hey guys Rick stone here from the blog our stony acres and the online gardening school welcome to 5-minute Fridays my video series where I try and give you a valuable gardening tip in 5 minutes or less before we get started this week please make sure that you subscribe to my youtube channel or if you're watching this on Facebook make sure you like my stony acres Facebook page okay so it is fall and we're about a week to two weeks away from our first frost temperatures have really cooled down we're in the 70s now and the warm season vegetables have really started to back off and they're not doing nearly as well and I have a lot of these on my tomato plants green tomatoes right and that happens every year we end up having a you know a rush of tomatoes that are set in you know early September and by the time they're to a decent size it's too late in the year and they're not going to blind ripen and so today I wanted to talk a little bit about how you can actually bring these green tomatoes in and if you deal with them properly you can actually have nice ripe garden grown tomatoes for maybe two or even three months after the growing season is over okay so what I want to do is before that really cold weather settles in and we actually have some that get frozen instead I want to go out and I want to pick all of the decent-sized tomatoes so this I kind of picked as a minimum size okay this this is a you know maybe a baseball-sized tomato and that's about as small as you want to go you you want to avoid little ones and this guy's not green he's kind of an orange one you want to avoid the littlest ones because they're not gonna do well as ripening green tomatoes and then it's what you want to do is you want to pick all of the the tomatoes that are on your plant that are worth saving and then you're gonna sort them and here's a picture of how I sort my Tomatoes every year you're gonna sort them by three different things first off you're going to have the the ones that are almost ready so you know ones like these that are that are red and maybe not quite ripe but just about ripe and those are gonna you're gonna bring those straight in to the house and they're gonna ripen in the warmth of your house in maybe just a couple of three days then you're gonna have some that are orange or just starting to get some color to them those will go in a separate box and again those depending on your needs you're probably going to just bring those inside to the warmer house and you're gonna leave those inside too and those will ripen up fairly quickly within about a week to ten days and you'll be able to use those up and then you want the third box of all green tomatoes and again really you want to make sure that they're at least this size they're at least the baseball size and you're going to bring that box in and then is what you want to do is you want to spread those green tomatoes out on something whether it's a shelf a table I actually like I because I have a home office I have copy paper boxes and the lids of those copy paper boxes seems to just work perfectly because they're kind of these shallow boxes but you want to spread the tomatoes out on so that they're just a single layer deep and then as and you also want to keep those someplace where it's going to be cool or cold and so either in a shed or maybe in your garage you don't want to bring them into the house yet because bringing them into the warmth will make them ripen too quickly and that is what you want to do is you just keep a close eye on these Tomatoes and as you start to see some that get color that maybe start to get a little orange or a little pink depending on the variety you want to pull those out of the box so check your boxes every couple of days and anytime you see some that are starting to get some color you want to pull those out and you can put them all together either in a box in the garage or if you want those are starting to ripen so you could actually just bring those inside but get those ones that are starting to ripen away from the rest of the green tomatoes because once the tomato starts to ripen it puts off a chemical that will actually influence the other tomatoes around it to start ripening as well and so if you want to make these lasts and stretch out then you need to keep the ripening ones separate from the green ones some people like to actually wrap the tomatoes up in in like some kind of paper newspaper or something like that that will actually help to keep those gasses away but it seems like an awful lot of work for me when you can just make them ripen you know by laying them out flat so lay those out flat and then you're just going to constantly monitor them every couple of days you go out look for any of their ripening pull those out take them inside let them fully ripen and use those leave the rest of the green ones in there and if you do that kind of slowly throughout the season if you have enough those will actually last upwards of two to two and a half months in a cold garage and and we'll just kind of slowly slowly right but now you'll have some that never ripen they just they just won't ever ripe them but usually you know by the time you hit that two to two and a half month mark there they'll probably all have ripened and and that will really stretch out your your harvest from your garden now a warning to you ripened green tomatoes are not like vine ripened summertime Tomatoes they're not going to be as good they don't have the same texture they don't have the same taste they're more like what you would expect to get from a grocery store they're not gonna be as good as your garden grown but they're still yummy and and it's still fun to have garden grown tomatoes in December right and I actually one year we had enough in in savings that we we had picked them all on October 15th and we actually had our last batch of fresh made garden grown salsa on New Year's Day while we were watching the football games and so that's how long you can actually make them last you know eight to ten to maybe even twelve weeks if you slowly monitor them and pull you remember just pull any that are ripening out bring those inside and leave the rest of the green ones out there and they'll just slowly ripen over that period of time and give you a continual harvest of tomatoes that you weren't really weren't really expecting so a great way to do it so hopefully that helps you out and make sure you get out there and and pick those tomatoes before you have a hard freeze so you got to get that done before it freezes hard all right okay well that's all I have for you for this week if you'd like to learn a little bit more about growing tomatoes I'd suggest that you take a look at my tomato growing course on the online gardening school and there's a link in the description down below that will take you to the online gardening course and you can learn more about that tomato growing course and it'll also give you a half-price coupon so you can get that course for only $10 so that's down below all right that's all I have for this week everybody have a fantastic week and happy gardening