A Common Kitchen Staple That Can Help Speed Up Your Tomato Harvest

A lot of care and effort goes into growing beautiful red tomatoes, like making sure you're planting them in your garden at the best time of year, or using Martha Stewart's must-try tip for growing tomatoes. All that hard work can make seeing tomato plants fill with green tomatoes exciting, but waiting for them to turn red may feel like it's taking forever. Thankfully, there is a common kitchen staple that can help speed up your tomato harvest: aluminum foil. Placing aluminum foil around the base of your tomato plants bounces light and heat up into the plant, in many cases where the sun can't easily reach. It warms the soil, which helps the plants produce ethylene, the hormone that ripens the tomatoes.

This easy, inexpensive hack is perfect for using early in the growing season or on overcast days, and it offers the added benefit of warding off pests like whiteflies and aphids — they hate the glare and heat the reflective foil causes. This is a great trick to use in cooler regions with shorter growing seasons, anywhere extra warmth for the plants is beneficial, or if your tomato patch simply isn't getting as much sun as you would like. The ripening isn't instant, but it can shave a week or two off your wait.

In addition to speeding up your tomato harvest a bit, aluminum foil can deter squirrels and help keep birds away, since most animals don't like to walk on or be around foil (even the flashes of light can be scary to them). However, don't lay down foil on very hot days, as it can provide too much heat. Extreme heat can have an adverse effect on your tomato plants, shutting down the production of lycopene, which makes tomatoes red (they still ripen, it just won't show). 

The foil process is easy: Just tear off sheets of aluminum foil and lay them, shiny side up, on the ground around the base of your tomato plants. Don't wrap the foil around the plant, just lay sheets underneath the plants and weigh the foil down on each corner with rocks so it doesn't blow away. That's all there is to it!

Tomato plants are not fans of excessive temperatures, so if your region is having a heat wave, you may notice your plants dropping flowers, and the ripening process slowing way down or stopping altogether. Remove any foil to avoid aggravating the issue. The good news is that once the temperatures cool down, your plants will get back to normal. If you are having other issues with your tomato plants besides a heat wave and you feel your tomato plants are dying, you can use this common gardening method that will bring dying tomato plants back to life.