A waste to see a glut of unripe green tomatoes rot on the vine

Bananas bring out the whimsy in us. The songwriter Frank Silver would stop at a fruit stand run by a Greek man who began every sentence with “Yes,” even if the sentence was a no. So the fruit seller's “Yes, We have no bananas,” inspired Silver and his partner Irving Cohn to write a blockbuster hit by the same title.  Then in 1966, Country Joe McDonald started a rumor that smoking dried banana skins would get you high.

If yes, you do have bananas and have not smoked the peels, you will be glad to know that bananas, peels and all, can transform unripe green tomatoes into ripe red tomatoes. No hallucination, just gas: ethylene gas that bananas release naturally. Many fruits produce ethylene gas, and wounding plants seems to induce them to produce more, perhaps an evolutionary tactic to be sure that any remaining fruits speed up and ripen before the plant dies. Because wounding stimulates plants to produce gas, the ancient Egyptians would score figs with a knife so the gashed fruits would ripen off the tree.

In the garden as temperatures drop below 60 degrees and daylight shortens, tomatoes are unlikely to ripen on the vine, so they should be picked before the first frost.

It is such a waste to see a glut of unripe green tomatoes rot on the vine after a killing frost. You can, of course, simply use the green tomatoes in chutney, or as breaded and fried green tomatoes, but most of us want ripe juicy tomatoes even in the fall and winter.

While any tomato can be ripened indoors, there are tomato varieties that are bred to stay fresh after picking, such as Burpee's Long-Keeper tomato. Long-Keeper has six-ounce, round orange-red fruits with pink flesh that when picked in late fall will stay fresh for up to four months.

You can keep temperatures a bit higher by covering tomato plants with light sheets or agricultural row covers every night. Let the tomatoes get as large as possible, and the closer to ripe they are, the better they will taste after ripening indoors. Give the tomato plants one last feeding of compost tea, fish emulsion or other liquid organic fertilizer.

Many gardeners simply pull up the whole tomato plant, roots and all, and hang it upside down in a cellar or unheated garage to ripen on the vine.

To ripen green tomatoes indoors, gently wash the tomatoes, and make sure they are totally dry before you store them. If you have just a few green tomatoes, you can put them in a paper bag with a banana, loosely fold the top closed, and store away from sun and heat. You will get best results using ripe bananas that have just a bit of green.

If you need to ripen more than a few tomatoes, try putting the green tomatoes in a cardboard box with several bananas. Make sure that the tomatoes are not touching each other, and there is room for air to circulate. Keep an eye on the ripening tomatoes and discard any that begin to grow moldy or start to rot.

Because bananas are associated with monkeys, we say that someone who is agitated is “going bananas.” So don't go bananas with unripe tomatoes, just store them with bananas and their ethylene-producing skins. Pick your green tomatoes and ripen them with a banana, whether you smoke the peels or not.

With ethylene, gardening can be a gas.