My Good Veggie Crops This Year...

...have been tomatoes, beans, peas, zucchini and cucumber. Here's a picture of some tomatoes and beans I picked recently.

My biggest challenge with the tomatoes has been keeping them up off the ground. The plants need to be propped up, or the weight of the growing fruit will pull the branches down. (The beans require less effort to keep up because they're lighter.)

My advice to anyone who has never grown tomatoes or beans before is to plant them along the edge of your garden if it's enclosed with a fence (this is what I do, then simply tie them up against the fence). Either that or have long sticks and twine ready, or purchase plant "cages" from your local gardening store to support the plants.

While I love the Roma tomatoes and the beans from the garden, the cherry tomatoes are fabulous!! Store bought cherry tomatoes simply cannot compare. If you've considered growing them but have never tried, you should - you won't regret it :)

Ripening Tomatoes

Tomatoes taste best when they're ripened on the vine, but sometimes there isn't time before the first frost in the fall. This happened to me last year - we had such a short growing season that most of my cherry tomatoes were still dark green when the temperatures started to drop.

I googled the topic and discovered that you can ripen green tomatoes by bringing them indoors and placing them in the dark, somewhere cool. I thought I'd try, and took a large plastic container, lined it with paper towels, and spread out the tomatoes. I then covered them to keep the light out and waited, checking on them every couple of days.

Voila! Success. I discovered something interesting, too... if I took out ALL the ripened tomatoes, it took longer for new ones to ripen than it did if I left a few ripe ones in the tub. It turns out that ripe tomatoes produce Ethylene, which accelerates the ripening process for the others. Supposedly ripe bananas have the same effect on green tomatoes, although I haven't tried that one.

Here are some other tricks to speed up the tomato ripening process (these ones I haven't tried yet):

• shock the plant by yanking on the root
• cut back on watering
• pull the entire plant and hang it upside down

This year we're having a much warmer summer so I've been letting my tomatoes ripen on the vine, but it's nice to have some tricks up my sleeve for the future :)