Grow Your Own Magazine

I have lots of tomato plants which were planted directly into the ground. There are two varieties, moneymaker and gardener's delight.

Many of the tomatoes seem to be turning brown and rotten, and I think the patch has a slightly unpleasant smell. (The healthy tomatoes are all green - none of them have turned red yet). The thing is, the garden was more or less unattended for six weeks due to illness and I only got back last week, so I don't really know how far the disease has spread.

My question is: would it be okay if I picked off the healthy looking green tomatoes and put them on the windowsill in the hope that they'll ripen? I'm not able to do a lot of physical work at the moment due to the aforementioned illness, so I can't really start cutting things and digging things up. But there are a lot of tomatoes and it would be such a shame to see them all be wasted.

Any advice much appreciated.

It sounds like you have blight, unfortunately. It's been prevalent this year because of the weather conditions.

It is always difficult to know whether it has affected all the fruit, so I pick ones which appear to be OK, put them in the shed, and just watch them. You may be lucky and they will ripen without showing signs of disease - some of mine have. Really green fruit take a long time to ripen, but any which show a sign of colour will not take too long.

Remove all the obviously infected foliage and fruits and dispose of it away from the plot (burn it, or take it to a Council green waste site). See how things progress on any remaining plants - if things stabilise, you may be able to continue cropping for a while.

Good luck - hope you manage to salvage something.

Lots of us have had a bad year with potatoes and/ or tomatoes - but there's always next year!

I've just spotted that in my few tomato baskets. The fruits haven't started to go yet but i know i won't be long before they do. It's just not nice to see the lovely healthy plant begin to wilt

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Vegmonkey and the Mrs. - vegetable gardening in a small space in Cheltenham at www.vegmonkey.co.uk

Whilst on holiday in France, the owner of a local nursery informed me that 95% of France has lost its outdoor crop of tomatoes to blight. Its not just over here that its rampaging due to the wet weather.

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Kindest regards, David.

http://pigletsplots.blogspot.com/
updated - Sunday 19th at 2100hrs

i'm in france - my potatoes got blight but i blasted the toms with bordelaise mixture and they have all done well - or as well as can be expected in the circumstances...but i've got tons and have to make chutney this week which is a pain because its now hot again here and i dont fancy standing over a hot stove.
Has anyone ever frozen tomatoes?
Can it be done?

It's a shame that so many have had poor tomato harvests this year.
I think the only succesful tomatos are the smaller pot varieties so one can bring them in the house when the weathers bad... as it has been, most of the time.

Green tomatos can be fried apparently. Not the most appetising of thoughts however.

I freeze my tomatoes every year until the gardening season is over. in the dark and dull days of winter i then make tomato soup, salsa and sauces. It certainly can be done.

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And when you're back stops aching,
And you're hands begin to harden.
You will find yourself a partner,
In the glory of the garden.

Rudyard Kipling.

How do you freeze them?
Whole with skins on?
Skinned?
Chopped?

Hi Jardinere,

You can freeze them in cubes size ( with of with out peeling it ) or you cook them as a sauce first and then freeze them. I like the sauce version better, but it takes a bit more time in preparing and when your freezer is full, you can always preserve the sauce in the bottles.

Cheers,
Momol

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I grow, I pick, I eat ...

Thank-you Momol
I have made some passata type stuff this very morning and frozen it in bags...hope it works!

I just freeze mine whole until i have the time to cook them.

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And when you're back stops aching,
And you're hands begin to harden.
You will find yourself a partner,
In the glory of the garden.

Rudyard Kipling.

I make mine in to sauce before freezing in bags. Tip for those of you that don't already do this: when you put the sauce in the bag, have the bag in a tupper of some sort and keep it in there until the sauce is frozen. This makes it much easier for storing as you can just pile up your 'tomato bricks', whereas in the past I've had bags of sauce mold themselves through the baskets etc. making them much less space efficient!

Hi Waffler,

Thanks for your tip, I usually freeze my sauce in the tupperware thing straigh and at the end... running out of container... Will try your tip...

Cheers,
Momol

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I grow, I pick, I eat ...