How To Ripen Green Tomatoes ON THE VINE IN 3 DAYS

So guys I've gotten this question three different times in the comment section over the last week and the question was about was about tomatoes and why are my tomatoes all still green they're not ripening they're just staying on the vine and there's no change and not even the slightest hint of a change in color. I've let my tomatoes go a little bit and they've gotten a little bit unruly over the last two to three weeks but I've just been super busy but I'm going to show you why your tomatoes are not turning red on the vine. I'll start out giving you the number one reason that this is happening and then I'll give you quite a few other things you can do to correct this problem but at the end of the video if you'll just stay to the end of the video I'm going to show you a super simple method turn this into the juiciest reddest tomatoes you can imagine just by doing one simple thing and the cost on it is minimal pennies literally pennies for doing this to turn green tomatoes still growing on the vine not bringing into the house you're going to do this while they're still in the vine and still expanding in size and still getting a lot more juice in them so let's head into the greenhouse and I'll show you how to implement this and we'll start off by telling you the number one reason. Now as I promised outside I'm going to give you the number one reason that tomatoes are not turning from green to ripe not softening up they're still very firm the only thing you could really do with them is maybe make fried green tomatoes which is a southern staple but a lot of people don't like those or they don't prefer that so what everybody mostly prefers is a juicy red tomato and here's what happens this is the number one reason if your daytime temperatures consistently stay above 85 degrees fahrenheit and your nighttime temperatures don't get below 70 degrees fahrenheit the tomato itself stops producing lycopene and keratin those two pigments that change your tomatoes from green to red and so that's what happens is your temperatures is the number one reason and there's a very easy fix so just remember if you're in the middle of a heat wave don't expect your tomatoes to suddenly ripen up because there's tremendous stress on the plant so I'm hoping I'm on camera here but this is a shade cloth and I use it both on the outside and the inside and the shade cloth on the outside has become damaged it's been up there for I believe over 15 years but this is a newer shade cloth I've put on the inside to help cut down some temperatures on things I had growing here but this is 90% shade cloth I believe I purchased it from Greenhouse Megastore and I'll try to put their name in the description so if you forget it you can just look down there but this is 90% but out in the garden we want to buy maybe 40-50% shade cloth and then set it up in the garden if you already have a structure out there that a trellis that your tomatoes are growing on just put the shade cloth on the top of it and cut down on that sunshine especially if you live in an area that gets intense sunlight so that's the number one way you can help your tomatoes undo this stress and they can start producing red tomatoes again now air temperature is important but soil temperature is also important and if you don't have any type of mulch around the base of your tomatoes it's a terrible mistake because the stress can continue down into the soil so I usually use the shredded pine bark you could use pine straw or just normal straw but any type of mulch that you can get at your big box store garden center you need to make sure you mulch around the tomato and I've seen people growing tomatoes with no mulch at all and they seem to do pretty well but then there was a lot of shade in that area so you had a little bit of daytime sun but then some partial shade to help relieve the stress of the soil temperature so remember if you've got full all day sun you need to mulch so watering in the morning is critical because as the day heats up you may go to work and then those tomatoes start to dry out all day and then at the end of the day you're watering you're causing a lot of stress to build up over the day so it's better to water in the morning where the soil is nice and cool and then it can warm up over the day but you have the protection of watering early in the morning maybe seven eight o'clock before you head out to work now if you live in a part of the country that gets very cool summers then that could be another problem if your nighttime temperatures are dropping or just dipping just below 50 degrees that can be another thing that slows the greening of your tomatoes it can slow down the metabolism of the plant and ultimately even though your tomatoes get may get to a nice size like this the ripening effect won't happen because your nighttime temperatures are too low so possibly you might need to make sure that you're getting it in the most sunniest spot of your yard because that nighttime temperature is really going to have an effect it may be one of those things that you can do nothing about other than growing tomatoes in a greenhouse where you'd have warmer days and nights in that case now fertilization can be critical when you're growing tomatoes because a lot of people put these normal big brand fertilizers on their tomatoes and what they don't realize is they're putting too much nitrogen and i would recommend using something like bone meal is 2170 and that middle number is the key number phosphorus you want as low of a nitrous nitrogen level as possible and that middle number the phosphorus you want that to be as high as possible i've seen some fertilizers that were something like 0 50 0 and that's really critical for creating just the right environment or soil environment for your tomatoes you want to grow tomatoes you want to have big juicy red tomatoes you don't want a big green leafy bush and that's what will happen if you put too much nitrogen on your tomatoes it just will happen every time so using something like this i believe schultz is another good product it has a very high phosphorus count and a very low nitrogen level so look for a bloom booster i'll try to find a link and put it in the description so remember nitrogen is your enemy once your plant has become established because you want it to focus on flowering and growing fruit now lack of patience is another issue we just want to have instant tomatoes we're so used to going to the grocery store and just grabbing a tomato off the shelf and just not realizing that it takes time to get there from the time your tomato puts out a flower to when it's actually in this green state the mature state of being green it takes about 20 to 30 days and then to go from that green state and this is most varieties there's some varieties that do yellow i mean excuse me turn red a little bit sooner but generally i'm just speaking generally 20 to 30 days to get to that point and then another 7 to 14 days to go from green to a nice red color like this so remember there's a patience factor here involved as well now focusing the plant's energy especially by the time now in august you need to focus that plant's energy onto the existing tomatoes you need to pinch off all the flowers you can to focus on what's already there because it will distribute the energy of the plant among flowers small fruit larger fruits so picking off all the flowers and removing some of the smaller fruits so the plant itself can focus on the largest tomatoes and go into that state of growth because you'll have very lackluster growth if you don't do this so we need to focus on the best tomatoes on the shrub on the vine and then we can pick them and have a really nice harvest but i just will tell you there is one secret by leaving the tomatoes on the vine i'm going to show you that secret in just a sec that will absolutely amaze you when it comes to ripening tomatoes why they're still on the vine so i've talked about this many times in my vegetable garden that planting things too close together can cause poor air circulation and competing for nutrients in the soil so make sure that whatever you're planting you space it out anywhere from 18 to 24 inches to make sure there's good airflow and there's no competing for nutrients in the soil especially if you have poor soils and you haven't added any additives to them now we're approaching mid-august and we have a fairly long summer we probably won't see our first frost until maybe mid-november but one thing you have to remember that it doesn't really matter how long your season is as you approach the end of your season you need to cut the total overall size of your tomato plant an overgrown vine you need to reflect that energy back into the lower part of the plant not the base but just kind of i'd say removing about 30 to 40 percent of the top of the plant especially if it's overgrown so it can reflect the energy back into the plant and ultimately into the tomatoes that are currently growing so you can get ripe tomatoes on the vine so there's an additive you can add to the foliar spray and to the base of the tomato plant that will speed up ripening of the tomato plant and give it a really boost one is potassium and the other is magnesium you want to take one tablespoon of epsom salt add it to a gallon of water and then apply it to all the leaves on the plant that magnesium can help quite a bit now the other is taking wood ash and if you have a fire pit or anything like that you can create your own wood ash i'll put a link in the description to where you can order wood ash if you don't if there's a burn issue in your neighborhood or something like that you can buy it online and just put about one half a cup right at the base of the tomato plants and that will add in the right amount just what you need for your tomato plant now if you have a short summer season and you know depending on where you live in the country you need to make sure that you buy the right type of tomatoes i'll put a list on the screen of the earliest ripening tomatoes but something like a really big beefsteak tomato that's going to take a majority of the summer to become red and ripe on the vine so just make sure that you get the variety that will work best in your zone you can usually tell your first frost date by going online and putting in your city or maybe your county and then it'll pop up and tell you what the expected first frost date is and you'll know how soon these tomatoes have to be ready to pull off the vine now i'm going to show you the trick of how to ripen your tomatoes while they're still on the vine ethylene gas is something that the tomato is naturally releasing but if you live in a windy area or if you have issues with too much rain or something like that you can have the ethylene gas not working properly so what i've done i came up with an idea of how to maximize the amount of ethylene gas because there's an old trick about taking tomatoes and putting them on your kitchen countertop in a sandwich bag and let them ripen that way it speeds up the ripening process but what i'm thinking is and what i did this year for the first time and it worked great i'm going to show you in just a second these little bags i ordered online and they're white so they reflect heat so i would recommend that you make sure you get a white bag if you get a black one it's going to draw in heat and make it too hot also you want to make sure you punch very small holes in it to release some of the excess heat even though it is white but one of the things to remember is is that we're trying to concentrate ethylene gas into this bag which will speed up the ripening process i've had green tomatoes on the vine i did this and less than a week later they were all red but what you need to do is you take a banana you peel it cut off about a three to four inch section of the peel you don't have to use the whole banana and just put that in this bag then you take the bag and place it over either a few tomatoes on the vine or a single tomato and make sure that you use a bread tie to tie it off so there's a pretty good system you have in place where it won't fall you may have to add a little bit of added support by some twine but that banana will release ethylene gas it is the number one thing in the garden not in my garden but the banana itself releases more ethylene gas than anything else even an apple because an old trick is putting an apple into a bag a paper bag once you bring it inside and that's supposed to ripen up that will work but i want to leave them on the vine as long as possible for maximum size so remember take your banana put it into the bag then tie it off and let it hang there and you'll see in about a week to a week and a half your green tomatoes will start to ripen all right so i haven't opened this today i just collected them off of the vine and let's open this up and take a look at our tomatoes and i just cut it and let them drop into the bag and as you can see they are ripe and ready they're still very firm but that's a trick you can do you don't even have to remove them from the vine just put the bags over them these bags are the same type of very small bags that you get often at jewelry stores or some place like that where they just put a small product in there they're very cheap maybe one or two cents each now in this bag i wanted to test it without the banana peel so this actually worked without putting a small sliver of banana in there now if you're worried about attracting insects by doing that you can take some diatomaceous earth and just food grade and just spray it around where the opening is and that'll keep any ants from going down into the bag that might be attracted to the sweetness of the banana and also it'll protect your tomatoes as well this is completely safe but it works as a great pest control item that is completely natural it's made from ground up seashells fossil fossil seashells and so i always recommend diatomaceous earth is the safest thing you can use around your vegetable garden now you only want to do this on the vine ripening trick if your tomato has reached its normal size in the green state and then you can slip the bags on and then that will incredibly speed up the process sometimes it might work in less than a week three to four days or something like that you'll need to check it take a flashlight and shine through the bag in the evening and it will kind of give you an indication of what color it is there because these bags are really thin and almost transparent but not completely and that's why i like them because they are thin i can see what's happening in the bag and so it's a great way to get your green tomatoes to red as quick as possible now i'll put a chart on the screen right here while i'm talking and the chart will be about 11 different things that you might have around your garden or what you might have purchased at your local grocery store that you could add to the bag and i'm going to go from the most ethylene production to the least about 11 different things there and you'll see the first two are probably the ones you want to use in your bag to produce ethylene gas to speed up the ripening and the reddening of your tomato now i had a little bit of issue finding bread ties because they use those little plastic clips now so if you don't have access to those a roll of painter's tape can be excellent for around the top of the bag one tip there when you're doing that though you don't want to make it too tight because these vines are slowly expanding and so if you put this on there super tight it could cause an issue with the flow of nutrients to your tomatoes the flow of water so just remember you want to lightly tie this onto the bag you don't want to put it clamp it down you don't want to use something like a clothes pin or anything like that something that provides too much pressure on the vine itself guys i really appreciate you watching if you have a question about this video or any previous video i hope you'll become a public subscriber first because i put those questions and comments to the very front because i get anywhere from one to 300 comments and questions a day also if you'd like to see added content or early release content i got a patreon and that would truly help the channel grow if you'd like to become one of those a fine patreon that would help me out quite a bit so guys have a great day and i really appreciate you watching