We're coming to the end of the season for tomatoes, but some of us still might have some coming out and at this point in the season they can look a little funky. You can get some issues cropping up and specifically you can

get cracking and splitting there are two different types of cracking that can happen with

your tomatoes one is a concentric ring of cracks that can appear around the top of the

fruit. So in the other one, there's a lengthwise split that will run from the top down the sides of the fruits.

And if you have heirloom tomatoes, a lot of the times that will run down the

indents in the airloom tomatoes.

So what's actually going on here? What's the real cause that is making this happen?

Well in a nutshell tomatoes are splitting open when the fruit inside the flesh is

growing faster than the skin.

What's usually the cause of that is a sudden influx

in the amount of water that tomatoes are receiving.

So whether that's you watering in consistently

or you get a crazy heavy rain that boom they start to grow and the

skin really can't keep up the problem is most common in tomatoes that are

nearly ripe so as they start to get really ripe, their skin does not grow as quickly. It just doesn't. But the plant's still going to try to put more water into the fruit and that's going to have it split up. Now with heirloom tomatoes tomatoes you actually have another reason to ask why

your tomatoes split. There really is a price to pay for the flavor that we love in

our Airloom varieties, especially those big beef steak types.

They're gonna crack in concentric circles

around the top of the fruit as they grow and mature.

These are more fine in their nature.

You can kind of think of them as tomato stretch marks, if you will.

So even tomatoes get stretch marks, don't worry about it.

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