Harvesting your tomatoes is fairly easy…
When the fruit is ready, you can gently pull the fruit off the vine by twisting. Alternatively, you can take a pair of scissors and snip just above the blossom end on the vine.
You can pick green tomatoes for a delicious fried green tomato recipe. Or you can allow your tomatoes to continue to ripen to a deep red, orange, or yellow, depending on variety.
Simply place them on the counter, or in a sunny windowsill and they will continue to ripen.
If you have a lot of tomatoes to ripen, you can also place them in a tightly closed paper bag for 2-3 days.
Fresh picked tomatoes are great sliced on sandwiches and burgers, or season with bit of salt and olive oil and enjoy the way they are!

Heather’s homesteading journey started in 2006, with baby steps: first, she got a few raised beds, some chickens, and rabbits. Over the years, she amassed a wealth of homesteading knowledge, knowledge that you can find in the articles of this blog.
I grind up frozen eggshells in the food processor and put down a layer of the fine shells under the tomato plant when I put them in ground to add some calcium.
that’s a great tip! Thanks for sharing it!
I like to start my tomato plants from seed. When I do plant them in the garden, I plant very deep with only the top few leaves above ground as you have suggested. Now, I recall that my father-in-law always fed his tomato plants with beer!! Have you heard of this? He swore that that was the secret to his VERY productive tomato plants!!!
with beer??? That’s new to me, but hey, if it works!! 🙂