Don’t give up on those green tomatoes

By Bonnie Orr
WSU Chelan/Douglas County Master Gardener

holding green and red tomatoes.
If you’ve been able to avoid freezing temperature where you live, you can still harvest the remaining tomatoes from your vines, even those that are green. WSU Master Gardener Bonnie Orr writes this week about which green tomatoes are salvageable and how best to store them so they will ripen over the winter. – Unplash photo/Lewis Wilson
Bonnie Orr
Bonnie Orr – WSU Extension Chelan/Douglas County Master Gardener – photo by Don Seabrook, Wenatchee World

Let’s extend the taste of summer — those glorious tomatoes don’t grow for enough months to satisfy me! There are many ways to store green tomatoes to ripen them for Christmas dinner. I have even succeeded in serving garden-grown tomatoes for Valentine’s Day, though the flavor had diminished by then.

It has been a tough tomato season, with excessive heat, early onset of cool nights and those pesky stink bugs.

Store only the green tomatoes that have a “matte” finish. When the shiny tomato skin fades to a flat, lighter green, it means the tomato is beginning to ripen. These are the fruit that will finish ripening in storage. Be sure there are no insect bites or bruises on the fruit you store.

Do not wrap tomatoes individually in newspaper sheets and store them in the basement as your Aunt Evelyn used to do. Most people abandon the effort for it is too time consuming to unwrap each tomato to check for rotting and ripening every third day and then re-wrapping each fruit.

Some people pull up the entire plant and hang it upside down in the garage in a dark space. This works best for cherry tomatoes, but you’ll likely also be bringing in bugs and dirt. You still should pull off all the green shiny tomatoes because they will not ripen.

Store tomatoes in a box lined with six pages of newspaper. Never store the tomatoes more than two deep in the box. This arrangement makes it easier to check the fruit for ripeness and prevents bruising.

My most successful means of ripening tomatoes is using an apple box and the purple cardboard trays that apples in the box are packed on. The tomatoes do not touch one another since each fits into one of the hollows designed for apples. The 88’s are great tray sizes for tomatoes. The best part is the ease of checking for ripening and rotting. You merely take the top off the apple box and lift out each tray to visually inspect the fruit.

Many of the tomatoes will begin to ripen immediately. To heighten the color and the sweetness, bring a few tomatoes into the kitchen and put them in a bowl in a sunny spot. Add an apple to hasten ripening.If all else fails, delight by cooking green tomato recipes. Green tomatoes make as good a salsa as tomatillo, which is a plant cousin. Green tomato pie is as good as an apple pie made with Granny Smith apples. Green tomato mincemeat is a delicious condiment or a base for a winter pie.

After the frost, plan for next year. If your tomatoes developed mildew or any other diseases, do not compost the vines. Cut off the plants at the base and rake the ground around the plants to clean up dead leaves. Leaving the roots in the ground enriches the organic matter in the soil and protects the soil structure. If you have not rotated your tomato plants in your garden plot, plan a new garden design for next year so the tomatoes are as far as they can be from the ones that have grown in the same spot for years. This also will disrupt disease and insect infestations.

Enjoy fresh tomatoes for another few months and begin dreaming of next year’s fresh tomatoes.

Reminders about force-ripening tomatoes

  • They do not need light until a couple of days before you plan to eat them.
  • The temperature cannot vary below 50 or above 60 degrees. If they are stored below 50 degrees for more than 24 hours, tomatoes will never ripen.
  • Store them so the individual fruit do not touch each other.
  • Do not take off the green calyx and trim stems very short.
  • If your plants developed fungal disease this year, dip the tomatoes one by one in 1 gallon of water with 1 tablespoon of bleach. Don’t let them soak in this solution.
  • Never store tomatoes in the refrigerator because the tomatoes’ sugars are diminished into a tasteless fruit … think store-bought tomatoes.

A WSU Chelan and Douglas County Master Gardener column appears weekly in The Wenatchee World. To learn more, visit bit.ly/MGchelandouglas or call (509) 667-6540.