Kitchen Garden Forum

This week,s weather has forced us to pick all our remaining outdoor tomatoes and put all the green ones on newspaper covered trays indoors to ripen.

Does anybody have any hints on how to stop the skins going dull and wrinkly as they slowly ripen? I know this is a natural process once the fruit is severed from its water source but by the time the last ones are ripe they,re usually quite wrinkled and only fit for the soup pot.

I haven't an answer Primrose but thanks for asking this. It was one of those questions that I was going to ask but forgot.

I always put green tomatoes in a brown cardboard box in my garage which is cool and dark when I turn the lights off check them every couple of days never had a problem

Well my bay windowsill does get winter sunshine (when it stops raining!) in the afternoons so I'm wondering whether exposure to light and sunshine speeds up the wrinkling process. I normally line my trays with newspaper before placing the tomatoes on them (still attached to their sprigs,) in case the odd one goes bad and leaky, so that the newspaper can soak up any manky liquid.

Perhaps I should experiment and try covering them with newspaper too to see if that slows down the wrinkling process.
(Looking at my face in the mirror this dreary morning, perhaps I should cover that with newspaper too !

Dear Primrose, you never fail to make me smile….

All my green tomatoes went into chutney on Saturday! A made up receipe from a couple of others to use up what was lying around! (fingers crossed)

robo wrote:I always put green tomatoes in a brown cardboard box in my garage which is cool and dark when I turn the lights off check them every couple of days never had a problem

HAHAHA same here