How To Deal With A Late Harvest Of Tomatoes

2024 Author: Sebastian Paterson | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 13:47

The time has come when you need to completely harvest tomatoes in greenhouses, regardless of whether they are ripe or not. Otherwise, they will just start to rot. After all, the nights are cold, and the days are too. That and look, frosts will begin …

So, you have harvested the entire crop of tomatoes. There are fully ripe, blange and green fruits here. They still mature and mature.

The varieties here are very different: salad and for canning, quickly spoiling and capable of lying for a long time, large-fruited and small-fruited.

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Now our task is not to let the crop die. After all, tomatoes, unlike carrots, zucchini and other vegetables, are not stored for a long time. The first thing to do with the assembled "collection" is to sort everything out. What we are going to store for a long time, we will put in one box. What will go straight to recycling - into another box, etc. We put small firm tomatoes intended for canning separately: they will lie down for a while without spoiling.

Now let's start working with these boxes (or basins, bowls - depending on who got what kind of crop). Let's deal with tomatoes intended for long-term storage. There are tomatoes here that can lie for a month, and there are tomatoes with a keeping quality gene - these can be stored until the New Year and even until March 8. You just need to create conditions for them. Separately put ripe tomatoes, ripe (blange) and green.

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They require different temperatures for better preservation. In industrial conditions, ripe tomatoes are stored at temperatures of 1 … 2 ° C, blanche - 4 … 6 ° C, green - 10 … 12 ° C. Most gardeners do not have such storage conditions, at best it is a basement, more often verandas, balconies, loggias, etc. So we will use what we have.

Let's take into account that the higher the storage temperature, the faster the ripening of tomatoes. The fastest ripening occurs at a temperature of about 25 ° C (if higher, they quickly wither), however, yellow rings with immature pulp remain around the stalks. Dozing can be done both in the dark and in the light. An important storage condition is that there should be no stagnation of air, otherwise the tomatoes will begin to choke. For quick ripening, you can put tomatoes in 2-3 layers with the stalks up. You can speed up the process by adding 2-3 ripe tomatoes to the unripe ones: reddening tomatoes release ethylene, which accelerates the ripening of nearby tomatoes. Every 2-3 days we will review the harvest, swap layers, and remove reddening tomatoes. Usually the lower layers mature earlier. If, on the contrary, it is required to slow down ripening, we put them in one layer.

Large tomatoes ripen faster. Small green specimens are able to lie for a long time in a city apartment. In the end, they will turn red, become even beautiful, and they can decorate New Year's dishes. However, their taste will not be so hot.

It is better to use such tomatoes in cabbage soup and borscht. Ripe tomatoes should be moved to a cooler room. But all the same, they will not lie long. Such tomatoes need to be sorted out daily to prevent spoilage, because in the cold, especially if the air is humid enough, tomatoes often begin to rot. We will select those that have begun to soften. They must be eaten immediately or recycled. The tomato must not be allowed to rot. Even with a small speck of rot, the tomato is best thrown away, and here's why.

Recently, more and more scientists have been warning us about the severe harm to health of mycotoxins - poisons secreted by molds. There is more and more research on this topic. So, recently it was found that, for example, a pear with a small speck of rot is all poisonous. We habitually cut out such a speck, eat the rest. It's easier with an apple - everything poisonous there is concentrated in a rotten place.

What about a tomato? So far I have not come across research on this topic. There is only a comic story about how one peasant ate a box of rotten tomatoes. The tomatoes in the box were good, but, sorting through them every day, he always found at least one beginning to spoil there, and ate it - not to waste the good. Perhaps nothing terrible happened to him, but we do not know this. Therefore, it is better to play it safe, especially since mycotoxins are not destroyed during heat treatment.

And therefore, reddened tomatoes from boxes intended for storage, after ripening, should be immediately sent to workpieces, since they will not lie for a long time.

We will not store tomatoes intended for canning either, we can quickly preserve them. Tomatoes for salad purposes, if we don't have time to eat them before they start to deteriorate, we will urgently put them into processing - for juices, pasta, ketchups, natural lecho and other preparations. Salad tomatoes are practically not stored at all; in other years, due to excess moisture, they mostly crack on the bushes.

From their tomatoes, amazingly tasty ketchups are obtained. Without any harmful additives. We'll have to tinker, but the stock will go for the whole winter. Here is one of the popular recipes at home:

In recent years, I have been making the simplest preparation: I put the peeled tomatoes in a saucepan, bring them to a boil, stirring constantly, immediately pour them into sterile jars and roll them up. I put it under the pillows. I am not adding anything. I did not observe any cases of damage. But in winter, opening the jar, you can add salt, and whatever you want. The taste and aroma of the workpiece is natural tomato.

And one more way of harvesting: I cut the peeled tomatoes into slices and dry them in a vegetable dryer to the consistency of raisins. Dries quickly. In winter, you can fill it with water to soften, and make whatever you want out of them. You can also eat dried, like original tomato sweets. Very tasty.