📌 Quick Summary: Late Harvests & The “Small Tomato” Myth
- 🍅 Size Doesn’t Equal Speed: Many growers assume that small cherry or paste tomatoes will ripen much faster than giant beefsteaks. However, genetics play a bigger role than size! An early-season beefsteak will easily beat a late-season icicle tomato to the table.
- 🌿 The Density Trap: If you plant your greenhouse rows way too close together, the middle rows get totally shaded out. Without enough ambient heat and airflow, plants will stall, leaving you with massive trusses of stubbornly green tomatoes well into August.
- 🥔 Hidden Potato Blight: Late blight (Phytophthora) is sneaky. Sometimes potato plants look perfectly green and healthy above ground, but when you dig up the hills, the tubers are already rotting below.
- 🍈 Cracked but Delicious: A melon that splits open on the vine might look ugly, but it’s usually a sign of a massive sugar rush and sudden water uptake. They are almost always incredibly sweet!
My tomatoes are barely starting to blush. No idea how they’ll handle this upcoming cold snap. I am absolutely loving the Tyulpan (Tulip) variety, though! Huge, delicious, and the skin just slips right off. Surprisingly, the most pathetic seedling that I planted outdoors was the first to ripen. I had tossed it out of the greenhouse because it kept flopping over. It looked awful and I almost threw it in the compost, but I just stuck it in an old zucchini bed instead. The soil must be really rich there.
I also dug up three potato hills. They taste great! I planted some store-bought spuds that had chitted (sprouted eyes) back in mid-June. A few leaves look sketchy, but the foliage is mostly green. Unfortunately, the tubers themselves are already hit with late blight (Phytophthora). No idea what to do about it, I only grow a tiny patch just for eating at the dacha.
Galiy wrote:
I don’t know how they will survive the cold weather coming up.
Galya, don’t sweat it, there’s no real cold weather in the forecast for the next few days. Daytime highs will hit 77°F (+25°C) and nights around 55°F (+13°C). The forecast says September should be warm, with no nights dropping below 50°F (+10°C).
I also grew the Pink Tyulpan. It’s stunning, but the yield was super low, and a few of them got Blossom End Rot (BER). I won’t be growing it again. Out of the massive grow list I had this year, only a tiny handful are actually making the cut for next season.
Galiy wrote:
My tomatoes are only just starting to ripen.
Why so late? I’ve got the exact opposite situation—everything has fully colored up and I’ve already ripped the plants out of the greenhouse! When did you start your seeds? I sowed mine on March 1st and specifically picked early-season varieties.
Apelsinka wrote:
Why so late? … When did you sow your seeds?
I didn’t even make it out to the dacha until May 26th! And then I had to get everything planted. The real delay was because a windstorm ripped the poly panels straight off my greenhouse. By the time we got it repaired, we’d lost a ton of time. 👋
Also, my melon split on the vine! I was waiting to smell that classic melon aroma. 🤭 It is incredibly sweet though, I totally forgot to weigh it. I’m currently fighting a super pesky mouse in the garden, yet somehow these melons are surviving and ripening! 😎
Luda, does your Tyulpan also have that weeping, wispy foliage? Mine is just labeled Tyulpan. Polina sent me the seeds about 8 years ago under that name. On another note, Italian Spaghetti totally underwhelmed me. Maybe it just needs heavy feeding like Rugantino. Rugantino is an absolute beast for me this year.
Apelsinka wrote:
Why so late? For me it is the exact opposite, everything has already fully ripened…
Even though I started my seeds early and got them into the greenhouse by early May, I only started pulling them in by the bucketful about a week ago. Before that, it was just a slow trickle for salads. They just took forever to set fruit for some reason. Now my vines are loaded to the roof with rock-hard green trusses. Really praying for a warm autumn!
Da4nica wrote:
Now my tomato plants are covered to the very top with completely green clusters.
Maybe you’re growing late-season varieties? I was blown away that my giant beefsteaks ripened faster than my Black Icicle paste tomatoes, which proves Black Icicle is definitely a late variety. Won’t be planting that one again. I always assumed that the smaller the fruit, the faster it ripens. Turns out that’s a total myth!
Apelsinka wrote:
I always used to think that the smaller the tomato, the faster it ripens. It turns out that is completely false!
They just have a different DTM (Days to Maturity). Black Icicle is a late variety for me too. My Yaponka (Japanese) and Black Heart always ripen early.
Another huge issue for me is that the middle row in my greenhouse is planted way too tight, so it gets completely shaded out. We’ve been harvesting cherry tomatoes and Yablochnyi Lipetskiy from the sunny ends of the greenhouse for ages, but the entire middle section is dead green! And that’s even after I cut my grow list down to 45 plants this year. Fingers crossed, next year I’ll have the self-control to cut it down to 35.
Da4nica wrote:
Black Icicle is a late variety for me too.
I actually really love Black Icicle! Since it’s late and meaty/firm, it’s a great keeper indoors. We are having such a fantastic summer this year! 😘
👨🔬 Editor’s Botanical Note: Why Small Tomatoes Stay Green
Irina raises a very common misconception: “I thought smaller tomatoes ripen faster!”
While cherry tomatoes generally blush before massive 1-pound beefsteaks if they are in the same maturity class, genetics always win. A tomato variety is hardcoded as Early, Mid, or Late-season (usually measured in DTM — “Days to Maturity” from transplanting). Black Icicle is genetically a late-season paste tomato. It will take 85+ days to ripen regardless of how small the fruit is, while an early-season beefsteak might start pushing out ripe fruit in just 70 days.
The Density Trap: Ekaterina also points out exactly why her middle row is staying green: it’s crowded. Tomatoes do not need direct sunlight hitting the fruit to ripen (in fact, this causes sunscald). However, they absolutely need ambient heat. If the canopy is crowded like a jungle, airflow stops, the microclimate inside stays cool and damp, and the plant cannot produce the ethylene gas required to trigger the ripening process! Pruning leaves to open up airflow is the fastest way to get those green tomatoes blushing.
