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Indoor ripening

Terry Marshall offers some timely advice on being able to enjoy
your tomato crop until Christmas.
Green tomatoes galore, it must be early November, but what are we going to do with them? After all there is only so much green tomato chutney we can eat and it is such a shame to waste well-grown sound fruit.

At the time of writing, the weather is cool and mixed so it is likely that there will still be plenty of green fruit left at season’s end. In many parts of the country November brings with it damp, cool, still, air with the ever-present threat of botrytis; the very conditions that signal the end of the cold greenhouse tomato season.

Now is the time to pick off the remains of the tomato crop; pick them carefully when fully dry and try to avoid bruising the skin. Remove any diseased, split, cracked or marked fruit and dispose of them, leaving only sound specimens for storing or preserving. Very late bush-cherry varieties can be cut off at ground level, trimmed of excess foliage and hung upside down in a warm place where most of them will ripen up over the next few weeks.


Tomato varieties vary in their response to off-the-plant indoor storing and ripening, but most green fruit will keep in good condition for up to two months if kept at a temperature of around 10C/50F. Tomatoes can be kept cooler than this for short periods of time but over prolonged periods some varieties will develop natural impurities and an unpalatable taste.

Sort the green fruit into two types, the fully or mostly mature green fruit and the smaller ones. Small fruit may eventually colour up but often dry and shrink before they reach this stage and are better turned into chutney while they are still turgid. Mature green fruit are better stored in a single layer and kept cool until required, traditionally empty drawers in a cold bedroom were often used for tomato storage. Every week or 10 days take out enough fruit to keep a continuous supply going, choosing ones that are lighter in colour and put them in a warm place, 18.4-24.1C/65- 75F, to ripen.

Meanwhile as the green tomatoes ripen steadily, look forward to weeks of sound fruit to come. By keeping the plants growing as late into the season as possible and then careful storing and ripening, my aim is to have home-grown tomatoes for Christmas and as far into the new year as possible.

Increasing ripening time

Tomato ripening time can be reduced by adding a source of ethylene to a container of mature green fruit. This is usually the only time of year that ethylene is mentioned in relation to tomato growing, but it is in fact made by the plant in minute quantities throughout the season, mainly for plant growth, hormone stimulation and regulation. Also, when we cut off the leaves or wound a tomato plant by pinching out the shoots, ethylene production is stimulated to help repair the damaged cells.

As apples, pears, bananas and tomatoes start to ripen they show an increase in respiration and ethylene synthesis. Strangely enough research has shown that tomatoes are more resistant to induced ripening by ethylene than other fruits. Scientists also tell us that 97 per cent of the ethylene leaves a ripe tomato through the calyx scar, so when using ripe tomatoes to ripen others remove the calyx or ‘chig’ first.

These photos (see below) show the different effect that other ripe fruit have on green tomatoes. The bag containing the two ripe tomatoes, each with its calyx removed were the first to ripen, the pear bag next, then the banana and apple ones. Much depends on the actual stage of ripening that the other fruits are at and the quantity of ethylene produced, but it does seem that the old way of adding ripe tomatoes to green ones is as good as any. Nor is a paper bag the only way, any clean, closed, small cardboard box serves equally as well. Polythene containers are best avoided as the condensation created usually triggers off any lurking fungus spores and mould follows.

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