Tomato Tip! From Kari's Garden

How to get your green tomatoes ripe:

My sister, Kari, grows a beautiful garden every year. This year I decided to give it a go and grow some tomatoes. Here they were when they were babies, the first day I brought them home from the nursery:

Now they have gotten HUGE! But the growing of actual fruit has been slow moving. I was only getting flowers and then.... nothing. On the 4th of July my sister came over and trimmed all of the green leaves off my plants and left nothing but the little yellow blossoms. Poor things looks so naked and sad, but you know what? Within three days I had little green tomatoes popping up everywhere!

Moral of the story is, this year's mild heat and overcast days are not enough to get the tomatoes to ripen without a little help (aka haircut). The leaves on the plant are to shade the fruit from excessive heat and direct sun so we, Oregonians, need to clip away the shade and protection that the leaves provide. Clipping away the extra leaves also allows the fruit to benefit from getting all the nutrients that would have otherwise been shared with the leaves. It just speeds up the process so you don't find yourself at the end of August with nothing but a recipe for fried green tomatoes.


Clip off any green leaves but not the blossoms or the fruit

 You'll end up with a pretty large pile of leaves to discard but that is GOOD! The bigger the pile and the more naked the plant, the better!

To make it a little more fun, do it with a friend

One step closer to a delish Caprese salad!