When do you know tomatoes are ripe?

[Rikki Jean]

This seems like a really silly question. Nevertheless, I don't know the answer, so I'm asking.

Should I have to tug on my tomatoes? There are some on the vines that look ripe, but they don't want to come off too easily. I know that with other fruits and veggies, they generally aren't ready if they don't come off with just a simple touch.

My Roma tomatoes are coming off just by touching them, but nothing else is. If it matters, my other tomatoes are Purple Cherokee, Zapotec Marvel Striped, Costoluto Genovese, Red Brandywine, and Cherry (I'm not sure that I believe that I actually have cherry...I ordered two of them, and planted them, but everything on my vines is much larger than a cherry tomato! I have to find my garden diagram to see where exactly I planted them, and see what's growing there in their place!).

One of my brandywines is HUUUUGE (probably 10 inches in circumfrence), but it won't come off without me pulling really hard. I don't want to pick it before it's peak, but I don't want to leave it there too long and risk it rotting either.

[Autumn Mama]

We go by color and feel. If you know from previosly seeing the tomatoes as ripe ie, in a book or a seed catalogue etc, you will get a sense of the color. My Dh just picked one of ours that was orange, really golden orange, and I was letting it turn red, lol! We ate it today and it was definitely ripe! : So, know what they should look like ripened. Second, feel them, and if they are soft, and yield a bit when you hold them, they should be good to go. Now, I don't preserve mine (yet) so I don't know if different rules apply in the softness department for say, canning them.

The ones that won't pull off yet, try taking one off and slicing it up. If it tasted delicious, you will know that that particulat variety can be removed and still be ripe, even if it requires some pulling. Just get in there and experiment a little!

I'm still waiting on sooo many of our tomatoes, and if we escape the blight, it will be our best tomato year ever!!!!!!!

[GinaRae]

We're trying to stimulate our plants to grow more tomatoes so we're plucking them when they're still a bit orange and putting them in a paper bag in the pantry for a day or two to help them ripen. It works well

[cschick]

I almost always pick my tomatoes when they turn pinkish/orangish at the bottom of the tomato and allow them to ripen on the counter.

Leaving them on the plant past that point risks two problems for us:

First: if they are larger tomatoes (the hybrids/the beefies) and you get a big rainstorm when they are at that point, they are likely to split or burst. Pests generally infest our tomatoes within a couple of hours of them spliting/bursting, and they become unusable.

Second: the raccoons have an unerring sense to find the just-perfectly-ripened tomato. If I see one that has the red ripening color shooting up the sides and leave it on the plant there's a pretty good likelihood it's no longer going to be present in the morning.

I've never had one not ripen, as long as the faintest color was present when I picked it.