How to Ripen Green Tomatoes

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Stan DeFreitas, Mr. Green Thumb. We're at Willow Tree Nursery in St. Petersburg, Florida. Well everybody gets green tomatoes it seems, at one time or another. And yes, like the movie, fried green tomatoes are great. But maybe you don't want fried green tomatoes, maybe you want to ripen them. Now you can take your green tomatoes, and you can put them on a shelf or on a counter, and they'll probably ripen up OK on their own. Or you can take a sheet of newspaper. Take the newspaper and just kind of wrap the tomato up like you would a little package. And by doing that, you'll help hold some of the ethylene gas that would be coming off this plant as it naturally ripens. If you want, you can take a little piece of an apple, like a core of an apple, or a piece of an apple and stick it also next to your little tomato plants, within maybe a few, four or five inches from it, that also gives off some of that ethylene gas as the tomato starts to turn color, it'll help give more of that gas off, which will help to ripen others. So you can kind of artificially speed up the natural process that should occur. Having fresh tomatoes is always important. But if you want to have your green tomato become a bright red tomato, or yellow, you're going to have to make sure that you sometimes help the ripening process. I'm Stan DeFreitas, Mr. Green Thumb, for AskMrGreenThumb.com."