Ripening Tomatoes Indoors: It's Easy

My garden was a little delayed in harvesting thanks to a little thing called flooding in Colorado this year. It water-logged most of my plants right at prime harvest time.

So after things dried up, I cleaned up the fruits that were no good, and decided to let the remaining tomatoes in particular hang out for a bit in the garden.

When I could finally hold out no longer, I took the tomatoes - mostly my San Marzanos - off the plant, placed them in a box in the hopes that they would ripen in my kitchen. I had nothing to lose really.


I did some research online. I love Google ... and so many people had different ways to do this. I decided that I would just put them in the box, and see what happens.

And it worked. No fancy tricks required. I did lose some to rotting, but for the most part I was able to salvage a decent amount of my final bit of harvest.

Here's proof they ripened. I only took a couple pictures throughout the process but you can see there is far more red in the second photo than the first:

There are fewer in the bottom photo, but otherwise I did not change the configuration of the box much over time. In the end, none remained green.

It wasn't fast, but it's better than losing out on fresh tomatoes!