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Get Your Tomatoes to Ripen Faster on the Vine—Here's How

There’s more than one way to ripen a tomato, and it all starts with speeding up the ripening process outside first with a few simple techniques.

But if cold weather is threatening to spoil your crop soon?

Learn how to ripen your tomatoes inside and choose the best fruits for doing so.

Trick #1: Pinch off the top of the plant.

Just remove the tip of the main stem above the topmost blossom. This prevents the plant from growing any taller and producing more flowers.

I also like to remove any green fruits that haven’t yet reached their mature size. Without its resources being wasted on growing immature fruit to full size, the plant can channel its energy into ripening the fruit it’s already produced.

Trick #2: Induce stress.

If tomato plants sense that their survival is at stake, they’ll speed up the maturation of their fruits to produce seed and create the next generation of plants.

You can induce stress simply by reducing the amount of water you give them. Do this gradually to allow the plants to adapt, giving less and less water each time over a three-week period. You don’t want to stress the plants too much at first.

Trick #3: Try root pruning.

This special technique hampers the plant’s absorption of water and sends out distress signals, telling it to hurry up and ripen the tomatoes it’s produced.

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