It’s tomato season and I hope you’re enjoying your big, gorgeous tomatoes on sandwiches, salads, and (my favorite) caprese salad. Harvesting tomatoes may sound pretty simple and foolproof, but there are a few changes you can make to make tomato harvesting easier on you overall and prevent disease from spreading.
You can (and should) pick tomatoes before they’re ripe.
Tomatoes are one of the only veggies that you can pick before they’re ripe. Once a tomato starts shifting away from green and turning its final color, you can pick it and it will ripen fully in a few days on your countertop.
What does that mean for your tomato harvesting schedule? You don’t have to be out in your garden every day, waiting for your tomatoes to turn perfectly ripe before you pick them. Instead, you can sweep through your garden once or twice a week and pick everything that has started to turn colors. It’s so much easier to harvest once or twice a week than every day.
As an added bonus, if you harvest tomatoes before they’re ripe, you can make sure that you get to your tomatoes before your squirrels and other critters do.
Don’t harvest when your tomato plant’s leaves are wet
Tomato plants are incredibly prone to disease. They seem to acquire various diseases throughout the growing season, through mold spores spread by wind, by soil splashing up on the plant during rainstorms, and any number of other ways you can’t control. Once one of your tomato plants has a disease, it’s up to you to do the best you can to stop it from spreading throughout the plant.
One of the easiest ways for disease to spread among tomato plants is by water. So if you harvest first thing in the morning before the dew disappears and you touch a diseased leaf and then touch another leaf on a different plant, congratulations, you’ve just shortened the life of your tomato plant!
It’s best to wait to harvest (and prune diseased leaves off your plants) until the leaves are dry for the day. If it recently rained, consider waiting a day or so to harvest so you can ensure your tomato plant’s leaves have dried out.
So that’s it! Two quick tips for you to make tomato harvesting easier on yourself and to make your tomato harvesting season last as long as possible. Happy growing!
