Yesterday, we very briefly touched on tomato ripening by mentioning the “breaker stage.” This is an important thing for us northern tomato growers to know about as it’s likely a major path to getting ripe tomatoes, especially if you’re growing outdoors!
Now, we won’t be shy. We strongly prefer “vine ripened” tomatoes here. We eat enough “ripened on the container ship” tomatoes that are shipped to Alaska over the winter months that we make huge efforts to produce vine ripened tomatoes. But, that’s not all there is to home grown tomatoes.
You might have some green or very partially ripened tomatoes. Maybe even a lot of them! Those tomatoes are still quite valuable as you can ripen them “after the fact.” We usually just lay them out on a table all together, but some people put them in paper bags or even put bananas near them.
What’s going on here is the tomato will produce ethylene, which is one of the major hormones responsible for maturing fruit. This ability is rooted in the plant’s survival instinct. Remember, the plant’s natural lifecycle is to drop tomatoes to the ground where they will spoil and eventually “sow” the next generation’s seed. Bananas produce a lot of ethylene too, and thus why some use them, but there’s really no need unless you want to speed ripen those tomatoes. The point is, there’s no “need” for heavy human influence.
Tomato growers have categorized the “stages” of tomato maturation. The earliest of them, the breaker stage, is when the tomato just barely starts to turn from green to red. There’s other stages too, usually dealing with the stages from orange to pink to “mature” red.
The important point is this. Once the tomato hits that breaker stage, and even sometimes before, it can fully ripen off the vine. In fact, most commercial growers do this as there is usually 1 to 3 weeks of lead up time until that tomato actually hits your grocer’s shelves. If they shipped “vine ripened” tomatoes, they’d be spoiled before they even got there.
So, those “green” and “not yet ripe” tomatoes are still valuable! This is one of the strongest strategies of growing tomatoes outdoors in the subarctic. In this case, you’ll get a whole lot of “green” and “breaker” stage tomatoes, but you can still get a romp of tomatoes by force ripening them off the vine.
We’re playing this end game, too. We grew tomatoes outdoors this season, but we also have tomatoes from the greenhouse that need those “final touches.” This is how we roll in the north. Often times, this is a necessary step, especially when you’re growing your tomato game to where we’re at these days!
