Tag: Tomatoes

Frost Looming? Bring In Those Green Tomatoes!

November 2nd, 2023 – USDA Hardiness Zone 6B (always check the zone when reading about gardening! What the author is saying might not apply to your location at all if they’re in a very different growing zone)

A hard frost ended the season here this week – temperatures below freezing for two nights in a row meant the end of the road for our outdoor tomato ambitions. I’m just putting up this blogpost to either remind or inform people that green tomatoes will (or at least might) ripen nicely if they’re brought in before the first freezing temperatures of the season and stored correctly. I did that for the first time last year and was pleasantly surprised at how well that worked out. Even very green tomatoes ripened nicely and were completely usable. The video that I watched on Youtube showed that tomatoes should probably not be stacked more than a single layer high; I stacked some in two layers (small tomatoes) and it seemed to be ok.

This blogger says that completely immature and shiny tomatoes will not ripen, which is bad news because this year most of the green tomatoes that I brought in are completely immature and shiny. I’ll do an update to report back whether the green tomatoes from this year ripened as well as the ones from last year. The pictures shown above are the tomatoes from last year (2022) in the picture on the left, and our 2023 crop of greenies on the right.

Don’t let those laggard tomatoes go to waste!

Fresh Tomatoes In December in Missouri, Locally Grown And Organic!

Full disclosure – I suck as a farmer.

One of my goals these days is create more fresh food during the winter, which is not easy or common here in Missouri. Really knowledgeable farmers have been doing this for a long time, but one thing you learn quickly is that the weather is unpredictable, and you can lose a whole lot of plants that you put a lot of time and effort into with just one hard freeze. It happened to me about 2 weeks ago. I thought I had more time to get these tomato plants (being grown in containers) inside and onto the sun porch, but mother nature had other ideas. So, in the picture above on the right, you will see a very dead tomato plant which still has ripening tomatoes on it. My poor husband dragged this container in because I had hoped that the plant wasn’t ALL the way dead, but alas, it is deader than a doornail. The tomatoes on the plant were completely green when the plants were hauled inside a couple weeks ago, but have been basically hanging in the sun since then, and have ripened. SO, first batch of December tomatoes.

In the picture on the left (above) are a bunch of tomatoes which were completely green and had been on the plant for two nights of hard freezing temperatures in the garden. I hauled them inside, set them on a south-facing sunny window sill and they ripened up also. They’re Cherokee Purple tomatoes, which produced surprisingly well for us. This is the first time I’ve grown them, and I intend to keep growing them, if I’m able to harvest and correctly save their seed.

Stay tuned for more winter gardening adventures!