Tomato ripening question?

Hi everyone, last year my first attempt at growing tomatoes was ruined by blight which struck before the fruits were large enough to ripen but this year I have plenty of large fruit, only one of which is beginning to colour slightly. I've been watering my neighbour's tomatoes while she's on holiday & they are ripening much faster (even though two of the plants were given to her by me & were started from seed at the same time as my own plants). Is there anything I'm doing wrong? I've removed quite alot of leaves, feed weekly and water regularly. Is anything I could do to naturally speed up the process?

 

Once one or two start to ripen the others tend to follow, dont be in any great hurry to remove the ones that are ripening.

 

Why have you removed a lot of the leaves? The plants need them to put energy into the plant and the fruits.:thumb:

 

Thanks for the replies, hopefully the ripening tomato will start the process for the rest of them, my neighbour's red tomatoes just had me worried :lollol:I'll try to be patient!

 

daitheplant, I removed alot of the leaves because of my experience with blight last year, I over watered & the abundance of damp leaves produced perfect conditions for it to breed in the greenhouse, which apparently isn't a very common site for the disease. Also a few experienced tomato growers I've asked have said that when all the trusses have set it's best to remove many of the leaves to aid the ripening process, is this not the case?

 

Thanks JWK, just wondering about the frequency of feeding, I feed with tomorite weekly. All the plants have four trusses, is this enough or could they be doing with more nutrients at this stage?

 

This season was the first season I tried to grow some tomatoes and i treated them a bit harshly in a sense, left them dry for days at a time, didnt use any feed whatsoever and let the wind batter them (dont have a greenhouse) however as a result it looks like they've just become hardy. Loads of the branches/leaves have just fallen off and it looks as though the plant is plowing all its effort into making tomatoes. The plants look a bit bare aside from the massive vines of tomatoes and these tomatoes look much healthier than most of my neighbours who have big green bushy plants that they tend to every day like a nurse tends to a sick child.

as far as pruning the plants goes im not sure how that would affect the plant too badly, ive finally pruned mine after they started to get so top heavy i kept finding them on top of each other in a pile (so i had to tie them to some deckchairs!) and all they did was just chill out and carry on making more tomatoes. The lack of branches has, if anything, added to the scrumptiousness of my tomatoes but im not sure if thats because of a controlled size or because i let it get a bit battered and it sucked all the health out of the branches and dumped it into the fruit.

What i would suggest is maybe doing your plants in a variety of different ways this year to see how they react, next year youll have a much better idea of how to handle them.

I seem to have a couple of eveything in my garden and because i treated them all differently i've learned a hell of a lot this year, next year im going to grow 100% more tomato plants and 100% less carrots :flag:

 

er....P.S.

my tomatoes are ripening from the top down (on the vine) and i seem to have a couple more every 3-4 days. if you wait im sure youll have a fair few in no time at all!
:thmb:

 

None of mine are starting to ripe yet!
John

 

My outdoor tomato plants were struck with blight about 3-4 weeks ago despite spraying with bordeaux mixture and it quickly progressed through the garden even though the tom plants were spread all over the place.
I cut off all the foliage and have left them alone. Some of the tomatoes went rotten but others on the same vine haven't. I have lost a lot BUT some seem to be doing ok, though they are taking time to ripen. Even where the stems are predominantly brown, new shoots are appearing, isn't nature great? I read that by putting anything red nearby will make the tomatoes compete with each other, so I have going to experiment by stringing some red ping pong balls together and draping them on the plants.:cnfs:
Finally, will the seeds from these tomatoes be blight resistant if they have survived blight this summer?

 

I've never fed outdoor toms, if the soil is good its a waste of time and money.

I always tend tend to think Tomorite was developed for the grow bag, which will definitely need feeding, likewise pots.

I have a theory that toms that struggle a bit, taste a bit better, may not be quite so big but the flavour is more intense, if thats the right word.

I remove some leaves lower down, but not to the point that the plant looks bare.