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"SOMETHING THAT MIGHT be useful for your 'Worth Trying' box," a fellow gardener said to me the other day as we were both in line buying coffee, "is that you can pick green tomatoes and they will ripen if you pack them right."
We discussed this a bit, talking about various ways to keep the tomatoes from rotting before they ripened, and how long one might expect them to keep. We agreed that the best way to have tomatoes from one's own vines over the winter was to pick them before a freeze, dry them well, wrap them in newspaper, and store in a cool basement or garage.
I put them in a basket so that air can circulate freely through the stored vegetables. I also check every now and then, and discard any tomatoes going bad, lest they infect others. I have no objection to eating green tomatoes, either fried or in green tomato relish, which will improve any hamburger or hot dog one wants to put it on. But having ripe tomatoes from one's own vines is not to be sneezed at. I have more than once served fresh tomatoes from my garden for Christmas dinner.
One can store apples the same way, though it is not a good idea to store them side by side, for apples among tomatoes will hasten their ripening. The winesaps that we grew in North Carolina were good keepers and, unless we got a bit too hungry for them, often lasted into the following year. We stored them in baskets lined with burlap, layering sawdust and apples, being careful that the apples did not touch one another.
It would be a bit chancy to use this process today, unless one produced one's own sawdust and knew that none of it came from pressure-treated wood, which would contaminate the apples and make them unsafe to eat. It would be better to treat the apples the same way as the tomatoes and wrap them in newspaper. Whether one is storing apples or tomatoes, store only firm and unbruised ones. Bruised ones should be used right away, for they will surely not keep long enough to justify wrapping and storing them.
There was a time, of course, when the root cellar was a normal outbuilding and all kinds of fruits and vegetables were kept there. Turnips, cabbages, carrots, and potatoes, both Irish and sweet, store well and need only to be kept from freezing. We did not have a root cellar, but a large closet under the stairs at the back of an unheated hall served just as well. The house, built just after the Civil War, had no insulation and no central heating and the hallway was ideal not just for keeping vegetables and fruit, but for bulbs, cuttings and plants from the ornamental garden.
My mother's dahlias, some of which were carefully staked and produced blossoms the size of dinner plates each summer, were wrapped and stored the same way apples and tomatoes were. Cannas, which probably would have been all right left outside, were nevertheless dug, dried and wrapped. Part of the reason most everything survived may well have been that there were so many live things stored together that they ensured, even in the coldest winter, that the temperature would never drop below freezing. I doubt it ever dropped below 40 degrees, ideal for storage.
Some things, carrots and turnips for two, were as frequently stored in the ground as in our pseudo-root-cellar closet. Turnips, grown both for greens and for the root, were best, I was always told, after a frost or two anyway, so if they were dug, they remained out until there had been multiple frosts. My parents seemed always to know just when the ground would freeze, and harvested turnips for storage just in time. The Old Farmer's Almanac hung in a prominent place in our kitchen.
Carrots were often left in the ground all winter. We baled our own hay, some of it to be used for livestock feed over winter, some of it, mainly wheat and other grain straw, to be used for livestock bedding. There were always enough bales to cover a row of carrots, or a few head of cabbages, in the garden. A bale of hay on each side, loose hay in the center over the vegetables, and bales covering the row would keep the ground friable over the winter, which would probably have worked even without the top bales, but we had plenty of hay, so there was no reason not to use it.
When one wanted carrots, one had only to move hay aside and dig with a potato fork, replacing the hay afterward, of course. My memory is that these winter carrots were far sweeter and better than were those harvested at any other time of the year. Shredded carrots, moistened with mayonnaise and mixed with plump raisins, are still one of my favorite winter dishes. I suspect that almost any root crop could be carried through the winter, but I don't remember that we tried with anything except cabbages and carrots.
I try variations of this theme throughout my garden, for straw, hay and leaves are heavily used for mulch each winter. Hay is likely to have seed from both native and cultivated grasses, so I like to compost it first, which is not difficult to do, for composting on site works well. Where I have no perennials or bulbs growing, I work the surface a bit with a hoe or rake and lay the bales on top of the disturbed soil. Over the winter, rain and snow will soak through the bales, carrying organic nutrients and microorganisms to the soil below, where earthworms will work throughout winter pulling hay into the ground.
It doesn't hurt anything to water the hay bales a bit when one places them, something which is better done with a watering can than a hose. One simply wants to moisten the hay, not create runoff, so this should be permitted by water restrictions. The moisture, and the sun, will help warm the hay, and composting will create more heat to complete the transformation from hay or straw to compost. Next spring, one can plant in the hay bale if one wishes, or move the uncomposted hay to the compost pile to complete its transformation, and plant directly into the invigorated, well-worked and fertilized soil earthworms will have helped create. Nothing could be simpler, or better for the environment, not to mention one's soil.
TONY P. WRENN of Fredericksburg is a lifelong gardener. He welcomes questions from readers and will try to answer them in his column. Contact him by mail at The Free Lance-Star, 616 Amelia St., Fredericksburg, Va. 22401; by fax at 373-8455; or by e-mail to his attention at gwoolf@freelancestar.com.
