would love some input regarding my tomatoes this year. Picked green and brought inside to ripen but they are all turning brown. Any thoughts?
Apparently you are picking at least some of the tomatoes before they have reached the mature green state, which is necessary for them to ripen indoors. The mature green state is indicated by a change in colour. If you wait until at least some pink shows up, then they will ripen properly. In cool, rainy weather I normally harvest after most of the tomato has turned pink or red; and they become fully ripe after a few days. I see what looks like grey mold (Botrytis) on one of the tomatoes and probably Late Blight (Phytophthora) on two others. These fungus diseases are common and difficult to control in the kind of rainy weather we've been getting lately. You have to inspect the picked tomatoes frequently and remove infected tomatoes before the fungus spreads to other tomatoes.
My experience with green tomatoes is entirely different. I always pick a lot of them at the end of the season. My growing season is short and my Tomatoes never stop blooming and producing fruit, so there is a lot of green fruit on the plants all the time. On the day the night temp in the nearest town is going to be 3 degrees C or less (I live on a higher elevation so that can mean close to zero for me) I pick practically all of them, regardless of their stage of maturity, or rather immaturity, put them in cardboard boxes, cover with a few sheets of paper, and store them in my laundry room (unfortunately I don't have a root cellar or something similar) at temperature in the low teens. They always ripen gradually, all of them, so I have my own tomatoes often until the end of December. Of course I would never store green tomatoes with a disease already developing in them. @Nicolas_garden, not knowing anything about your growing methods it could be difficult to say what is the nature of your problem. May be over-fertilization? May be a disease prone variety, or a cultivar that is not suitable for your climate? In your mild climate, at this time of the year, I wonder why you would like to pick tomatoes that are still far from being ripe?
Thank you both @Sundrop and @vitog for your thoughts! I have been picking the last of my tomatoes green as it seems to be getting chillier at night and was getting a long stretch of heavy rain. I had done the same in the past and never had a problem with them ripening indoors. This year was different. I put them in their usual spot in the basement and they all looked fine, and within a couple of days they began to brown. Guessing a disease was present and spread quickly, maybe too much rain, should have looked a little closer maybe before storing. Trial and error. What a waste! Thank you both again, nice to have a knowledgeable group to turn to!
