Hey, Hive gardeners!
I'm back to share a very helpful tip for all the tomato growers out there.
So, last year I realised to my dismay that I'd left it quite late to start off my tomato seedlings. It looked like tomatoes might be off the menu. In the first few years of my gardening journey I wanted to focus on crops like root vegetables and leaves that could be used in stir frys, such as Swiss Chard. Tomatoes just felt a little too complex for me at the time and I instead favoured things that would crop early or that I could store for a long time.
However, fate would have it that my step daughter would pass a house just a few streets away that were kindly giving out their excess tomato seedlings. I grew them on a bit and eventually planted them outside in my raised bed with the belief that I couldn't fail to get a harvest thanks to a stranger doing most of the work for me.
Now, being pretty broke and constantly looking for ways to reduce my spend on the garden I decided not to feed the tomatoes, assuming that the soil would be good enough. This was a big mistake! In the end I got some reasonable growth but it turned out to be not enough. Summers in the UK feel like they are getting shorter recently and the rain descended to rot my unripe tomatoes long before they were ready to harvest.
Fast forward to early this year and I had a new plan. I bought seeds early in started them off nice and early. I had also focussed on replenishing my soil by adding lots of horse manure and home made compost over the previous winter. The UK weather again had a different idea of how this way going to go. Spring came very slowly this year and cold temperatures persisted way longer than I'd expected. As a result the seedlings stayed in their pots and I was behind again.
As with the previous year, summer was over in a flash and my tomatoes were still not ripe. I thought all was lost until I came across an incredible tip on one of the favourite YouTube gardening channels called 'GrowVeg'. The gardening guru that runs that channel claimed that unripe tomatoes could be ripened in the home after being removed from the plant. It was apparently as simple as placing the tomatoes in a bowl with a banana and placing it on a warm windowsill. Below is the video and how it went for me.
I picked all of the bigger tomatoes and put them on the warmest windowsill in my house above a radiator. I also covered the bowls with kitchen towels to speed up the process.
As you can see there were a lot of unripe tomatoes so I was quite sceptical about how well this would work out for me. I should point out that I had grown a mixture of standard tomatoes and a green variety called 'White Zebra'. After about 5 days I started to see results! Maybe all of my efforts weren't wasted after all...
Finally, here we are a couple of weeks in to my experiment. Most of the tomatoes were successfully ripened and as of today there are no more than 10 left! 😁 Thank you for stopping by and I hope this tip can be useful to anyone else that has been struggling. Next year I am going to take the hit and buy tomato fertiliser, however if I still struggle I know that I can now reliably get some sort of harvest.
Until next time!
