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Plants At-A-Glance
Splitting tomatoes is a frustrating garden problem, but luckily it's easy to narrow down the cause and fix the problem. Let us explain how!
The heartbreak that comes when you notice a crack or split in one of your beautiful, red tomatoes ripening on the vine is real, but don’t you worry! We’ve got you covered with what causes tomato cracking, how to prevent it, and what to do if you already have a tomato that’s split.
The main reason tomatoes split is because of overwatering. The flesh of the tomato absorbs so much water that the skin can’t hold it all anymore and—POP!—the tomato cracks.
This overwatering can come from the gardener being too heavy handed with the watering wand, but more often, it’s caused by periods of heavy rainfall. This is especially true with early maturing varieties that tend to ripen on the vine when the heavy rains of spring are still falling.
If you are growing tomatoes in containers, make sure your container has drainage holes!
If overwatering isn’t the culprit for your cracking tomatoes, there are a few other things to check:
A good layer of mulch can help you tomato plants have consistent soil moisture. We like pine shavings, but straw, chopped up leaves, or pine needles are also good options.
If your tomato has split, don’t freak out yet, it’s probably still edible! Ripe or almost-ripe tomatoes that have split can be harvested and used within the next day or two. If the tomato starts to get a sour smell or shows any signs of mold or insects, toss it out. Otherwise, you can cut around the crack and enjoy the tomato as usual.
For unripe tomatoes, you can try to pick the tomato and keep it on the kitchen counter to ripen, but be aware that the longer a tomato is cracked, the higher chance it has of going bad.
If cracking tomatoes are a common problem in your garden, you might want to try some crack-resistant tomatoes. Here are some of our favorite varieties:
