How do you harvest your tomatoes?

I like to sneak up on mine and act super-natural!

This is how hybrid tomatoes are harvested for the grocery stores, with a tomato harvester machine. They're fully red and ripe and as hard as a softball. Tastes like a softball too! This is why I began growing my own old fashioned, real, super tasty tomatoes and all my other vegies!



Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

And remember.... nothing ever looks like it does on the seed packet and weeds grow just as fast as you pull them out.

I feel bad for folks who only know "fresh" produce through the grocery store megachains.  It is the most mediocre, insipid stuff a person could ever consume, and pay good money for the "priviledge".  Truly sad to think they will never experience freshly harvested vine ripened tomatoes, freshly picked green beans, or fresh new potatoes dug up an hour before cooking dinner.  I would never want to be reliant on grocery stores, and every time my bones ache and I start to get grumpy about doing all the work I just think about the alternative and suddenly putting in all that effort does not seem so bad, and I remind myself to be thankful I have the ability to produce such food for myself and others close to me.  Never take your blessings for granted.

One question I have had for years, maybe someone here could answer:  How have these bulk commercial tomato producers avoided blight in their fields from adversely affecting their crops?  Is blight nonexistent in those production areas due to regional climate conditions?  There is no chemical of which I am aware that eliminates the threat of blight, only some on the market that supposedly delay the disease, so how is blight not affecting these producers?

We pick our tomatoes just as they are turning from green to yellow.  It is a little tricky though if we wait the birds enjoy them first.

I save the brown paper bags from the grocery store and usually have one or more on my counter.  I check them every day until one turns the color of red that I like. That is the day the tomatoes go into the fridge or get eaten.

These tomatoes are so much better than the blan store tomatoes.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.  

Philosophy is wondering if ketchup is a fruit smoothie... sorry couldn't resist :)

Hi Tom,
I learned a long time ago that these big corporate producers of seeds and plants have huge teams of 'scientists' that spend a lot of time and effort to produce these hybrids. They have a long list of traits that they try to breed into their plants. Some are more important to them than others. This is kind of what the list entails starting with the most important to the least....
Disease resistance is # 1 so they don't get blights
Biggest yield possible
Shortest growing season
Resistant as possible to bugs
Most transportable without being harmed
Longest shelf life possible
Uniform sizes and shapes to make harvesting as easy as possible
The list goes on and on but great flavor has long been dead last!

I was listening to a program on NPR a few years ago called Fresh Air. The host, Terry Gross was interviewing an organic, heirloom farmer. She asked him why he only grew heirlooms. He mentioned what I just said about hybrids. And he said that his dad had spent about 30 years working as a truck driver for Bonnie plants. They produce most of the little starter seedlings you can get at garden centers and the grocery stores. He said when he was a kid he got to spend lots of days during the summer going with his dad when he went to work. He learned a lot about their operations from the growers themselves. He learned that they had one trait close to the top of the list that was super important to them. They wanted every tomato  and pepper plant to be EXACTLY 9-10” tall at EXACTLY 7 weeks. They wanted other vegies to be an EXACT height at 7 weeks. Because they wanted them to fit perfectly on the shelves of the truck! They didn't want some plants too tall so they got scrunched in or too short so that space was wasted! They didn't want to take the time and expense to raise or lower the racks either! They wanted to make as much money on every inch of that plant as possible.

I would rather have vegies that taste great. Disease, bugs, mildews... they're all just a part of life. Real  life. And I make the best spaghetti sauce I've ever tasted from my homegrown tomatoes. Can't do that with a store bought hybrid! Keep saving all your great seeds Tom, they're worth their weight in gold bitcoin?!

When I was a kid, I had an uncle that grew acres of tomatoes for a canning factory. I and my brother and cousins and sometime hired kids picked every single one by hand. The canning factory sent wooden bins, six of which would fit on a hay wagon. My aunt or uncle would usually drive the tractor, two kids on the wagon, three or four in the field.  More in the field because they had to find, pick and inspect each one before making the toss, everyone had to be ripe or nearly so but not overly so. We had a system, underhanded pitch, yep, like a soft ball.  We were good at it; I expect well less than 1% failed to be caught but if so, they were not retrieved; kids that couldn't or wouldn't meet that expectation didn't stay long.  Standards in all aspects of it were higher back then, I think.

I ordered some imaginary trained monkeys to pick blueberries. Wonder if they are multipurpose monkeys? Or is there a monkey app for tomato picking?

Seriously, I try to avoid store bought vegetables unless it's something I can't grow. In that case I rarely eat it. The quality & flavor seems so much better when the meal is home grown with some physical labor & sweat involved producing it.

I think that picture shows tomato & land abuse. Easy enough to understand trying to feed the masses & make a profit though. Customers also have the choice to not participate. To answer the original question ... I wander through the garden almost every single day to hand pick any fruit or vegetable that is ready. The garden is large in a year round growing climate so it's a constant chore. Very much worth the effort. Sometimes it's just enough for dinner. Other days there's plenty of extra to preserve & give away. The day doesn't seem complete without eating at least a little something from the garden.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.  Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.  

Creativity is putting it in a fruit salad well,so it complements the salad perfectly.

Good heirloom cherry tomatoes are awesome in fruit salad.

Tomatoes picked minutes before you eat them - one of life's little pleasures. Mr Ara bought some from the local supermarket when we ran out of home grown. The taste was so disappointing, we have never bought shop tomatoes since.

I am one of those people who got traumatized as a kid from doing "too much" garden labor. The trauma came from my mother, who made the classic mistake of not accounting for all of her costs of production.  She viewed child labor as "free" (not taking into account her substantial investment in our raising, nor considering the opportunity cost to us of the hours spent in her garden) and as any economist will tell you, most people who have a "free" resource don't use it wisely.  Thus, my mother. Kids work for free, so you can just tell 'em to do stuff even if it's the stupid hard way, and beat 'em if they don't do it or if they give you too much backtalk or if their angry-labor doesn't produce aesthetic results that comport with your OCD expectations.  Lot of wasted time and effort, lot of labor spent on unvalued tasks, lot of free-flowing disrespect in all directions, yup, trauma.

And thus did I grow up swearing I would never get within a mile of a garden as an adult.  Kept firmly to that plan well into my 40s, before one thing broke my resolve: the utter uselessness of a Walmart tomato.  

Credit to my mother where due: by the time I escaped from her household, I knew what a genuine tomato was supposed to taste like.

Came a time where I got frustrated by the flavorlessness of store tomatoes and started looking around my county for local growers, farmers markets, small truck farmers, any of that. Nobody was doing it.  This is a food desert; commodities produced here are oil, cows, and and hay.



That desire for the sweet fruity flavor of a sun-ripened garden-fresh tomato was the undoing of my resolve.  (Which is all to the good; it was a stupid and childish resolve, nothwithstanding that I came by it honestly. We ought not let the dead hands of our forebears control us foolishly.)

This longwinded set of anecdotes is to set myself to explain my current situation, which I find amusing.  I'm trapped in the following cycle:  

Every summer, I grow all the tomatoes I can eat, and some extra to give away.  By picking green tomatoes at frost and storing carefully, I have good tomatoes until sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  

And then I say, every year: "I'm just not going to eat any fresh tomatoes until next summer.  I can't face those green nasty flavorless supermarket things.  I'll just do without."

And so I do. For about three months. But then, every March, something happens.  Usually it's a sale on Roma tomatoes from Mexico.  "Well, I'll just get a couple to slice up for a tomato sandwich."  They are, always, a disappointment -- but after months without, my body is craving tomato minerals and tomato phytonutrients, so they taste better than they should.  I end up eating store tomatoes -- not a ton, but a few every week -- until early summer when my good ones come in.  

I just think it's funny how my tastes go from "Ugh, no, I just won't eat the supermarket ones" to "OK, a few, I guess" over the course of three to four months.

Debbie Ann wrote:Hi Tom,
I learned a long time ago that these big corporate producers of seeds and plants have huge teams of 'scientists' that spend a lot of time and effort to produce these hybrids. They have a long list of traits that they try to breed into their plants. Some are more important to them than others. This is kind of what the list entails starting with the most important to the least....
Disease resistance is # 1 so they don't get blights
Biggest yield possible
Shortest growing season
Resistant as possible to bugs
Most transportable without being harmed
Longest shelf life possible
Uniform sizes and shapes to make harvesting as easy as possible
The list goes on and on but great flavor has long been dead last!

I am not aware of any variety of tomato commercial or otherwise that is blight proof or blight immune, I am only aware of blight resistant varieties.  I keep trialing these varieties as I acquire them, both in monoculture/isolation as instructed and also planted in with my landrace plants.  Results continue to be consistently poor at best, and every one of those varieties trialed so far have produced mediocre fruit regarding taste and texture.  My locally adapted landrace plants generally perform better in comparison.  I have some strains that are very blight resistant but every year I have a couple of extremely blight susceptible plants that are so bad that I cull them out immediately upon their discovery and incinerate the plant material.  Each year I hope to find that miracle plant that is blight immune, but no luck so far.  I would consider finding such a unicorn plant to be the pinnacle of my gardening "career".

I do not consider finding a blight immune strain to be impossible, just highly unlikely.  I consider local adaptation and genetic diversity to be the two primary keys to getting higher blight resistance until an immune strain shows itself.  It will happen someday, but people need to be looking for it.

Tom Knippel wrote:
I am not aware of any variety of tomato commercial or otherwise that is blight proof or blight immune, I am only aware of blight resistant varieties.  I keep trialing these varieties as I acquire them, both in monoculture/isolation as instructed and also planted in with my landrace plants.  Results continue to be consistently poor at best, and every one of those varieties trialed so far have produced mediocre fruit regarding taste and texture.  

Absolutely, if fact I haven't seen one yet that is any more or even as resistant than mine are, not to mention they taste awful. I don't know what kind my uncle grew back then; I suspect they may have been Rutgers. Each field was picked from just once so I'm sure they were a determinate type. I actually have a tomato I call Particularly Productive Rutgers that showed up in my patch several years back. It is determinate enough, productive enough and early enough that I bet it could be grown and harvested like we did back then, maybe even like with that machine.  Most all of my tomatoes are like that, sure they get diseased, blighted or whatever you call it but by the time it gets really bad the canning jars are full and I'm tired of tomatoes anyway.

Hi Tom.  
I sincerely enjoy reading your posts and I hope you continue to reach out to all of us! You're one of my favorite people on this website! I don't have the answer to your question. I was simply trying to show people why store bought hybrid tomatoes taste so awful. I can only share just a few little snippets of facts that I am aware of.....

Blights thrive in humid, moist conditions. I have been gardening here in Arizona for 11 years now...... and I have never gotten a blight. Not once. Lots of other issues and some pretty bizarre ones at that but blights were/are not one of them. Not yet, knock on wood!!! Probably because it's pretty dry here.

Most of the tomatoes grown in the U.S., according to the 'World Atlas'.com are grown in California, Florida, Indiana, Ohio and Michigan. Mostly pretty dry areas. According to the 'Global Trading Magazine' we are the second largest producers of tomatoes in the world. But we still imported $2.4 billion worth of tomatoes in 2019, $2.1 billion came from Mexico, representing 87.5 percent of total U.S. tomato imports. Mexico, also a pretty dry place.

The commercial producers don't grow things like Better Boy or Mortgage Lifter tomatoes. They grow things like M466H79 hybrid S-2 strains of tomatoes. Stuff we've never heard of and could not buy anywhere.

The EWG, the Environmental Working Group is an organization that tests lots of products for contaminants and produces the list of the 'Dirty Dozen' most contaminated vegies every year. Tomatoes are always on that list.

These are just more good reasons to grow your own tomatoes. I hope we hear from you often. Real wisdom is in rather short supply these days.

My vegetable harvesting methods seem to be less and less organized every year, and more along the lines of "I'm taking this bucket for a walk."

"How do you harvest your tomatoes?"

One at a time, with scissors or pruners snipping the stem so they don't crack or explode.

Our last real tomatoes were in October, dodging the frost. Our next ones will be mid-July, if all goes well.

Boy are we ready.

I learned a trick to harvest tomatoes that helps me.  There is a little nodule about 1/2-1 inch up from the fruit.  If you put your thumbnail on it and move the vine, it separates there perfectly every time.  

I've experimented with all types of tomatoes both in a greenhouse and outside.  What I have found is that the hydroponic variety is firm and beautiful.  The same one in my garden is firm, beautiful, and actually tastes good.  This year, all my 'maters will be outside on a trellis.  

Mark Reed wrote:Absolutely, if fact I haven't seen one yet that is any more or even as resistant than mine are, not to mention they taste awful. I don't know what kind my uncle grew back then; I suspect they may have been Rutgers. Each field was picked from just once so I'm sure they were a determinate type. I actually have a tomato I call Particularly Productive Rutgers that showed up in my patch several years back. It is determinate enough, productive enough and early enough that I bet it could be grown and harvested like we did back then, maybe even like with that machine.  Most all of my tomatoes are like that, sure they get diseased, blighted or whatever you call it but by the time it gets really bad the canning jars are full and I'm tired of tomatoes anyway.

I have seeds of your PP Rutgers in my tomato landrace mix.  I trialed the seed you gave me years ago and found it to be decent and quite worthy of inclusion.  I like the medium slicer family such as the Rutgers for daily eating while they are in season, I prefer using them sliced in sandwiches and diced for burritos, etc. because they are not as sloppy juicy as the larger tomatoes.

"How do you harvest your tomatoes?"

Gently, patiently, and with reverence (I consider tomatoes to be my most important food crop).  Perhaps a little bit of self indulgent pride as well.  Some of my strains pop off at the slightest touch, some need to have stems snipped with a pruner.  This variation in my landrace can be frustrating which is why patience and tolerance is required (this is not a trait I select for or against because I consider it irrelevant).  I never pile my larger sized tomatoes, they are always placed single depth in the crates during harvest and storage.  Means more trips from the gardens but I do not care.

Photos are a bit of a tease, but tough on me as well.  What I would not give for just one of these vine ripened tomatoes right now.  I only eat tomatoes when in season.  They are a gift to be treasured in their time as opposed to acquiring the insipid store-bought stuff during the off season, which never fail to disappoint.

Most of the tomatoes in the photos are from my locally adapted landrace mix.

Am I the only one who really really really wants a juicy tomato sandwich right now?