Fall is approaching

As the fall of 2010 was starting to come in nice and slowly, we still had lots of tomatoes that needed to ripen before the frost came. Here is the story of how we helped them ripen:

Tim holding a tomato plant he ripped up.

We hung them upside down in our basement to stress the plants into ripening their tomatoes.

Some of the tomatoes that fell off during their uprooting were put in a box, layered with newspaper and a small apple to help their ripening. It worked! We were eating ripened tomatoes from our garden well into December. In fact, we froze many of them whole and still make sauce from them when the mood strikes.

Here is the garden aftermath:

All of the foliage was laid back down on the garden and later covered with leaves rescued from the leaf drop off area in our community. This act assures that nutrients are not all being removed from the garden and are composted into the soil during the winter.