Wondering what’s the fastest way to ripen tomatoes indoors? Here’s how to ripen tomatoes faster!

So many of us grow tomatoes. Whether we have tomatoes planted in our garden, greenhouse, or in pots on the deck, gardeners just love growing our own tomatoes! 

Home growers are well aware of the enhanced flavour of tomatoes grown in their gardens! 

But what can we do for our tomatoes when a sudden frost is expected or the nights suddenly become a lot cooler? Even though we may have a long growing season, the odd first frost can happen here in July or August. Tomatoes are heat lovers and they do not like the cold at all.

But first, ask yourself if they do really need to come off the vine now? Is there any way you can add some frost protection to your tomato plant? You could use insulating blankets or several layers of Remay cloth. These will give you an extra couple of degrees of protection.

If that won’t be enough, then yes go ahead and pick your tomatoes. If in doubt, PICK them. The last thing you want is to head out to the garden one morning to find your plants have been hit with frost or rot. Tomatoes do not like frost and even one light frost can be enough to kill your plants.

 

Learn How to Ripen Green Tomatoes Faster

Need to pick all your tomatoes because cold weather is coming? Got lots of green tomatoes on the vines that need to be picked? Here’s an awesome trick to quickly ripen tomatoes.

How to Ripen Tomatoes Quickly

Will Green Tomatoes Continue to Ripen off the Vine?

You bet they will. Tomatoes are often ripened off the vine. Chances are, they were picked green and turned red before you bought any at the grocery store. They’ll still be just as delicious as any vine ripened tomato.

And, you’ve probably already put a few slightly green tomatoes on a windowsill at some point, right? Actually, that’s not really the best place for it for more than a day. Here’s a better idea.

 

Wondering How to Ripen a Tomato Indoors?

If you’ve got only a couple, you can ripen tomatoes stem-side down on a sunny windowsill; it doesn’t take much room. But, if you’re growing lots of tomatoes in order to make home made Tomato Sauce, AND you have to pick them from the vine, here’s how to ripen tomatoes off the vine. Even if you have LOTS of them!

The key to ripening tomatoes is you want to put them in some kind of bag or box at room temperature out of direct sunlight. Don’t put them in the refrigerator!

The fridge will make them cold, which will slow down the ripening fruit. Two other chemicals important to ripening, lycopene and carotene, are produced best at optimum temperatures of around 59-68 degrees F.

Avoid high humidity areas as well to prevent decay or issues with pests. Tomatoes naturally produce ethylene gas, which is what leads them to tun red and ripen

Keeping them in some kind of closed environment will speed up the ripening process. And this technique works for any kind of tomatoes, even smaller cherry tomatoes!

Here are some more detailed instructions for speeding up tomato ripeness!

How to Ripen Tomatoes – The Paper Bag Method

Carefully harvest your mature green tomatoes and place them inside paper bags. Yup, a big paper bag. The ones you get from the grocery store if you ask for brown paper bags. You do save those bags, right? Those kraft paper bags can be used and upcycled for so many things! Including…yup, garden produce!

Try to NOT bruise your tomatoes! Pick them carefully and place the unbruised tomatoes in the bag carefully – don’t drop them in there as they can easily become damaged.

You can fill the bag almost all the way, if you’re very careful with the tomatoes. So, go ahead and add additional layers of tomatoes to almost fill the bag. 

But use lots of bags! Just depends on how many tomatoes you have. The important thing is to be able to preserve tomatoes – you’ve worked hard enough tending to your plants all season.

The Trick to Using a Paper Bag to Ripen Tomatoes

OK here’s the trick. ALWAYS put one or two red tomatoes in the bag along with all the fresh green tomatoes. This gives a great head start for ripening!

If you don’t have any red tomatoes at all, then use a banana or an apple instead. This will ensure lots of ethylene gas is being produced. Add it to the bag, then close the bag up tight and set it aside.

Check the bag every single day, as the tomatoes will ripen quicker than you may think. You’ll also want to ensure the moisture of the fruits isn’t causing any rot or decay. Pull out each ripe tomato and leave the others in there to ripen.

You may also find you need to do some rearranging of the tomatoes, in case the lower ones are getting too much weight on them.

You’ll find that within a few days, all your tomatoes will be ripe. Now you can use them to make Homemade Tomato Sauce (canning instructions too) or put up a case of the best Salsa you will ever eat (canning instructions for the Salsa are there too).

Now you know how to make tomatoes ripen faster, give this a try! They’ll taste just as great as tomatoes ripened on the vine without the risk of frost or pests!

FAQS

How long does it take for tomatoes to ripen?

On the vine, it can take up to 20-30 days for a tomato to fully turn from green to red. Removing them from the vine and keeping them in an enclosed space traps the ethylene they produce, which will cause them to ripen much faster.

This can take anywhere from a couple of days to overnight, depending on how ripe they start.

How to ripen tomatoes overnight?

Use the method above to quickly ripen your tomatoes! Enclose them in a cardboard box or paper bag. To really speed things up, add a ripe banana or a bit of apple peel to increase the amount of ethylene gas.

Can you ripen tomatoes in a cardboard box?

Absolutely! Especially if you’ve got way too many to fit in one paper bag, a cardboard box is another good option. This method generally works best if the tomatoes aren’t touching too much, and like with the bag method, just be sure to check on them often and remove any ripe ones. Arrange them in single layers in the boxes for best results!

Are there other ways to use green tomatoes?

Yes! If you don’t want to bother with the ripening process, you can also use and eat tomatoes that are still green. They’re a bit crunchier than ripe tomatoes and have a somewhat tart flavor in comparison, and there are plenty of recipes that utilize this difference for the better.

Make these Fried Green Tomatoes as a way to capitalize on your unripe tomatoes, and poke around online to see what other recipes call for unripened/green fruits!

 

More Resources and Posts You’ll Love

• Here is the absolute Best Salsa recipe ever – and it includes the canning instructions.
• Want to read every Preserving post on this site? Here it is!
• We LOVE this home made Pizza dough recipe – makes 3 pies.

 

Use this fastest way to ripen tomatoes indoors next harvest season!

 

 

originally published 2020, latest update Sept 2024

 

This guide is your one-stop shop for learning how to dig up and store potatoes for eating throughout the winter!

The vegetable garden is slowly being emptied for the season – since the spuds are definitely ready, here is how to dig up and store potatoes so you can eat them over the winter. If I get one row of potatoes harvested every day, it doesn’t take long for the potato bed to be emptied.

Every year we grow enough potatoes to eat all winter long, plus enough stored to use as seed potatoes the following year! 

Watch this short video where we will show you how to grow great potatoes! We’ve got a link below the video where you can learn everything about growing potatoes.

They take up garden space, but if you have enough room, it is well worth it. Potatoes are expensive to buy in winter – often 10 pounds here can sell for $8.

 

Want to learn our tricks for growing potatoes?

We often get over 3 pounds of potatoes from 1 potato – seriously!

We know how to grow potatoes here.

 

But it’s not enough to know how to grow vegetables, you need to know how to dig up and store the tubers! Growing potatoes is a lot of the work, but you need to store them properly. If they aren’t, they will start to mold or rot. Then the mold spreads to the other potatoes in storage – and – you have a big problem.

 

How to Dig Up and Store Potatoes

One important thing to remember when harvesting potatoes is to start digging with a garden spade or garden fork about one foot away from the plant and the stems. It really does help to avoid cutting the potatoes, which is pretty easy to do.

Potatoes don’t just grow vertically under the plant – the roots spread out a bit and potatoes grow from there. So cut a wider swath and then work your way in!

Mature potatoes like to hide under foliage and dirt – it is so easy to miss a few here and there. Once you have dug around your potato plant, get your hands in the loose soil and feel around. Move the dirt around and go as deep as you need to, to find that original seed potato.

If you leave a potato or two behind, the following year they could easily sprout. Some people don’t mind volunteer potatoes popping up in the garden, but we always pull them.

They can lead to scab so we try to make sure we get them all dug out in the Fall. Then, in the spring, we pull volunteers out wherever they pop up!

 

After Digging Up Potatoes

Once we dig up the potatoes, we like to let them sit on the garden for most of a sunny day if the weather allows.

I go down and turn them after several hours – it helps them dry a bit more in the sunlight on both sides. I can lightly brush off the worst of the dirt that is clinging to them.

We never leave potatoes outside over night. We can’t take the risk of a frost happening, which can happen at almost any point here in the growing season. Too much moisture at just about any temperature can also ruin potatoes.

Leaving potatoes outside overnight can ruin them; once touched by frost they are no good anymore for eating.

So we dig up as much as we feel we can deal with during the day and leave the rest in the ground for another day.

Frost Hit Potatoes

Here’s a photo of our potatoes that had been hit by a frost. Not much can be done about this, but just because there is light frost damage does NOT mean the potatoes are ruined.

We’re thankful there are still plenty of green leaves on the plants. These potatoes didn’t yield as much as they could have, but we still had a harvest!

Sorting Potatoes for Storage and Eating

One of our tips for learning how to dig up and store potatoes is this: Sort the potatoes by size BEFORE you put any potatoes into storage for winter. We like to sort the potatoes right there in the garden. We bring lots of paper bags and some of our large empty paper feed bags.

These feed bags are nice and thick so we don’t have to worry about the bags breaking. You can see we just keep reusing the bags for several years. Waste not, want not!

You can also use this kind of potato bag – they also work great!

The really nice sized and shaped potatoes go into paper bags, one kind to a bag. We write the variety and put right on the bag that they are for seed for next year.

What to do with tiny potatoes?

The really tiny potatoes? We toss them into empty canners and cook them up for the chickens or growing out pigs, if we are raising them. Any potatoes that we accidentally cut into with the shovel get put in another bag. We will be sure to use these up first for fresh eating.

Don’t save cut potatoes – it is too easy to introduce mold by doing that. Just set them aside and use them as soon as you can. They’ll be at peak tenderness then, too. By sorting in the garden, we find we handle the potatoes a lot less. And when we grow enough potatoes to last all winter, that’s a lot of potatoes.

Why handle each potato more than we have to? This way, we don’t have to sort again once we get them all in the house. We have found this to be the easiest way to save and store our seed potatoes.

The really small potatoes? We toss them into empty canners and cook them up for the chickens or pigs, if we are raising them. Since Valley friends are raising a few pigs this year, they will get all the little ones to be fed off.

You can certainly eat the baby potatoes! They are just as delicious as any other potato, they are just a bit more of a pain to wash and prepare for eating.

Our hallway during Potato harvest time – we are overrun with large bags of potatoes ready for storing in our basement Cold Room.

The seed potatoes get put on a separate shelf down in the Cold Room. We have no problem storing fresh carrots and potatoes down there, as it acts as a perfect root cellar. A garage during the winter can also be a good option for storing your potatoes.

See how I grocery shop right from my Cold Room – all winter long!

We’re always happy when the potato seed sorting is done, as we are assured of having enough seed for a good potato crop next year.

Once the little ones and the big ones are dealt with, all the rest go into the large empty feed bags. We label them with the variety name and mark them for “eating”. We can easily store 40 pounds in each one, often more than that.

Hauling those bags up to the house and down into the Cold Room is definitely a “blue job” as they are far too heavy for me to handle.

 

Curing Potatoes

If you really want to extend your potatoes’ shelf life, you can cure them. Once they reach maturity, rinse them with water (no need to scrub), then pat dry and cover with a towel in a cool room.

Wait a week to 10 days, then store in a cardboard box in a dark and cool place. This will thicken the skin and extend the life of your potatoes and prepare them for long-term storage. You can learn more about curing potatoes here.

 

Good Potato Varieties for Winter Storage

Seigland potatoes – what a fantastic yield and we are super impressed with this variety of potato. Look how big those things are. They always have a great shape to them as well, which makes them easier to peel or scrub. They are delicious being used for baked potatoes.

Since they are so big, we always have a great supply of them to use for seed.

I dug up the row of Fingerlings (also known as Banana potatoes because of their shape). As you can see, they are still sitting on in the garden. Later they’ll get sorted and put away.

Fingerling potatoes are very expensive to buy at the store – I have seen them for sale at $3 a pound! But they are very inexpensive to grow. Do yourself a favour and buy some Fingerling seed potatoes next year to get started.

These are wonderful potatoes to eat in the middle of summer. I love the taste of new potatoes and these are one of my favourites! Why pay $3.00 a pound when you don’t have to?

More Great Potato Varieties

We grew a few Yukon Golds this year and here they are. We are not as pleased with them as we find they don’t taste as good as they used to years ago.

I have no clue why that would be, but we have other varieties that we like much better. So we will stick with planting those. We also grow Russet potatoes, which are a good keeper.

A row of Cariboo potatoes was harvested too – these are really good. They used to be available as a seed potato, but you can’t find them anymore. The only way you can get some is to beg a few off someone growing them in the Cariboo.

We were fortunate to get a few several years ago and for the first couple of years we only ate the little ones and saved all of the others for seed. Now we get a good harvest of these as well. These grow so well in this area and are well worth trying to find.

Preparing Soil for Planting Potatoes