Ripening tomatoes and greening manure

Tomatoes on the vine 
and in trays,
ripening in the glasshouse.

 Six months after planting out my tomatoes it came time to pull them out, since it has got too cold outside to ripen the remaining fruit. I also wanted to plant a green manure crop in their bed, to build up and nourish the soil for whatever goes in that bed next spring.

I stripped the plants of their remaining almost ripe, half ripe, and green fruit, and where a branch had a lot of green fruit on it I cut off the whole branch. Tomatoes will ripen off the plant so long as they are kept warm, so I have put the branches and also trays of fruit in the glasshouse. I will now see if there is any difference in speed of ripening for those on and off the branch, and also whether mixing almost ripe and unripe tomatoes together hastens the ripening of the green ones. It should do, because ripe fruit gives off ethylene gas which affects adjacent fruit and accelerates its ripening (this is why putting hard kiwifruit in a bag with a ripe apple or banana ripens them faster) but how significant a difference there will be, if any, I have yet to find out.

Once the tomatoes were in the glasshouse and the spent plants on the compost heap, I forked over the bed (which has lovely loose soil as it gets replenished regularly with compost), raked it, and scattered blue lupin seed to grow over winter. Just before it flowers, while still soft and green, it will either be dug into the ground to nourish it, or pulled out and laid on top as mulch. The former if there is at least a month for it to rot down in before the next crop goes into the bed; the latter if time is short. Either way the worms and other soil dwellers will deal to it, and transform it into more healthy, rich soil. This is the main benefit of green manure crops, but they are also often called 'cover crops', since their other great function is to cover space that would be colonised by weeds if it were left bare. Whatever they are called, they are an essential crop in an eco-garden, giving nature a nudge to build up just the right kind of soil (and lay off the weeds) wherever vegetables are to be grown.

 A blue lupin green manure crop -

sown in the former corn and pumpkin patch at the end of March.