No more good summer salads. Melon, tomato, peach, mirabelle plum… The fruits and vegetables of the beautiful season are beginning to bow out, since autumn has arrived. The cooling is even very sudden, the thermometer having dropped several degrees in a few days and not rising again. You will find fewer and fewer sunny fruits and vegetables produced in France over the next few weeks and your vegetable garden might not like this transition to the cold season either.

Indeed, if you are used to growing your fruits and vegetables directly in your garden, you know that it is time for some of them to ripen before taking a cold snap and being permanently lost. This is especially the case for tomatoes! If your latest plans are not ripe and you fear the effect of the cold, you must ripen them quickly. For this, there are two particularly effective tips that will not require a lot of effort.

The banana is your best ally when it comes to ripening underripe fruit. Rich in ethylene, it speeds up the process of the products placed next to it. To give your tomatoes a little boost, place two bananas near your tomatoes, hanging directly over the stem. You can also pick them once they have reached a good size and put them in a salad bowl with the bananas.

Don’t have any bananas handy? Use newspaper, explains How to save. Wrap your tomatoes in the news of the day then place everything in a warm room in the house, bathed in sunlight if possible. Three or four days later, your tomatoes should be ripe and ready to eat. Take note of this trick, because it is also effective with vegetables that have not grown enough or fruits that are not yet fully ripe. If you don’t have newspaper, you can also use a plastic bag that you have pierced with a few holes and leave untouched for a week. The process will be accelerated if you also add a banana to the bag.