Forcing Tomatoes

Not being willing to let 10 vines of tomatoes just rot before even getting ripe, I decided to try an experiment…

Last year I forced the last of our tomato crop in bags with an apple in them. This year I was told a banana peel worked even better. So I stripped my earliest tomato plants (they had already begun to rot) and placed them into two identical paper grocery bags, one with an apple and one with a banana peel.

Then I waited…

A little over a week later only the apple bag had little pink tomatoes in it. So I removed all of the pink ones to place in the sun in my kitchen window, condensed what was left into the apple bag and threw in one more apple for good measure…

Now I almost have enough ripe ones for a small batch of salsa!

I may have a whole lot of brown bags with green tomatoes and apples in the laundry room pretty soon…