Doing This Makes Tomatoes Ripen Fast and NEVER Stop Producing

What's going on growers? It's James Pergione coming to you live from Jersey. It's July. Your tomato plants have been growing for months. They're loaded with fruit, but a lot of the fruit is probably still green. Today I'm going to show you how to make your tomatoes ripen earlier and continue to produce late into the season. Look at these big green tomatoes. They're full size, they're ready to ripen, but sometimes it feels like they just sit here green forever. Take a look at this trellis. Look how much fruit is here. This front row, it's only 10 square feet of growing space. One thing you'll notice about these plants is that they're not giant bushes with so much unnecessary growth. They're focused on one thing. Fruit production. Now take a look at this tomato plant. I put it in the ground, I didn't prune it, I let it grow however it wanted, and it's just growing in all different directions. There's so many leaves, there are so many suckers, and there are some fruit down there, as you can see. But take a look, all of these are still green, nothing ripe. Move over just a foot to my left, or to my right here, look at all these tomatoes, ready to harvest. Beautiful ones. Look at this set back here. Gorgeous tomatoes. This plant right below me is trying to do everything at once. It's growing so many leaves, new stems, new suckers, trying to grow new fruit so much while also trying to develop the fruit it already has. It's just... It's not focused on fruit production. The first thing I do to control all that growth with my indeterminate tomato plants is I selectively remove suckers, especially when the plant's young, to encourage it to grow up one main stem. All these plants, if you follow them up, they're growing up one single main stem all the way to the top. So if I allow too many of the suckers to grow, for instance, we've got a sucker right here. If I allow this to grow, what will happen is if we move up, it'll continue to grow a whole new stem, just like this one here. And what I do is I'll selectively remove some of them to make sure I keep the plant focused. I definitely don't remove every sucker or every leaf though because the plants still need enough leaves to be able to photosynthesize to continue growing so they could ripen the fruit they have and just keep on producing late into the season. One thing is your plants, especially for the beefsteak ones, you want to make sure that there's enough leaves or suckers to be able to shade that fruit a little bit, especially during a heat wave because we don't want our tomatoes getting sun scald, basically sunburn on the tomato plant. So you'll notice here, I've got some beefsteaks under here, but they're getting some nice shade from the leaves down below. And then if you move up to like a plant here, you'll notice there's I hear some suckers growing at the center. These will help create some shade for the plants. I usually don't leave that many suckers growing for some of my plants because things are planted so densely some shade from the plant next to it provides for the for the other one for the other tomatoes. So as long as you're getting some shade on your actual tomatoes that's good. If these things are just cooking in the sun all the time that will slow down ripening. But I do make sure to go by and remove any unnecessary growth like Like these lower leaves here, especially if they have disease issues on them. but if they could come in contact with the soil we want to get rid of them this will help create a lot more airflow which is beneficial too so remove all that what we want to do is get these plants focused on production that's what it's all about but we got to make sure that the plant is balanced for instance if we have all this fruit and remove way too many leaves then it's going to stress the plant out it's going to stop producing in the future and it's just going to be too much fruit to even ripen on the other hand if we don't remove enough of the suckers then the plant is going to be so focused on producing new leaves new suckers then it's going to slow down the ripening of the rest of the tomatoes if you think about it in a simple way it's like a plant has a certain amount of energy so we want to balance the energy energy between producing the fruit and having some new growth. We don't want to have. only fruit on here and not enough leaves that would be imbalanced and we also don't want to have so much so much growth and so many new leaves and so many new tomatoes forming to the point where they can't you they don't the plant doesn't have enough energy to focus on the fruit it already has if you move here and notice around all these plants there's a good balance between leaves and fruit and i planted things densely and vertically which gives us a plant that's focused on production while also not having too many leaves getting good airflow and now it can focus on ripening this fruit so we can make sure we get some nice delicious early harvests and we're not just waiting for these harvests so late in the season. So instead of having a four foot wide bush that's sprawling in the ground growing in every different direction, I have these super productive vertical plants that produce fruit early, that ripen it early, and just never stop. And the cool thing is since we're growing them up vines they'll get tall pretty quick but with a system like this we can lower and lean it. So I go up here I just take this click it lower the plant down. What that does is Is if you come down here. It allows the plant to just bend at the bottom and soon we'll be harvesting a lot of this fruit. We'll take this fruit off, we'll take these lower leaves off and the plant will just bend. What this does is it makes the plant at a manageable height to be able to grab some harvests and it just makes it so much easier to work on and it's a fantastic system with a high level of production especially per square foot when you grow this dense. When it comes to making tomatoes ripen faster we need to make sure that our tomato plants are Happy, healthy, well-fed, and not too stressed out from disease throughout the growing season. This way the plants can grow fast, they can produce fruit fast, so that the fruit can get to this stage of maturity where it can even begin ripening. Look at these two tomatoes here. This one is completely green, but you'll notice this one is just starting to change color. This is known as the breaker stage. When tomatoes reach this stage, they don't have to stay on the plant to ripen. What we could do is we could cut this tomato off. Bring it inside and let this thing ripen at room temperature. And if we really want to speed up the ripening process, what we could do is we could take our tomatoes, we could have put them in a box or a paper bag with either a ripe apple or ripe banana, and then close the box. What this does is the bananas and the apple, they release ethylene gas, and that's a natural plant hormone that makes the tomato ripen. So we can put it in the box, close it, check it the next day or every single day to see if our tomatoes are ripening. It will just speed up the whole process Ripe tomatoes quicker. Once tomatoes reach their full size there's a factor that determines how quickly they will ripen and that's temperature. The ideal temperatures for tomatoes ripening is about say like 68 to 75 degrees. When it gets too high above 80 degrees that actually slows down the development of the pigments in the tomato that gives it that red color. So if you have a major heat wave, you've got a bunch of tomatoes that are just sitting green and you're wondering why they're not ripening, it's probably because of the temperature. Notice these tomatoes down here and as we move up, these tomatoes here, that they're shaded. That's what we want as the fruit starts to develop. You would think that this plant needs as much sun as possible. That would help speed up ripening. But like I said, a lot of it's based on temperature. So if the sun's beating on these fruit, they're going to be hot. If they're shaded, then that's going to help cool the temperature down and speed up the ripening process. You'll notice here we've got a lot of tomatoes that are starting to ripen, like these ones here. You love to see it. And swing over to here. this one i'll grab some tomatoes some fresh tomatoes at the end of the video to show you guys which ones we're growing but you'll have to see it see it's in the shade nice and cooler and when the temperatures start to drop you'll notice like you'll have a bunch of green tomatoes all of a sudden you get a couple cold days and bam they all ripen at once like we said it's based on temperature so if you can keep these tomatoes a little cooler as they reach full mature size you're going to speed up that ripening some people think that they should stress out the tomato plants and that will speed up ripening maybe by underwatering but in my opinion that's not a good idea because if you underwater your plants too much you allow the soil to get too dry and a big rain comes or you give them a heavy watering that will cause your tomatoes to split instead we want to deeply water our tomato plants then as the soil starts to dry out a little bit we come back and water them again a wood chip mulch a thick mulch is a fantastic thing because it helps keep the soil consistently moist While also keeping the soil cool when you have some of those extreme summer temperatures. With our indeterminate tomatoes we want these things to continue to produce late in the season to keep fruiting so we can keep grabbing harvests. If we stress them out too much that's going to negatively affect them and that's kind of a short-sighted thing in my opinion. You might get a few of the tomatoes on the plant to ripen but you're going to reduce your overall harvest. So use a few of the other tips instead of trying to stress your plants out from from underwatering, it's a It's a little bit too risky in my opinion. One of the simplest ways to get earlier ripening tomatoes is to simply grow varieties and kinds of tomatoes that ripen earlier. Grow all different size tomatoes. For instance, if you just grow beefsteak tomatoes, then that tomato has to get to the size of maturity before it can even start ripening. On the other hand, if you grow some cherry tomatoes, they grow fast, they get to the mature size fast, and then they start ripening fast. Like this one right here, the sun gold cherry. Look how much ripe fruit it has on it. this is always an early producer for me and it tends to also be my favorite flavored tomato of all time i just love it if you've never grown the sun gold cherry then you definitely have to what this does is it allows us to get a nice harvest to snack on to get that fresh tomato flavor while we're waiting for some of our beef steaks to actually get to the point of ripening so we can kind of uh you know get that tomato fix while we're waiting There are lots of different kinds of tomatoes in here and you can see I'm like in this little mini tomato jungle. Just think about this. This is 20 square feet of gardening space that I'm able to grow all these tomatoes in. And they're just all starting to ripen. It's a great feeling being out here. I feel like I'm surrounded by tomatoes. I call it tomato alley. We can walk down, grab a fresh harvest of tomatoes, and there's simply nothing like it. Now that we do have a bunch of tomatoes ripening, my favorite time of the year, let's grab a few of them and I'll show you some of my favorites. This one right here is the... Sweet treats. It has this beautiful pink blush to it. It's a nice size tomato. The flavor is incredible I've grown it many many times and it's one I always have in the garden. Look at the look at the color It's like this pink blush. It's gorgeous. It's not like a red. It's like a just just a beautiful pink You can see here. I really like this one next to me. Here is one that I haven't grown many times before This is the yellow mini. It's doing really well. I used to try another one. I think it was like Hartman's yellow or yellow gooseberry or something it didn't produce as well but this one has done really nice for me look at the color to it beautiful a lot of fruit you can see here so we'll grab this one so uh beautiful looking tomato the plant looks healthy not a lot of disease problems next up is one of my all-time favorites this is the mountain magic this is one of the most productive prolific and fantastic growers that i have it's such a good tomato i never have any issues with it it always kicks out a lot of fruit it's not as early ripening as some of the other ones but still an absolute winner after this after that is one i've been growing for a couple years now this is the amai This one. Looks like the Juliet, but it has bigger flushes of tomatoes. In my opinion, really good disease resistance. Look on the way up. Look how dense these clusters are. Look at all the fruit that's going to be on there. Just incredible producer for me. I really like this one. Next is one of my favorite beefsteak tomatoes. This is the Hot Streak. Look at that. this one's really close to ripening i'll leave it on there and let it ripen on the plant this one has great disease resistance it's a really good beefsteak probably one of my favorite beefsteaks overall and just a fantastic one next is the i believe this one's the pink bumblebee this one has some beautiful fruit too i like a lot of the bumblebees the pink bumblebee the purple bumblebee because of just the beauty of the look at that of the plant the variation of colors in there too On the fruit, really nice. We'll grab a couple more of them here. I really like the bumble bee varieties. I get these ones from Baker Creek. Next, back here, we have another Amai. I grew a bunch of the Amais because I really like them, so I just showed you that one here. And then back here, which one's this? I forget which one this is, but I'll put the variety right down so you can see it. Let me show you some of them. It's producing really well. It looks like a Maybe it's the apple, something apple, but I'll put it down low. Look at that beautiful fruit. One thing you'll notice, though, is, look, the squirrels or something got in here and snacked on it. That's why if you have a lot of problems and issues with the squirrels and those little critters, it could be a good idea to grab some of your fruit when it's just at that breaker stage to bring it inside and let it ripen inside so you can actually get some of the fruit before all the critters get to it. but again so many varieties that's only the first row let's swing over to the other row show some of the others and grab some more harvests as we move to the other side i've got in the front here we've got some more of the bumblebee varieties that i don't really have any ready on these ones just yet then i showed you the sun gold on the other side my favorite flavored one right here this is the sakura this is known to be a super early ripening one so it's a great one to have to make sure you get that early fruit i'll grab some of those it's a good looking one decent size not a tiny little cherry and next to us here this is the cherry bomb this is one i always grow every single year the disease resistance on this one is incredible it the plant is so prolific look how thick the stem is on this thing it's so strong it never has any issues it's got bomb proof disease resistance against blight so it's a really good one for that and then next to I accidentally planted another one of the same thing, another cherry bomb, but I mean you can't have too many of them because they're just so good, so productive, so easy to grow, and the fruit tastes amazing. And then after that, we've got another one of the ones I showed you earlier. This is the sweet treats. Then we have a couple more of the bumblebee varieties because I love those ones. And then at the end, we have a hot streak that's ready. This one's ready to harvest. It's got a little damage, but it looks like it's about ready to go. So I don't have my printer this second. I'll grab it. overall though you might notice that i don't have one of my all-time favorites the super sweet 100 here i was supposed to plant one in the center i forgot to but i have a bunch of super sweet 100s growing at the farm so i'll show you some of those they're healthy they're prolific they're already kicking out so much fruit uh you've got to be growing the super sweet 100. that's today's video growers thanks for watching i hope you enjoyed it i hope you got something out of it it's so fantastic to have a bowl full of tomatoes one of our It's kind of our first harvest of the season and it's such an exciting time. I wanted to send a thank you to one of our new channel members, Susan Seybold. Thanks for being a part of Team Grow. Thanks for having your hand in everything we're doing out here. Also, go to teamgrow.us to enter the giveaway so you can win a free bag of fertilizer and grow some fantastic tomatoes like we have growing here. This is only just the start of good things, of big harvests, and of a massive production. So there's nothing like grabbing fresh fruit right from the garden. It's so rewarding. We'll catch you guys on another one real soon. We.