Hi Lois - are you talking about actually sun drying or will you be using a dehydrator as most do? Actual sun drying is uncommon now days and difficult to keep the process clean. And it may be impossible to do with standard size tomatoes. It is difficult to do with even paste types as bacterial contamination and damage sets in quickly. Small pieces, of course, are much easier to do than tomato halves or even quarters. For example, cherry types cut in half will be done in a dehydrator with in 8-10 hours while romas will take 2-4 days, depending on the dehydrator. But once dried, then yes they can be used to either replace or to supplement the tomatoes called for in the recipe. As for the easiest way to preserve them to use for cooking? That would be freezing. Tomatoes can be frozen whole, halved, crushed, chopped, etc. and then used for cooking with all sorts of dishes. Hope this helps. Dave

You'll find many discussions about this over on the Harvest forum here - it is the food preservation forum. I have linked one of the best and most detailed discussion for you below. The search there will pull up all the others if you want to read them. Personally we dry lots of tomatoes each season including the larger non-roma types. But we use dehydrators - I think most do - given all the problems associated with trying to use the sun. Dave Here is a link that might be useful: Making dried tomatoes

The link below is to several other discussions on how-to and using dried tomatoes. You'll notice that most of the active discussions are over on the Harvest Forum here. We talking alot about drying various foods as well as methods used over on that forum so join us. Dave Here is a link that might be useful: Drying tomatoes discussions

Eileen, all you have to do is pick all your green ones, bring them in the house and they will all ripen/turn red. You can also pull the whole plant out of the ground and hang it in a garage or barn and they will all continue to ripen. To encourage ripening on the vine outside, discontinue watering. I don't know if you could dry green ones (can't see why not) but they sure would be bitter and I don't know what you would use them for. You could use fresh green ones for salsa verde or fried green tomatoes. Earl, smaller types I slice length wise. Bigger types, stem end down to bottom. I grow only paste types so few seeds, which I remove most of. If you are using tom's with a lot of seeds, you should probably remove them as they get pretty bitter. And I know seeding tomatoes (other than in a squeezo or something) is a huge pain-in-the-butt! Cutting slices that are the same thickness is important because then your slices will dry at a similar rate of speed and you don't have to keep picking through the trays on the dehydrator taking out the ones that dried the quickest. Also, I have a commercial dehydrator so mine has 1/2" metal squares. I spray the trays with pam to avoid sticking. Most home dehydrators have teflon trays but if not, the Pam works really well.