In the comment section of my post about protecting your plants from frost, Doccat5 shared a great tip for ripening your green tomatoes indoors. She writes:
"If your tomatoes are about done in, you can pick all the green ones, store them between layers of black and white newspaper (make that a layer of about 3 sheets) in a cardboard box. Store in a cool, dry place and check regularly. You will have fresh ripe tomatoes well into winter. Got this trick from Mother Earth over 20 years ago and it works wonderfully. Besides it's a hoot to take a plate of sliced home grown tomatoes to a pot luck in the middle of January! It does raise some eyebrows."
This is a great tip, and it is definitely wonderful having fresh, garden-grown tomatoes even in winter!
Comments
Like this tip–I use paper bags but this method doesn’t have the tomatoes touching and probably works better with large amounts of tomatoes.
Thanks so much for the info. This year I spread my green tomatoes out in the dark in the basement. All had turned red within 3 weeks. Hopefully the newspaper method will keep them green longer next year.
I.m 78 I learned this method of ripening tomatoes from my mother. Some methods are enduring
We just cut the determinate tomatoes off at the ground, bring them into the basement cages and all. Then we set the cages upside down on the floor. I get far more of them to ripen than with the paper method. With the determinates we sometimes cut off long vines and tie them to racks downstairs, it works as well but not quite as well as more of them rot than the other way. This way we check every couple of days when we need somemore.
These are great tips, everyone! Thanks for sharing your experiences with ripening those green tomatoes!