Green Tomato Solution Green Tomato Solution

Late September and still not ripe (Photos by Debra Pearlman)

Blog Reader June Mohan sent me the following solution to the green tomato problem I mentioned in this week's Cambridge Life posting. I now share this good tip with all the readers of the Cambridgebuzz.

You don't have to quickly use up the last of the green tomatoes each season.

This is a very, very old solution for final harvest time, passed down through the generations of my family. You can use it on green peppers for a while, too.

When I was a youngster my mother used to set out 12-24 tomato plants each year! (And she did not do any canning, believe it or not!) The ripe ones would instantly go into sauces and other food preps several times a week during the growing season. BUT...

When the season ended, just before the first frost, she would pick every green tomato, wrap each individually in newspaper, lay a bed of crumpled newspaper on the bottom of a drawer in an old chest of drawers, layer the wrapped tomatoes, put another layer of crumpled newspaper over these, layer another batch of wrapped tomatoes and continue this process until the drawer was full. Then she would go on to the next drawer. The trick was this chest was in an unheated bedroom, a pretty cool place, I'll tell you.

We were eating ripened red tomatoes into January! And they were delicious. Every few days we'd go into the drawers and choose some "pinking" tomatoes to put onto the kitchen table to ripen over the week. If we wanted them to ripen quickly we'd put them onto the kitchen window sill to let the sun help them along.

If you have an unheated room that is well protected from frost give this trick a try next year. Just make sure you put the greenest, most unripe tomatoes on the lowest layers in each drawer as they will last the longest.

Thanks June!