This is the last step of the course, the one where everything you have learned since day one finally takes on the taste of fruit on your plate. You are going to learn how to recognise the right moment to pick a tomato, a chilli or a bell pepper, how to dry your herbs without losing their aromas along the way, then how to store your harvest without losing half of it in the following weeks. By the end, you will know exactly when to cut, how to dry and where to store, ready to start an even better cycle.
Tomato: the stage that decides the flavour
A tomato does not ripen all at once: it goes through a well documented colour scale, from mature green to full red.
The colour scale
Aim to harvest at the pink stage: the fruit has already formed most of its aromas on the plant, and finishes ripening very well once picked.
What happens next takes place off the plant: lay the fruit flat, without letting them touch, in a room at ordinary temperature, and the tomato will turn red within a few days. It is the warmth that does the work, not the light. A fruit picked at mature green can wait up to 14 days at around 12.5 °C before it starts ripening, then keeps for another 8 to 10 days once coloured. A tactile cue: a ripe tomato gives slightly under gentle finger pressure, without being crushed.
Picking too early, with the fruit still completely green, gives a dry, mealy tomato: the aroma compounds have not had time to form. Letting it turn fully red on the plant, on the other hand, exposes it to splitting (rain, irregular watering) and to pests. The compromise you find everywhere in the field: harvest at the pink stage, for a flavour almost identical to a vine-ripened tomato, without the end-of-season damage.
At the end of the season, before the frosts, you will often have tomatoes still green. Brought inside away from frost, they turn red within a few weeks, but the flavour stays behind that of a sun-ripened tomato: fine in a sauce, more disappointing raw. Two pitfalls: wrapping them in newspaper (they rot instead of ripening), and stacking damaged fruit, which goes mouldy at the stem scar and contaminates the batch. Keep only intact fruit, laid flat, in a single layer.
🍅 Another option to stretch out the last tomatoes: pull up the whole plant and hang it upside down in a garage or a frost-free cellar. The stem stays green for a couple of weeks, long enough for the nearly ripe fruit to finish. The only drawback: they end up falling as they dry, so slide a cardboard box underneath.
