Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Killing Frost and Keeping Mum.




We had our first frost of the season on Monday nite. John's 4 tomato plants to a direct hit!


There were still tomatoes ripening on the vine, even at this late day (John has a superior green thumb!) and he decided that we could harvest the green tomatoes and place them in brown paper bags in a dark closet and they would ripen. So we got all the ripe tomatoes off the vines (about 10 pounds of them) and then got all the green ones (about 25 pounds of them) and put them in brown paper bags in the closet. Check back later to see if this worked! I'm not holding out much hope...but I'm not the farmer in this couple - John is...


On the other hand, the employee entrance of the library has a small strip of garden right next to the door. This is what greets us as we come to work each day:



Is this not the prettiest sight ever? Well, maybe not ever...but right now, with all the beautiful colors fading fast into winter drearies, this is a wonderfully uplifting sight when walking toward my daily workplace.

Check back soon...hope to have some quilt pictures up in the next week.

4 comments:

WhiteStone said...

It was probably 40 years ago that I heard about picking those late season green tomatoes and ripening. A friend told me he used old peach crates, and placed each tomato individually in tissue and set them in the basement. Spacing them out seemed the optimum. Good luck! Mine froze while I was gone on vacation. :-( So no late tomatoes for us!!!

cinnamongirl93 said...

I have also heard that you can wrap each one in tissure and lay them out not touching on newspaperThat way if one started to get over ripe it doesn't affect the others.. If you had a ping pong table in the basement for space that would be perfect. Just an idea. I have never sone that. I never had that kind of room.

John Knotwell said...

Looks like those babies won't be lasting until next year... our's have died as well. It's too bad, because with the Indian Summer we've been having, we could have had a few doezen more toms!

Dawn said...

And I just read that you should fry those green tomatoes just like the title of that movies says! Supposedly they are sooooooo yummy. Oh, well, we too had green tomatoes on the vine, but they stayed there until the rototiller mulched them.

Enjoy your cooling temps!