Gardening
Harvesting Red and Green Tomatoes
'Tye Dye' tomato in the garden with red and green tomatoes to harvest.
Photo courtesy of MelindaMyers.com
Nothing beats the flavor of fresh-from-the-garden tomatoes. Harvesting when they are fully ripe ensures the best flavor for eating fresh, cooking, and preserving.
Visit your garden often and watch for the fruit to turn from green to fully colored. Then leave them on the plant for five to eight days. Vine-ripened tomatoes have the best flavor for using fresh or preserving.
Check plants regularly and keep harvesting, so the plants continue to produce. This also reduces problems with insects and disease organisms attacking overripe or rotting fruit. Store mature, fully colored tomatoes in cool, 45-to-50-degree conditions with high humidity. They will last about seven to 14 days in these conditions.
When growing indeterminate tomatoes, you will notice the plants keep growing and producing more flowers and fruit until the frost kills the plant. Redirect the plant's energy from sprouting new blossoms and fruit to ripening the fruit that is already on the plant. Prune off the stem tip of indeterminate tomatoes about a month before the average first fall frost in your area. This allows the existing flowers to develop into fruit and the existing fruit to mature before the end of the growing season.
Extend the harvest season with the help of floating row covers. These fabrics allow air, light, and water through, but trap heat around the plants. Protecting plants from the first few fall frosts often provides time for more tomatoes to ripen.
Sometimes you cannot protect plants from frost or hungry critters prevent you from leaving the tomatoes on the plant to fully ripen. You can pick any tomatoes that are starting to show color before the killing frost and finish ripening them indoors. The blossom end should be greenish white or starting to color up. Use blemished and cracked fruit right away since these do not store well.
Store green and under-ripe tomatoes in a cool 60-to-65-degree location to maximize their storage life. Set the tomatoes on heavy paper spread apart so they are not touching. Or wrap them individually in newspaper so the fruit do not make direct contact. This helps prevent rot spreading from one fruit to the next.
These tomatoes will ripen over the next few weeks. You can speed up the process by moving a few tomatoes to a bright, warm location a few days before they are needed.
Extend the tomato season next year by growing a Long Keeper. The flavor is not as good as vine-ripened fruit, but you can pick these before the first fall frost and enjoy garden tomatoes for up to three months.
And don't let the rest of the green tomatoes go to waste. Use them for frying, chow chow, green salsa, and other tasty treats.
Keep harvesting and enjoying your garden-fresh tomatoes as long as your growing season allows. Then make space to store them a few weeks after the first fall frost.
Melinda Myers has written more than 20 gardening books, including The Midwest Gardener's Handbook, 2nd Edition and Small Space Gardening. She hosts The Great Courses "How to Grow Anything" DVD series and the nationally-syndicated Melinda's Garden Moment TV & radio program. Myers is a columnist and contributing editor for Birds & Blooms magazine. Her web site is www.MelindaMyers.com.
Antiques
Auction, Antiques, and Collectibles News
In my last column, I shared that a 1952 Mickey Mantle card set a sports card record when it sold for $12.6 million at auction last month. I noted that the Mantle card also set a record for any type of sports memorabilia by topping the $9.3 million paid for a Diego Maradona 1986 World Cup jersey. Well, CBS Sports reports that a new record was set this month for another non-card sports memorabilia item.
A jersey that Michael Jordan wore in Game 1 of the 1998 NBA Finals recently went on the auction block. The Bulls lost that game to the Utah Jazz, but went on to win the series, giving Jordan his sixth championship in his "Last Dance" season. Jordan also received his sixth career Finals MVP award. His jersey price soared well above the $3 to $5 million estimate, selling for $10.1 million.
In non-sports news, the New York Times reports that the art collection of Paul Allen (who formed Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975) is expected to be the biggest auction of a private art collection in history. The inventor, sports team owner and philanthropist died in 2018. Over 150 of his pieces spanning 500 years will be sold. Highlights include "Jasper Johns' encaustic, acrylic and paper collage 'Small False Start' from 1960, estimated to bring more than $50 million, and Paul Cézanne's 'La Montagne Sainte-Victoire' (1888-90), estimated at over $100 million." Allen bought many of the paintings as an investment. He anonymously purchased an 1891 Monet painting of a haystack for $81.4 million in 2016. He also loaned pieces from his collections to several museums. He told Bloomberg in 2015, "I feel that you should share some of the works to give the public a chance to see them." The sale, which also includes masterpieces by Renoir and Roy Lichtenstein, is expected to top $1 billion.
An antique advertising sign also recently fetched eye-popping auction record prices, according to Greenville, South Carolina TV station WYFF. The double sided Musgo Gasoline sign was discovered in a Michigan attic and is the best-known example of the 1920s version of the Musgo Gasoline sign. WYFF writes that "Musgo, originally located in Muskegon, Michigan, was believed to be open for less than six months during the mid-1920s." The previous auction record for a gasoline-related advertising sign was $400,000 until the Musgo sign shattered it, selling for $1.5 million in August, especially remarkable considering gasoline sold for slightly over 20 cents a gallon when Musgo was in business.
We are accepting consignments of gold, coins and sterling through September 26th for our fall auction. We are also accepting consignments for our sports card and memorabilia auction as well as our art, historical memorabilia, antiques and collectibles fall auctions through September 30th. I'll be appraising items for the public at the Townsend Historical Society on October 15th, the Worcester Senior Center on October 18th and the Leicester Senior Center on November 5th. Please visit our website www.centralmassauctions.com for links to upcoming events.
Contact us at: www.centralmassauctions.com (508-612- 6111) info@centralmassauctions.com for antiques and collectibles auction services.