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Question by Vagabond1111: What do I do with tomato plants when season is over?
I have both regular and cherry tomato plants in the garden that are now done producing. What do I do with the plants? There are still tomatoes on them but what is left is either too ripe or didn’t ripen at all. I thought about composting but then thought no the seeds would not be good. What do you guys do when yours are done?
Best answer:
Answer by Sammy
Composting them is just what should be done with them. The seeds will get burnt up during the composting process. If one does not compost, shredding them up directly onto the garden soil add organic matter.
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Tomato Plants
Image by kendra e
I have never grown tomato plants before, but they are doing awesome! I have a Cherokee Purple on the left and a Green Zebra tomato plant on the right. I am so proud of them! Go go tomato plants!
Check out how big they have gotten here.
I just discovered that Green Zebra is not only an delicious tomato, but also the name of fancy vegetarian restaurant in Chicago.
You can also take your unripened tomatoes,put them in a paper sack and they will ripen in a few days or more.
I compost my tomato plants at seasons end. But I cut off the root system & the stem base of the plants as this part is sometimes too robust for good composting. Also include your over ripe & unripened tomatoes that you don’t want. The composting process will prevail.
Depending on what stage of development the unripened fruit may be, you could try placing them in a paper bag (as someone has suggested) to ripen. My mother always made green tomato pickles from this type of fruit at seasons end.
compost
Compost them or toss them in the green recycling bin. In a pinch, you can just throw them in the trash, too (if your community does not do green recycling). Also, look for “volunteer” tomato plants in that spot next year. This is where a tomato either split or fell off of the vine, to where the seeds went into the soil and sprouted the next season. You want to pull these out, and only grow new plants from packaged seeds or transplanted seedlings from a nursery.
This is because you really don’t know the quality of the fruit that will be produced from plants grown from a fruit off a vine. There could be some kind of genetic mutation or whatever that causes the fruit developed by these seeds to not be anything at all like the parent plant. Just like a cat that has kittens can have all different colors of kittens with different colored eyes, even though they’re all siblings from the same litter. But, packaged seeds and seedlings from a nursery have been developed to be genetically identical, so you get a definite result with the yield from the plants.