blossom end rot, can I pick them green

[I & H]

I'm trying to save my plum tomatoes which I think are indeed suffering from blossom end rot. Can I pick them green and plump, but before the rot is evident, and ripen them in brown paper bags or on my windowsill? Will the rot still come out? Or, shall I let them ripen on the vine and then cut off the bottoms and use them anyways for cooking. I'm hoping to salvage a massive batch of sauce I have planned. There is a lot of advice about preventing the rot for future years, but I still don't know if the crop is completely lost or if I will be able to use the fruit. Thanks for iding the problem!

-Holly

[Dwayne]

Cant tell you about BER on tomatoes, but on watermelons, I just cut the end off and the rest was delicious.

If you let them ripen maybe you could use them in canned sauce or salsa. You are lucky. You can grow tomatoes, I got 24 from 24 plants last year.

Dwayne

[Mark & Shauna]

In our experience its kind of a hard one to call as not all of the fruit will suffer from the rot. You may be picking many that will ripen just fine. Also, it seems the rot causes the fruit to prematurely ripen so if you pick them before the rot is apparent you may be picking fruit that are so premature they will never ripen.

Depending on where you are and how much season you have left I would suggest picking up a foliar spray for the BER and or putting some dolamitic lime around the base of the plants. Many times the BER is caused by weather/water but often times it can be due to calcium deficiency. Fine ground dolamitic lime can be taken up by the plants in

2 weeks and from what I hear the foliar spray can be even faster. We had pretty serious BER on our italian paste's and I hit them with the lime a couple weeks ago and the yield is up markedly already.

Just my .02, Mark

[TQ]

| >

| | In our experience its kind of a hard one to call as not all of the fruit | will suffer from the rot. You may be picking many that will ripen just | fine. Also, it seems the rot causes the fruit to prematurely ripen so if | you pick them before the rot is apparent you may be picking fruit that | are so premature they will never ripen. | | Depending on where you are and how much season you have left I would | suggest picking up a foliar spray for the BER and or putting some | dolamitic lime around the base of the plants. Many times the BER is | caused by weather/water but often times it can be due to calcium | deficiency. Fine ground dolamitic lime can be taken up by the plants in | 2 weeks and from what I hear the foliar spray can be even faster. We had | pretty serious BER on our italian paste's and I hit them with the lime a | couple weeks ago and the yield is up markedly already. |

Unless you maintained a few control plants that received no treatment, you have no way of knowing whether the lime cured the problem or whether the problem went away on its own.

[Mark & Shauna]

True that I didnt hold out two pastes which I didnt lime but there are plants in the same bed, on either side of the pastes which I didnt lime (they arent pastes). They had some BER as well but to a far lesser extent. They still have BER at approximately the same rate while the pastes are showing little to none at this point. Of course rain/weather change regularly so they surely could have played a part. The only real changes seem to be the lime and perhaps rains have been slightly more even though still erratic. Temps have been all over the place.

Mark

TQ wrote: