I had an interesting conversation the other day with the folks who are responsible of the Dartmouth Square Project and  Edenbee about our upcoming talks at Electric Picnic. During the conversation their resident gardening authority  offered a couple of tips to help put my tomatoes on the fasttrack to ripeness.

I followed up our conversation with a google to verify the claims. It seems there are two things required for the tomatoes to ripen:

1. The tomato fruit need access to light and so can’t be in shade.
2.  The tomato plant needs to divert as much energy as possible to fruit production.

Luckily these two things can be accomodated easily by pruning branches, leaves and any fruits or flowers which are too dead or small to make it at this stage. Removing leaves reduce the amount of shade the fruit are in and also reduces the amount of effort the plants puts into leaf production and maintenance.

Admittedly, I should have been on this way earlier. As my grandmother would have said – I should have kept the amount of main stalks to 1 per plant (the Internet seems to think 2 is ok too) and remove any “suckers“. I haven’t been doing this. This is due to one part oversight on my part (read: laziness) and one part the difficulty in navigating around a microgreenhouse which is jam-packed with growth.

I removed as much of the plant as I could without disturbing the growth. Hopefully we will see some more ripe fruit beyond the 6 red tomatoes we have had so far. The plants outside are doing great – it certainly looks like bringing them out of the greenhouse was a good move!

The overgrown greenhouse, which as I’m sure you can imagine is difficult to get at to prune:

Below are our cherry tomato plants, post-pruning. Admittedly, you can’t see much difference to how they looked before. Rest assured that much was removed and it took a good while!