8 Things to Do When You Have an Explosion of Cherry Tomatoes
Swimming in cherry tomatoes? Here's what you can do to preserve the ones you have, and keep the tap flowing.
One indeterminate cherry tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) in decent soil can hand over a couple of pounds (1kg) a week once it hits full stride, and two plants will bury a small family. The crop sets its own deadline, too. A cherry tomato goes from perfect to split overnight when a storm follows a run of hot, rainless days.
Most advice about growing cherry tomatoes ends at the harvest. The real work starts there. The plant has no interest in whether the kitchen has caught up, so the response has to move in two directions at once – what is already picked, and what the vine does from here.
Eight Moves for a Runaway Harvest
A few of the moves take an afternoon, and others take five minutes with a pair of snips like these from Amazon. Start with whichever side is more important that week.
1. Pick at the First Blush of Color
Tomato cracking is a plumbing problem, not a disease. The fruit pulls water in faster than its skin can stretch, so one heavy rain on the back of a dry spell splits half a crop overnight. Picking earlier sidesteps that. It works because a cherry tomato seals itself off from the vine the moment real color appears, and what happens after that happens without the plant. Then you can turn green tomatoes red by just leaving them out on the counter. If your cherry tomatoes are producing heavily, walk the rows every other morning rather than holding out for full color. If any slip past you, cracked tomatoes are perfectly fine to eat.
2. Keep Them Out of the Fridge
Refrigeration costs more than it saves. Somewhere below 55F (13C) the aroma compounds start breaking down and the texture goes mealy, which accounts for most of what is wrong with a supermarket tomato. A counter does better. Ripe ones keep several days in a single layer, stem scars down, somewhere out of direct sun. Green fruit picked ahead of a storm colors up in a paper bag with a banana tucked in for ethylene – a gas naturally emitted by bananas that speeds up ripening. Anything that doesn't turn red pickles beautifully.
3. Freeze them Whole on a Sheet Pan
Freezing tomatoes whole is the easiest way to go: no blanching, no peeling. Wash and dry a batch, then spread it in one layer across a sheet pan from Amazon. Freeze them solid before bagging so they stay loose rather than welding into a brick. The skins slip off under a warm tap later. Straight from frozen, they collapse into sauce quicker than they can fresh.
4. Roast them on a Tray
Soft ones and anything that sat a day too long belong here. Halve them and toss with olive oil and salt, then hold a low oven around 300F (150C) until they slump and go jammy at the edges – a couple of hours, unhurried. A full tray reduces to about two cups as the moisture leaves and the sugars pull together, and what comes out is far darker than what went in. Freeze it flat in portions – it thaws into sauce, or lands on bread as is.
5. Dry the Smallest Ones
Drying tomatoes is a great choice for the littlest specimens. Less moisture inside means less time on the trays, and they finish evenly instead of toughening outside while the middle stays damp. Halve them cut sides up and run a food dehydrator from Amazon at about 135F (57C) until they feel like leather rather than brittle chips. An oven set as low as it goes will manage it, at the cost of the kitchen for most of a day. Jars come next, shaken daily for a week; water beads on the glass mean another round of drying.
6. Save Seeds from the Best Plant
Only open-pollinated plants are worth saving from – hybrid seed comes back as something nobody planned. To save tomato seeds, squeeze the pulp of a few good ones into a jar with a splash of water, then leave it alone. A pale film forms across the top within a couple of days. That film is doing the work: the ferment strips off the gel coat that blocks germination and knocks back several seedborne diseases. Rinse, then dry the seed flat on a plate. Kept cool and dark, they will still come up even several years later.
7. Top the Vine
Indeterminate types climb until frost stops them, adding flowers that have no chance of finishing. Pruning tomatoes by cutting the growing tip roughly a month ahead of the average first frost redirects what remains into what is already on the vine, and it opens the canopy in the bargain. Determinate plants set their whole crop at once and need none of this. Thin the lowest leaves while the snips are out, since airflow near the soil tends to be poor by late summer.
8. Up the Potassium
Nitrogen at this stage buys foliage. Fertilize your tomatoes with a blend where potassium leads, such as Tomato-tone from Home Depot at 3-4-6, supports fruit quality instead of another flush of leaves. Water counts for just as much. Deep and regular beats a splash whenever someone remembers. Uneven moisture is behind the splitting, and behind most of the blossom end rot that gets blamed on soil calcium. A harvest like this is a good problem. Keep the water steady and the plant will go on handing fruit over right up to frost.
Cherry Tomato Essentials
