You can place green tomatoes in a brown paper bag (indoors) with a banana or apple to help them ripen more quickly. https://www.growveg.com/guides/the-best-ways-to-ripen-green-tomatoes/

Note that really immature green tomatoes will take longer to ripen, and may just dry out or rot before they do. So what you decide to do with them (as in, bag 'em or cook 'em green) might depend on how large they are, and how close you think they were to vine ripening. One indicator for maturity is cutting into one and looking at the seeds. Well formed seeds surrounded by a gelatinous coating mark a tomato that could have been ripened off the vine. Ill-formed seeds surrounded by a more solid mass of flesh mark a tomato that would not have ripened off the vine.

Those really green ones never taste as sweet as those left to ripen on the plants. I use them for cooking.

My solution to varmints was loosely wrapping ripening fruits in sheer fabric - worked for birds anyway. Some folks use paper bags.

Of course, the importance of vine ripening is a common myth. Tomatoes that are harvested when they reach first blush, and then allowed to ripen off the vine are just as good. Varmints don't know that. So a common strategy is to harvest at first blush.

https://agrilifetoday.tamu.edu/2022/06/10/pick-tomatoes-at-color-break/

That being said, harvesting before color break and then forcing ripeness by applying ethylene (as in, from a ripe banana or apple) yield somewhat inferior storebought-quality tomatoes, because that's how they do it.

I agree that blushing is better,. My personal experience is the longer I can leave them on the plant, the better - 'really green' is certainly not the same thing as blushing.

I've always harvested all the tomatoes when a freeze is predicted. I store them in an unheated integral garage that gets down to at its lowest about 53 or 54. My goal is not to force them to ripen but to prevent it. The tomatoes will slowly ripen up until as late as Christmas. Some rot but all of them ripen. I try to keep the light off them. In cardboard boxes, paper shopping bags, or in a covered stainless steam tray.

There are two types of green tomatoes, mature and immature green tomatoes. Immature green tomatoes will never ripen even with ethylene introduced and telling the difference is difficult. But usually the mature green will be a pale and lighter shade of green and slightly softer, so if they're small, darker green and hard chances are they're immature and will never ripen.

Storing them at at between 68 and 77 degrees is the optimum temperature to ripen, and above or below this temperature range will delay the process. Temperatures to low or above about 85 will stop the ripening process completely and why during the heat of a hot summer turning color will be delayed. The production of ascorbic acid is inversely proportional to the length of time a tomato is held in the mature green stage and thus the bland store tomatoes Dan mentioned.

Pick them, store them at an adequate temperature and the mature green tomatoes will ripen, and the immature will not. I picked everything with the slightest blush and the paler and lighter green before my last frost and a few weeks later had a few more racks of red tomatoes to make product with. The immature greens just sat and it was no big deal throwing them in the compost pile.

I use those hard greens for cooking - they're good sauteed with Italian sausage. garlic and parsley - or you can fry them, of course.

Living in FL, I rarely have to strip the fruit from plants because of weather, but I do strip them when I need to remove the plants. I mainly grow indeterminates.

There must be a difference in ripening for different tomatoes. I grow only heirloom beefsteaks. When I pick all my tomatoes because of a coming freeze I get a full steam tray that's 10"X20"X6" deep. Were I to store them at room temperature they'd all ripen in a week or so.

i find it hard to believe that if you store them at room temperature the hard green ones won't ripen, but if you store them in the 50's they'll ripen. Must be the variety??

Does anyone have experience with the indigo variety? i need to pick tomorrow before freeze. bottoms still light green.. will paper bag method work ?

Peps- They're still a tomato. Same thing applies to them as with all tomatoes.

Rodney

I give them the squeeze-and-look test. Hard and green, in the bin. Yields and paler, in the cellar. With an over ripe banana for company - of course.