Reading r/tomatoes taught me that “first blush” started life as a gardening term, and now my tomato yield is up because the local birds and mammals have been shut out of the buffet. This article by the Dallas Garden explains the science and how to use it to your advantage.
This season, I started harvesting tomatoes at first blush: the moment they begin to show color. My usable yield is way up, and the yard has far fewer half-eaten tomatoes dragged into weird corners by critters who apparently believe they are running a seed-distribution startup.
The Dallas Garden School shares that science-backed explanation of why this works. Tomato researchers consider fruit “vine-ripe” once it reaches the breaker stage, when color first starts to change. At that point, the tomato has the basic chemistry it needs to continue ripening off the plant. The sugars, acids, carotenoids, and flavor compounds are already on their way. Leaving it outside longer mostly gives birds, squirrels, rats, raccoons, heat, rain, splitting, and rot more time to file competing claims.
This does not mean picking hard green tomatoes and hoping for magic. Mature green tomatoes are a different thing and can taste worse. The trick is waiting for the first blush of color, then bringing the tomato indoors to finish ripening on the counter. Do not put it in the refrigerator unless you want to punish it.
The hardest part of all this, for me, is my love of dark purple colored tomatoes. I have an Indigo Rose plant going that is amazingly beautiful, covered in 100s of small tomatoes, and all of them a deep dark black with almost no visible green shouldering. I clearly waited until the one in the photograph was fully ripened, thinking I was not!
Hmm, we might reconsider tomatoes then. The old way was that the deer would think they were perfect eating just a night of two before we through they were ready to pick.