Saving green tomatoes for winter ?

[2 in August]

My mil told me that her fil told her that if you individually wrap green tomatoes in newpaper and keep them in a basket in the basement you can bring them upstairs to ripen one at a time and have fresh tomatoes for most of the winter. She said that she tried it once and it worked. I've never heard of that before and my grandparents used to be tomato farmers (possibly I was just never told about it though).

Has anybody here ever done that? I don't want to waste money trying it if it doesn't work, but if I can fresh tomatoes for the winter instead of the cardboardy grocery store ones, I'd be a happy momma! So what do you think?

[thixle]

hmmmm... I've never heard that before, either... and my grandparents also had tons of tomatoes. They always canned ripe
I'd kill sometimes to have fried green tomatoes in the winter. So, yeah, The toms would never make it to ripe with me

Subbing to see where this goes, lol

[CarrieMF]

We would keep green tomatoes in a box with newspaper under & on top of them, pulling the red ones out when they were ripe. They were not individually wrapped.

[serenetabbie]

I do it too. I put mine in a shallow milk crate, alternating newspaper and tomatoes. I do not wrap them individually. I keep them in my sunporch. We usually have tomatoes until the end of the year that way, sometimes into January. One note though... make sure you check them often! Rotting tomatoes is a smell I personally could do without.

[2 in August]

Cool! I'm going to try it then. Thanks!

[MamaE]

A few years ago, I picked green tomatoes and left them on newspapers in the basement, though not individually wrapped. They ripened just fine, but several of them did rot before I got to them. I think the rationale for individually wrapping is to prevent them from all ripening at once. (You know how ripening fruit offgasses and causes everything around it to ripen too? Can't recall the name of the gas... ethylene?)

Anyway, I have also heard to pull the whole plant out of the ground, shake off the dirt and bring it in that way. It sounds messy to me, so I think this year, I will just cut off some of the vine with the tomatoes, allowing them to gather more nutrients from the vine as they ripen.

Thanks for the thread - you reminded me to bring my tomatoes in this year!

[pumpkinmom2]

this was told to me by my g.mom. she took all my green tomatos one year. she said brown paper bags do the same thing.

good eating!

[cristeen]

Living in Russia, my family picked all the tomatoes, red and green before the first snow (in September). They all got packed into crates and put in cold storage. The reds definitely got used first, but we were eating tomatoes (albeit green/pink ones) well into December before we ran out.

[tayndrewsmama]

I am soooo glad to read this thread. We lost our plant to frost and I have a TON of tomatoes on my kitchen table right now. Is there such a thing as too green to ripen properly though?

[CarrieMF]

nope. Put them in a paper bag or box with newspaper & they'll ripen.

[Aubergine68]

Originally Posted by CarrieMF

We would keep green tomatoes in a box with newspaper under & on top of them, pulling the red ones out when they were ripe. They were not individually wrapped.

We do this too, but adding a few apples to the box to ripen them faster.

We check them every week or so and take the ripe ones out (and the odd rotten one). I cook them into sauce and can them at my leisure -- we don't eat a lot of raw tomatoes, actually.

They taste best vine-ripened, but this beats storebought for sure!