Tag Archives: tomatoes

Ripening Green Tomatoes

As my gardening season comes to an end, I still have many green tomatoes on my plants. Here is just a small bag of green tomatoes I harvested off of two plants. I needed to harvest the tomatoes on these plants as they were in frost danger. You can always cover your tomato plants at night to protect them from frost but the end of my warm season is here and it was time to just pick the green tomatoes.
Harvested Green Tomatoes

I wrote a post a few years ago with a great tip on ripening green tomatoes. You can read that post here. If you don’t have a ripe banana to place inside your brown paper bag, don’t worry. The green tomatoes will ripen over time inside a closed brown paper bag. You can also wrap the green tomatoes in newspaper and then place them inside the paper bag. This is another good way to ripen green tomatoes and store them for future use. You can read more about storing green tomatoes here.

If nothing else, place the green tomatoes on a sunny, inside window ledge and they will also ripen over time. But if you have lots of green tomatoes, you might try my useful idea about storage of the tomatoes. It is very nice to have red home-grown tomatoes into November from the brown bag storage idea.

0

Tomato Container Gardening

Here is a photo of some of my tomato container gardening this year. These plants have been growing in recycled plastic buckets for the last several months. I am just now able to start harvesting red tomatoes. As you can see I have a few more red tomatoes and many green ones still growing.

Tomato Container Gardening

I have reused these same buckets for many years now. I am able to buy them at my local grocery bakery for just a dollar. They are food-grade buckets that frostings, fruit-fillings and other bakery supplies are sold in. They make excellent containers for growing tomatoes and other items if you don’t have a lot of room to put in a traditional garden.

Most of these buckets just have holes drilled into the bottom for drainage. I also have a few self-watering buckets that I made using this self-watering tomato plant container tutorial. Here is one of my self-watering containers below.
Continue Reading →

0

Tomatoes

Just wanted to share a photo of my tomatoes that I harvested today. I have several containers of tomatoes growing this year. The tomatoes are starting to ripen and here is today’s little bounty.

These homegrown tomatoes have just the best taste. Not like some of the plastic-tasting tomatoes you buy in the store. Anyway, we are just loving our tomatoes and still have more green ones on the vines that hopefully will ripen soon.

0

Saving Tomato Pieces

Here is a quick and frugal homemaking tip. Save and freeze tomato pieces that you may have leftover or over-ripe pieces. This is also a good tip for freezing as you can use a freezer-safe canning jar and just add pieces as you acquire them.

When I need some tomato pieces, I just pull out the jar and remove a few pieces as needed. I chop them up on the cutting board if I want puree tomatoes for my recipes. Otherwise you can just shake out some frozen tomato pieces directly into Continue Reading →

0

Harvest of Green Tomatoes Ripen

Here is my final harvest of green tomatoes that were picked October 19, 2014. I picked all my green tomatoes and kept them after my garden was pulled before the frost hit. I had a whole bag of green tomatoes that I wrapped in newspaper and stored in a large brown paper bag in my basement. I have used this process in the past and you can read the original storing green tomatoes post which works excellent for storing and ripening all those green tomatoes you have at the end of your gardening season.

Ripened Green Tomatoes

You just keep checking the tomatoes and pull them out as they ripen from the storage brown bag. This is the last of my tomatoes and as you can see, just one is still yellow. Continue Reading →

1

Self-Watering Tomato Plant Containers

Here are my tomato plants that I am growing in my self-watering containers. I made these containers a few years ago and just reuse them each year. I did have to replace the tin water cans in the bottom of the buckets this year but other than that these can be used year after year.

Self-watering plant containers work well as the water is sucked up through the wicking can directly to the roots of your plants. Additionally you don’t have to water your plants every day as you have a reservoir of water inside the outside bucket for your plants to draw from.

All you need to make a self-watering plant container such as mine are two recycled plastic buckets, a tin can, and a piece of plastic tube or pipe. I used Urban Organic Gardener’s post and video to help me assemble my self-watering containers.

Here is a photo of a new can with the holes drilled in it to absorb the water from the bucket. Continue Reading →

0