Guest Columnist
Did you pick all your green tomatoes before the "early" frost/freeze last weekend? Now, you have all those tomatoes that may take six-eight weeks or more to ripen. Well, if you're willing to do a few things, you can considerably change that wait.
First, spread those tomatoes out and closely examine them. Any beginning to ripen should be placed in a separate container or containers so they are only one layer (no stacking) deep. Ripening tomatoes emit a chemical gas that initiates reddening on the other tomatoes in the container, hence, the need to separate reddening fruit from green fruit.
Like reddening fruit, put your green tomatoes in a container that also allows them to be stored in one layer, and all containers are in a cool but never freezing area. Your efforts are now geared toward keeping them from all ripening at the same time. As your ripe tomatoes begin to run low, you can take a few "greenies" and put them in a container with an almost red tomato to speed up the ripening process for those few greenies.
Examine your green tomatoes daily. When any show signs of turning red, remove them to the ripe container, so they don't cause the entire green container to begin ripening all at once. The reasoning for all this is to allow you to have ripe tomatoes over as much as a three month period instead of having the ripen all at once, leading many straight to the garbage pail!
The finished products are usually at least equivalent to grocery store tomatoes. Unfortunately, they will not be as good as those vine ripened tomatoes you were picking back during the regular growing season, but they were grown by you, are hopefully organic, and at least as good as a store-bought tomato.
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