Gadenin日本語Get the appIt will not sweeten off the tree
This is the single most important fact about harvesting pomegranates and the one that catches nearly everyone. Pomegranate is non-climacteric. It has no ripening burst after detachment, no starch reserve to convert, no equivalent of a hard pear softening on the windowsill. Whatever sugar and color are in the fruit on the day you cut it are the sugar and color you will eat. A pomegranate picked early is a sour pomegranate for the rest of its life, and no amount of paper bags, warm shelves or bananas will change it.
That makes the timing decision asymmetric. Picking a week late costs you very little, because pomegranates hold well on the tree once mature. Picking a week early costs you the fruit. So when you are unsure, wait, and take one fruit as a test rather than the whole tree. The exception is rain: if heavy rain is coming and the fruit is close to ripe, pick, because a split fruit is worth nothing at all.
Take one sacrificial fruit as soon as the earliest fruit looks plausible, open it, and taste it. That single fruit calibrates your eye for the entire crop, and it costs you one fruit out of dozens.
The signs that actually work
Skin color is the sign everyone uses and the least reliable one, because some fruiting pomegranates ripen to a dull brownish-red or even a yellowish blush rather than the deep scarlet of shop fruit, and a sunburned green fruit can look red on one cheek. Use the whole set of signs together instead.
The most dependable sign is shape. A ripening pomegranate stops being round and goes angular, flattening into distinct facets as the arils inside swell and press against the skin. A round pomegranate is not ready; a slightly squared, hexagonal-looking one is. Next, the surface loses its gloss and goes matt, and the skin becomes noticeably harder and thinner-feeling under the thumb, no longer springy. Tap it and a ripe fruit gives a metallic, hollow, high sound rather than a dull thud. Finally the crown of sepals at the flower end draws inward and closes, where on an unripe fruit it stands open.
| Sign | Not ready | Ready |
|---|---|---|
| Shape | Round | Angular with flat facets |
| Surface | Glossy | Matt, slightly leathery |
| Sound when tapped | Dull thud | High metallic ring |
| Crown of sepals | Open and flared | Drawn in and closing |
| Weight for size | Light | Noticeably heavy and dense |
| Skin under thumb | Springy | Hard and thin, does not give |
Splitting, and how to lose less of the crop
Splitting is the commonest disappointment of the whole season, and it almost always arrives at the very end, when the crop is nearly finished. The mechanism is simple: the skin stops expanding some weeks before the arils do. When rain or a heavy watering follows a dry spell, the roots deliver more water than the rigid skin can accommodate, and the fruit opens along a seam. Within a couple of days gray or blue mold colonises the exposed arils.
You cannot repair a split fruit but you can reduce how many split. Keep watering absolutely even through the last month, mulch to buffer the soil, thin so fruit are not pressed together, and pick promptly once fruit are ripe rather than leaving them hanging into an unsettled autumn. If a spell of heavy rain is forecast and the fruit is within a week or two of ripe, harvest ahead of it. A slightly under-sweet whole fruit beats a perfectly ripe split one.
| Situation | Risk of splitting | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| Dry spell then heavy rain | Very high | Pick anything near ripe before the rain arrives |
| Irregular hand watering | High | Switch to a fixed deep-soak rhythm plus mulch |
| Fruit touching in clusters | High | Thin to one fruit per cluster at walnut size |
| Even watering, mulched, thinned | Low | Leave on the tree until fully ripe |
A split fruit is not wasted if you catch it the same day. Open it immediately, take the sound arils, and use or freeze them. It is only sitting on the tree after splitting that ruins them.
Cutting and handling
Never pull a pomegranate off. The stems are tough and woody and pulling tears the shoulder of the fruit or breaks the fruiting spur that would have carried next year's crop. Cut with pruners, leaving a short stub of stem no more than half an inch (1 cm) long. Handle the fruit as you would eggs, because the skin bruises invisibly and bruised patches go soft and mold in storage.
- Test one fruit first Cut the fruit that looks furthest along, open it and taste. If the arils are pale and sharp, leave the rest for another two to three weeks and test again.
- Pick in the dry Harvest in the middle of a dry day rather than after rain or early in a heavy dew. Wet skin going into storage is what starts the rot.
- Cut, do not twist Pruners, short stem stub, one fruit at a time into a basket rather than dropped into a bucket.
- Sort before storing Set aside anything split, bruised, sunburned or with a soft patch. Use those within a day or two and store only sound, unblemished fruit.
Storage: better than almost any other fruit
Sound whole pomegranates keep extraordinarily well, which partly makes up for the fact that they will not improve after picking. Held cool at around 40 to 45F (5 to 7C) with reasonable humidity, whole fruit stay in good condition for two to five months, and many people find the flavor more concentrated after a few weeks as the skin loses a little moisture and the arils sweeten in relative terms. Do not store them much below 40F (5C), because pomegranate suffers chilling injury and the skin develops sunken brown pits.
Extracted arils keep about five days in a sealed box in the fridge and freeze very well: spread them on a tray, freeze until firm, then bag them. Juice freezes well too. If you have a big crop, extracting and freezing arils is far more reliable than trying to hold marginal fruit whole.
Write down, for each fruit you test, the date and whether it was sour, fair or good. Two seasons of that record tells you your own ripening window to within a week, which no general guide can do for your particular garden.