Yes it's early but on my mind

[Ruderunner]

Already thinking about how to handle tomatoes at the end of the season. My plants typically bear lots of fruit at the end of the season and most ends up going to mulch as too unripe to deal with.

Are there tricks to get plants to focus on ripening the fruits before frost gets the plants?

Cutting off blossoms? Culling small fruits?

 

[DirtMechanic]

Read about the phytohormone ethylene and how it is used for this very purpose.

 

[Ruderunner]

I've heard about it for force ripening off the vine, but never heard about it on vine.

 

[DirtMechanic]

Bag it with some banana. They wont be a sweet I speculate. Hormones work in a matrix. Academically I have to imagine a spread sheet where numbers in the cells each represent a quantity of hormone x. When the sun hours diminish or temps slow respiration, less of some hormones are made, tipping a balance point toward the effects of those hormones remaining. Such as ethylene, which already exists. To manually tip the balance you change the quantity artificially. I would not bag the whole plant, just the fruit.

 

[Chuck]

Some folks have success by stressing the plant by reducing the amount of water. When a tomato is in the white stage its growth rate is slowing down to almost nothing and when the tomato shows the slightest color it has completely stopped growing. By reducing the water a plant uptakes the plant thinks that the end of its life is near and it supposedly spends its energy maturing its seeds, thus the earlier ripening. Personally I don't do this because I pick my tomatoes at the first sign of coloring and let them ripen indoors. There is no difference in the taste of the tomato between what I do and letting the tomato ripen on the vine. I do this to eliminate possible dangers to the fruit such as weather, animals, birds and insects. One can even ripen tomato while they are in the white stage but by doing this the flavor is what you get from a grocery store tomato.

 

[Mr_Yan]

I have also taken to cutting off all flowers, any tiny fruit, and the growing tips about a month before typical first frost. I can't really say it does or doesn't work but it's what I have been doing.