Photo by double.reed, shared via
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In many northern states, the tomato season is short enough that you might end up harvesting more green tomatoes than red ones. Never fear! Just like the giant agri-businesses, you too can ripen a green tomato to a delicious red one. All you need is to slowly and gently trap the natural ripening gases near your tomatoes. It is really quite simple.
Start with lidded cardboard boxes that are more than 12 inches deep. You want your boxes to be sort of shallow to decrease the pressure on the bottom tomatoes- too deep and the tomatoes will be crushed by their friends. Any cardboard box will do. Plastic boxes are a no-no, as they won't allow the tomatoes to breathe a little and thus will encourage spoilage.
Place the greenest tomatoes in a single layer at the bottom of the box.
Add a row of newspaper, then add the next greenest (fading to red in this case) on top.
Finish with another layer of newspaper, and the most ripe tomatoes you've got. In my case, the type of tomatoes roughly corresponds to ripeness, but that is not always the case. You don't need to put cherry tomatoes on top- it just turned out that way for me.
Close, label, and use the tomatoes as needed from the top downwards!
If you have so many tomatoes that you need multiple boxes, you have two options. Spreading all your tomatoes evenly into the boxes will ripen more, faster. This will decrease your tomato loss from spoilage. However, if you want to drag out your ripening process and don't mind losing a few tomatoes to rot or dessication, you can segregate the boxes by ripeness, i.e. doing a box of 100% green, another of 100% pale yellowy green, another of pale orange, etc. Either way will work, and each way has a downside. The choice is yours.
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Great post, Leigh. What would life be without homegrown tomatoes? I didn’t realize you could ripen them this way. How long does it usually take for the greenest ones to ripen? days? weeks?
The ripening time is really variable. If you put a very ripe red one next to a green one, the green one will ripen up in about a week. But if you store them by color (all green in a box) in a cool dry spot they could last for months before ripening. It all depends on the amount of ripening gases they are exposed to, and the bright red ones release a lot of gas!
I’ve needed good advice about ripening tomatoes for a long time. In years past I took a neighbor’s advice and hung the entire plant upside down from my garage rafters. Over the course of the winter, the tomatoes gradually ripened to a pale brown color, like the color of pickled slug-tummies. Then they fell with a splat to the garage floor and sat rotting, until I discovered them by stepping on them in the dark. After the plants had so decorated our garage all winter, they went straight into the compost bin.