The harvest and the frost

Much of our region was subjected to a hard freeze overnight, on the evening of Oct. 17, although some readers in Kingston and further south have yet to experience it.

At my house, the temperature dropped to 28 degrees and there was a dusting of snow. By now, my vegetable garden is pretty much finished, anyway.

I did harvest the few remaining green tomatoes and I even found a few cucumbers under the canopy of weeds that now covers most of my raised beds.

It appears that the oversized, European cucumber —also known as English cucumber, burpless cucumber, hothouse cucumber, seedless cucumber, gourmet cucumber or greenhouse cucumber— that I grew for the first time, survived the longest through this rainy season, as disease wiped out the other two varieties weeks ago.

I am afraid these late harvested fruits (yes, cucumbers are technically fruits, as is squash) did not have nearly the flavor of the earlier ones. Without a good number of green leaves to produce the sugars that eventually add flavor to most vegetables, summer crops, like cucumbers and even tomatoes, do not taste nearly as good when harvested this late in the fall.

Still, I will take an October-harvested, green tomato that has been ripened on my windowsill, over any supermarket varieties available.

Most of these green tomatoes will not fully ripen, though, because they have disease spores all over the fruit. I do wash them immediately after harvest to try to remove the fungal spores, but once infection occurs, there is nothing to be done except cross your fingers and wait. Some people put the green tomatoes in paper bags or wrap in newspaper to ripen, but as long

as the temperature is between 60 and 75, they will ripen just fine, even in sunshine.

The tomatoes must be mature, or “ripe,” in order to turn red. The only way to be sure they are ripe enough to turn red is to slice one and see if the seeds are cut by the knife.

If the gel that surrounds the seeds has formed well enough to allow the seeds not to be cut when the fruit is sliced, they will turn red. (obviously, not the one you cut!)

Most tomatoes that already are starting to turn yellow are mature enough to finish the process indoors. The ripening process for most fruits and vegetables is triggered by ethylene gas that ripening fruit emit as a naturally occurring plant hormone.

Supermarket tomatoes are often treated with this chemical in order for

them to look like they are tasty, but this technique does not mimic nature when the fruit ripen on the plant. That is the main reason why supermarket tomatoes taste so bland.

Some of you are still waiting for your tomatoes to ripen even while still on the plant. The main reason why tomatoes fail to ripen their fruit outdoors is because the soil they are growing in is overly fertile.

Too much nitrogen fertilizer will result in tremendous growth, monster big plants, tons of fruit, but they are very slow to ripen. If you have lots of green tomatoes, but not enough ripe ones, make sure you back off on the fertilizer next year! If you garden at high elevations here in the Catskills, you must also choose shorter season varieties.

As usual, my favorite variety, Big Beef, far outperformed

the other two varieties I tested this year. Every year I try at least one “new” tomato variety (this year it was “Hillbilly”) and each year they fail to even come close to the quality of Big Beef. I am already wondering what variety will be the next season’s “loser”. With limited garden space, I cannot devote much of my precious raised beds to inferior varieties.

I did give a 4-by-4-foot bed to trialing a new vegetable in 2018. This was Malabar spinach, which I had never grown before. It is actually a twining vine and it grew nicely around the handle of my hoe, which I had left standing nearby the raised bed and eventually it grew up my tomato cages as well. I ate some of the semi-succulent leaves last night, combined with onion and gar-

lic and seasoned with fivespice powder. It tasted very much like spinach, but not as good. I might grow this vegetable again next season at the base of the tomato cages to save space. It is a very pretty

vine as well, with purple stems and broad green leaves that did not suffer from any insect of disease issues. It is also quite hardy, having survived the recent frost.