At last, the time has come: after sowing, planting, pruning, tending and lots of watering finally the time has come to harvest your first home-grown tomatoes! But how do you know when tomatoes are ripe and how do you pick them?

A tomato is ripe when it turns from green to red, yellow, white, orange or purple. The longer the fruit stays on the plant, the better the taste. With edible green tomato varieties it is a bit harder to see when they are ripe. The unripe fruit is often white-green and as they ripen they turn yellow-green. When you hold an unripe and a ripe tomato next toeach other, you can see the difference. In addition, and this applies to all colors, unripe tomatoes are hard and only soften as they ripen. So when in doubt, gently squeeze the tomato and then you will feel the difference.

Nature has made the tomato plant in such a way that makes it easy to harvest. All tomatoes have the familiar flower-shaped leaf on top, known as the calyx, which attaches the tomato to the cluster. Above the calyx is a thickening. 

If you take a ripe tomato in your hand, press your index finger on the thickening above the calyx and twist the tomato away from the truss, then the calyx breaks at that thickening and you have picked a tomato. Once you’ve done it a few times, you’ll get the hang of it. If you still find it hard, you can of course use scissors to cut off the ripe tomatoes.

You will notice that freshly harvested tomatoes can be kept for a week in a kitchen bowl. In the fridge they will keep longer, but the taste will deteriorate considerably and that, of course, is a big shame.

I pick the number of tomatoes that we consume at home in about 2 days. I leave the rest hanging on the plants. If I see that there are still many ripe tomatoes on the plants, then I’ll pick about 5 kilosat one time (at home I always grow about 40 tomato plants) and I’ll make a substantial supply of tomato sauce to freeze or to pour into jars. For example, we eat tomato soup and sauce from our home-grown tomatoes all through winter. 😃