Like most residents of the Inland Northwest, my husband Bill and I have a bunch of green tomatoes that need to ripen. We picked the last of them yesterday because a killing frost was forecasted for last night.
What I ordinarily do is place sheets of newspaper on the floor of our unfinished basement, spread out a layer of green tomatoes on them, and then place newspaper sheets over them. But this year, my husband had a great idea.
Last year, we bought an "orchard rack" from Gardener's Supply which we used for storing our potatoes, onions and winter squash. The wooden rack has six drawers and is very well made.
We're still going to use the rack for storing the above veggies but first we're going to ripen our green tomatoes in it. We lined each drawer with a sheet of newspaper and then placed the tomatoes in each drawer. We did this before we left for vacation about 10 days ago and as you can see, it worked great.
I particularly like not having to crawl around on the basement floor to lay out or pick up the tomatoes and it's nice not having them spread out all over the floor.
For now, our winter squash - and other veggies we'll be storing - are waiting to be placed on the drawers but I think this is a great use for the rack early in the fall. Click on the link above to view more details on these orchard racks so you can see what I'm talking about.
