December Harvest

On Sunday morning, we ate the last of our fresh cherry tomatoes for the year. Some of them were a little wrinkled, so I threw them in a scromblet – potato, onion, tomato, basil butter from the freezer, eggs from a local producer, and a bit of local Asiago cheese grated on top.

Just before the hard freeze that mostly ended our garden season, I brought in all the green tomatoes. What wouldn’t fit on the windowsill I wrapped in newspaper and put in the basement. About the time I finished all that wrapping, I talked to my mom in Florida. She had just heard about a different way of ripening green tomatoes. I found the same method described at a University of Nebraska Extension site.

I still had one cherry tomato plant that was loaded with green tomatoes, so we tried it. And it worked.

What you do is pull the entire plant, shake the dirt off the roots, and hang it upside down in a cool, dark location. We hung ours from the exposed floor joists in the ceiling of the basement. Make sure the leaves don’t touch the walls or floor or anything damp. The green tomatoes ripened slowly on the vine. They don’t have as much flavor as sun-ripened tomatoes, but they tasted just fine to us.

The leaves on the vine are dry and crispy now, and the whole thing is ready to go out to the compost pile. I’m looking at those exposed joists now wondering how many tomato plants I can hang there next fall.