Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Tomatoes: Red or Green?

Harvesting under the tent
Growing tomatoes is easy; harvesting red tomatoes in the high desert climate of Gallup, is not as straight forward. In my experience our cool early fall nighttime temperatures inhibit ripening of most varieties of tomatoes, and without some intervention, most gardeners are left with far more green tomatoes than red when the first hard frost inevitably comes at the end of September. 
Reliable cherries
The big exception has been cherry tomatoes that ripen beautifully without any heating aids; I planted 18 starts in a 30' row this year and harvested over 20 lbs. of sweet cherries. This year I used a medium-weight polyester gardening fabric over my 6 stunted Sweet 100's, that were loaded with green fruit. They quickly began producing ripened tomatoes and the fabric held the daytime temperature around 90 degrees and added 10 degrees to the nighttime low.
Doubled-up 1 mil plastic ($2.77 for 10'x20') and an incandescent lamp warmed my pair of roma tomatoes that refused to ripen.

Canning tomato sauce
After a month of enjoying fresh tomatoes the remainder of the fruit joined chile, onion, and garlic from the garden in becoming 8 concentrated pints of tomato paste/sauce.

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