Our Better Nature: Taking Care of Your Late Harvest Tomatoes and Squash

As the season’s end approaches, how we harvest the last precious tomatoes, squash, and other vegetables can have a big impact on their quality, taste, and storage life. Whether our garden is a few containers on a balcony or a vast veggie patch that feeds a family, we’re all keen to save the last bit of bounty that we’ve worked so hard for. Yet some of the harvest practices we’ve gleaned from family or friends can work against us.

Tomatoes

One widespread fallacy is that the sun makes tomatoes red. I wonder if this idea began with British colonists, who first raised the crop here around 1710. Perhaps they thought, “Blimey, the sun reddens me skin, so it should work for tomatoes.” Who knows? I recall how my Irish mother, who burns lobster-red after about three seconds in full sun, used to line up tomatoes on our windowsill to ripen at the close of the season.

Or maybe the notion stems from the fact we’re told that tomatoes should have at least eight hours of full sun per day to thrive. Well, tomato plants need that much light, but intense sun on the fruits can lead to sunscald, which creates bad spots that must be cut away and reduces flavor as well.

While sunshine on his shoulders made John Denver happy, too much sun is one of the causes of green shoulder on tomatoes, where they get red except for the tops, which stay hard and green (or sometimes yellow). Certain varieties are more prone than others to this condition. To my knowledge, no gardener has ever gotten green shoulder.

Too much sun hinders the production of tomatoes’ main red pigment, called lycopene, and we want as much of this stuff as possible. For one thing, it makes our tomatoes look just gorgeous. Lycopene also has major health benefits. According to the National Institutes of Health, it strengthens the cardiac system, reduces inflammation, and helps promote good sleep, among lots of other perks.

When the danger of frost looms, bring in all your green tomatoes except the smallest ones. Very small fruits are usually not mature enough to ripen properly. They’re still great for making green tomato relish or other recipes, though.

Wrap each tomato in newsprint or brown paper, and spread them out on baking sheets at room temperature. The reason for covering them is to trap ethylene gas. Ethylene, released in tiny amounts by the seeds, promotes the ripening of tomatoes and other fruits. It’s also flammable. But don’t worry; your tomatoes won’t explode. I promise.

Check inside the paper wrapping every three to five days to see how your post-harvest crop is coming along and weed out the occasional spoiled fruit. To speed up the pace of ripening, put a few apples among your tomatoes – apples are like ethylene factories, and the extra gas will hasten the process. If you’d prefer to slow things down, unwrap some tomatoes and set them on the counter, away from direct sun as well as other fruits. In northern New York State where I used to live, this method allowed me to enjoy ripe, garden-grown tomatoes long after freezing weather had set in.

Squash

An unfortunate thing about pumpkins and other winter squash is that they appear to come with handles. Their stems are a handy size, often curved in an ergonomically pleasing way that invite us to grab on. However, those “handles” can pull away from the fruits when we do this, especially if they’re heavy. Always support pumpkins from underneath. They develop a thick rind when mature; this protects them from decay organisms. If their stem breaks off, the resulting blemish is a freeway for microbes to enter and turn the parts we like to eat into mush.

The number one consideration with pumpkins and other winter squash is to get them indoors before a hard frost – anything at or below 28° F (-2°C). A hard frost will shorten their storage life dramatically. Covering the garden at night is an option if only a light frost is predicted, but it’s taking a gamble.

If you want pumpkins and other squash to keep for a long time, it’s important to “cure” them to fully harden their skin. Follow this link for details, as some squash need different temperatures to cure properly. Once hardened off, they should ideally be stored at around 65° F, but never below 50, and between 60 and 70 percent humidity.

Under good conditions, acorn squash usually last five to eight weeks. Pie pumpkins typically keep for three to four months, while Hubbards and butternuts can go beyond six months. Depending on the growing conditions and how careful I was in curing my butternut squash, they frequently lasted into the following summer, and a friend had a Hubbard that kept for an entire year. But I admit its flavor was past its “best by” date.