Two Tips to - Increase your Tomato Production.

Tomatoes are some of the most common vegetables to grow in a home garden. The idea of being able to grow verieties that aren't found in the grocery stores, and also being able to pick fully ripe tomatoes off the vine with all that great flavor! No doubt the tomatoes we grow at home taste far and away better than the ones from the grocery store. Most people think this is because the tomato is allowed to fully ripen on the vine before being picked. And this thought is partially true. See the grocery store tomatoes are picked while still green, not even a hint of color starting to show because they can ship better that way. Then they are sprayed with Ethylene, a compound that ripens them. See when we grow them at home and allow them to ripen on the vine, they naturally produce ethylene, and continue to pump sugars and nutrients into the tomato while ripening. However there is a cutoff point for those sugars, nutrients and ethylene to enter the tomato. The tomato itself cuts off from the vine after it gets about 50-60% ripe. This means when you see color on at least 50% of the tomato, you probably can pick it without any ill effects. Then let it ripen on your counter. There will be no difference in flavor from the one picked half ripe, and the one allowed to fully ripen before picking. The problem with fully ripening tomatoes on the vine is that this allows birds to peck at them, bugs to eat holes in them, and more chance for them to crack. So picking when the tomato is half ripe helps to be able to harvest more of your tomatoes growing and not sacrificing them to the birds or bugs.
The other thing that I do to get larger harvests is to allow sucker shoots. In the past couple hundred years people have started to believe you must grow a tomato to be one single stem. And for high density planting this is mostly true. This is for when planting large beefsteak tomatoes 1' away from each other. Training for that single stem only allows you to plant more dense and in a way gets larger tomatoes that sell better in the grocery store. But for cherry tomatoes, or for home use, unless you are going for extremely large beefsteaks to win a contest. Having more than one stem, and allowing some sucker shoots to grow, only increase your yield. every sucker shoot will turn to a stem if you allow it, and that sucker will start to produce tomatoes as well. In fact one of my plants I counted 6 sets of tomatoes off one sucker. That's dozens of tomatoes I would have lost if I didn't let that sucker continue to grow. There are a couple downfalls with this method of growing and one is you have to separate the tomatoes further than normal. The other would be that you have to increase the amount of fertilizer you are giving your plants since there is more mass to each plant. When a tomato is trying to grow a dozen tomatoes, vs trying to grow 5 dozen tomatoes, it will need different nutritional requirements. So keep this in mind. You might have to fertilize more often.