Quote:
Originally Posted by rzr
I am planting jd's special tex, and a few others, maybe: better boy, mortgage lifter, brandywine, or something red, my wife likes red.
When picking these tomatoes last year I waited until they fully ripened on the vine, but half of my tomatoes were damage from someway or another before fully ripening.
So the question is, how much worse is the taste if you pick it right at starting to ripen and let it ripen inside?
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I think you were lucky to get 50% of the crop by leaving these tantalizing pest-magnets on the vine until dead ripe. In my opinion, there is absolutely no reason to wait until the tomato is fully ripe before picking.
Tomatoes at grocery stores taste awful because they are:
- Poor-tasting varieties (BHN444, Celebrity, Carnival, Sunmaster, etc.)
- Fed chemical fertilizers in practically sterile soil
- Picked completely green
- Gassed with ethylene
- Shipped up to 3,000 miles
- Refrigerated for days
All of those things conspire to produce the flavorless bags of pink water we get at the grocery store. Even that 'vine ripened' tag you see could legally describe tomatoes which are picked at the first sign of a white starburst on the bottom indicating breaker stage 2 (?) but not anything anyone of us would call "ripe".
Pick them when you see a substantial blush and you aren't missing anything -- except huge losses to insects, fungus, and splitting from unexpected rainstorms.