Back in July we talked about heat tolerant greens. We looked at alternatives to lettuce that would last long enough into the summer to allow you to eat fresh salads with greens and heirloom tomatoes from your garden. Now we are going to look at the opposite, storage tomatoes. Growing storage tomatoes will allow you to get tomatoes to last late into the fall and winter to go with your cool season greens.
You can of course use high tunnels and other season extension tools to help extend your tomato harvest past your first frost. However, tomatoes are quite intolerant of cold temperatures, so this will only get you so far. At some point they will get frozen or stop growing and ripening because the temperatures are too low.
So what other options do you have if you don’t have a heated greenhouse?
Often times we need to look past modern plant varieties to find ones that fill unusual purposes. And as you likely know heirloom tomatoes are an extremely diverse group of plants. Heirloom tomatoes come in every shape, size and color you can imagine. They also happen to come in storage varieties.
As it would turn out, our ancestors also wanted juicy tomatoes in the middle of the winter. So before greenhouse tomatoes became commonplace, they developed varieties of tomatoes that would store long term and ripen slowly. These storage varieties can extend your tomato season for a couple months or more into the winter.
Storage tomatoes are also called longkeeper tomatoes. You will probably have to work a little harder to find seeds than you would with other heirloom varieties. However, they are several seed companies that do offer them. Some of the more common varieties are Longkeeper, Reverend Marrows Long Keeper, and Garden Peach.
How to grow storage tomatoes
The culture of winter tomatoes is the same as any other tomato plant. They require the same growing conditions and care. However, you need to time planting of them differently. You will likely need to plant them later than your summer tomatoes. With storage tomatoes, you don’t want them to ripen in your garden. You need to adjust the planting so that instead of ripening on the vine, they are at what is called mature green before your first frost.
Mature green tomatoes are simply ones that have reached full size. They start to turn from the very dark green to a slightly lighter green, and a few of them may be starting to blush with color. You want to pick mature green tomatoes as they will store the longest. At this phase they are mature enough to ripen off the vine.
To time planting, you need to look up your first frost date. Then count backwards that number of days. You will also need to add some extra days as the plants will grow more slowly as the weather cools in the fall. Err on the side of planting them too early rather than too late.
It is also important to trellis up your plants to make sure that your tomatoes are not touching the ground. Any tomatoes that are touching the soil will rot in storage and should be discarded. You should try to protect them from any kind of insect damage or mechanical damage for the same reason.
Before your first frost
Once your tomatoes are mature green and it is getting close to frost, it is time to harvest your crop. If you are going to get a frost and are not sure if the tomatoes are mature green, harvest them anyways. They may still ripen.
You need to harvest your tomatoes very carefully. You do not want to damage or bruise them in any way. Use a pair of pruners or scissors to carefully snip each tomato off leaving a bit of stem. You do not want to rip the tomato off the stem as it will damage the top of the tomato making it more prone to rotting. Once you have snipped your tomatoes carefully place them into a basket making sure the stems don’t stab through the skin of other tomatoes.
Packing your tomatoes for storage
After you have picked your tomatoes you need to bring them inside and pack them for storage. Depending on how much space you have, there are a couple different options. You can lay the tomatoes out in single layer on a sheet of newspaper. Alternatively, you can wrap each tomato in an individual piece of packing paper and nestle them into a box in layers.
Regardless of how you choose to store them it is important to keep in mind that you should not allow the tomatoes to touch as it makes them more prone to rotting. It is also important to check on your tomatoes regularly. Remove any that are ripe or any that appear to be starting to rot. Not every tomato will ripen, and you will need to dispose of ones that start to rot before they can contaminate your other tomatoes.
It is best to keep your tomatoes in a cool but not cold area. Periodically remove the ones that are the most ripe looking and move them to your warm kitchen counter to finish ripening. At this point you can use them as you would any other tomato.
In our experience storage tomatoes are not as good as vine ripened summer tomatoes. They are however significantly better than many of the grocery store tomatoes. Plus you have the pleasure of knowing that the tomato gracing your plate in January is one ‘fresh’ from your own garden.
So when you are planning your garden for next year, plan space for some winter storage tomatoes!
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