Tomatoes

By Mary Jo Baur


If you have grown tomato plants in your garden this summer, by now the plants look a mess; but they probably still have some green tomatoes left hanging on them.  What to do?  Well, you can always make fried green tomatoes, or you can pick them and bring them inside to ripen.  If you know a frost is coming, you must bring them in before that.

The best way to ripen tomatoes inside is to place them in darkness, perhaps in a brown bag or box and keep them cool.  If you leave them on a sunny window sill they become pink and bitter.  To help them ripen, it's a good idea to place a ripe apple in the bag or box with them.  Apples give off ethylene gas which aids the ripening process.  Make sure that the tomatoes you store are free of blemishes because any cracks or bad spots will ruin the fruit and possibly make the others nearby suffer the same fate.  If you have lots of tomatoes left over, think piccalilli or maybe spaghetti sauce.  If your tomato plants are hybrids, the seeds cannot be saved for next spring because the seeds will not be like the parent plant and will revert to a less desirable kind.