Green Tomatoes up top?

Always seems to happen. End of the season your tomatoes are all sitting up the top of your plants like little green golf balls.

Well the advice I have is to strip all the lower leaves. Right back to a stem. Sure you get a top heavy plant, but the gardening gurus tell me that somehow the plant gets the idea, and puts all the energy into ripening your fruit. You might prick out any flower trusses too (although this year I'm playing devils advocate and letting the trusses go).

Fruit WILL after ripen, if you pick it at what viticulturists call "veraison" - I think. For tomatoes that's when the fruit goes from green to white. You'll get it if you look close enough. For about a day, a tomato looks not green, not orange, but something in between. Most obvious on the "bum side" of the fruit.

PULL YOUR PLANT OUT if the fruit has yellow streaks through it. It's over. If you have your fruit looking like this then nothing from that plant will be any good, and you might infect other plants. Be cruelly kind. All you could've done is do some better mite control earlier in the season - Sulphur, Natrasoap, Kelthane or keeping the humidity up around them.

Relax. Tomatoes are annuals. You simply lost a couple of weeks. With tomatoes nothing lasts forever.

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