link that might be useful: Why Aren't My Tomatoes Ripening
chervil2
10 years ago
My microclimate of the warm and sunny southwest side of my house enabled me to have a decent crop of Sungold, Juliet, and Stump of the World tomatoes. My tomatoes in other garden areas did not ripen.
terrene
Original Author
10 years ago
That is an interesting link Thirsty. I would have thought that the tomatoes need warm temps and maybe more sun to ripen! I'm going to try to be patient and keep waiting for the color to break.
thirsty_dirt_77
10 years ago
I found it a little surprising as well. All we hear about is how cold the weather is for tomatoes but never that its too warm.

I've grow tomatoes before but outside in the garden. They didn't get much love and if I got a good crop it is a nice surprise. Growing them in a greenhouse for the first time this year was... educational. :) By the end of the summer my husband was saying "hot is good!" and I was saying "NO, it needs to be cooler!"

Something else you might be interested to know is that high temperatures also affect pollination. So you know those warms summers where we all expect to get tons of tomatoes and then they set fruit late??? Its because its TOO warm. lol Apparently the "viability" of tomato pollen greatly depreciates if not turning sterile in temperatures of 90F (32C). Go figure!!!
seysonn
10 years ago
Tomatoes thrive best in a given range of temperature. It partially depend on the cultivars too. It is a know FACT that most tomatoes shut down at extreme heat (over 90F).
I thin the optimum temp range is 70F to 85F.

Tomato plants are pretty cold hardy. I have experimented them to endure lows down to 38F. So the mature plant will be the same.

But the question of ripening the fruits is another issue. In my guesstimation, Both growth and ripening will be dramatically slowed down and the fruits will be more on the dry side.

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