I suppose old wives tales can’t be true all the time. Many people swear by the banana technique for ripening tomatoes: put green toms in a paper bag with a banana. The ethylene gas naturally given off by the ripening banana makes the tomatoes ripen too.
Well after a week in the bag this bunch of Sweet Million cherry tomatoes hasn’t changed much at all (before on the left / after on the right). Thankfully it’s a glorious sunny afternoon today so I’ve set them out on a warm kitchen windowsill to see what happens. Meanwhile I’m very happy with the Pinstripe aubergines below, which are ripening now. It’ll be a small crop from my three plants, but i think they’re a delight to look at.
Elsewhere in the garden I’m trying to bring along the Giant Red Celery in the bed below. They’ve grown to their full height and thickness, with lots of stalks making up each plant, but I’m hoping that the strange-looking but standard technique of wrapping maturing celery with cardboard or newspaper will bring out the red colour and sweeten them up.
I broke one stalk off to try and it was very munchable. Hopefully a couple of weeks in darkness will make them even more so.
www.grow-veg.uk 
I HATE bananas and would never expect a tomato to like them either; my understanding of the old wives’ tale was that you put the green tomatoes plus one or 2 ripe ones into a brown bag and put the bag in a drawer. Forget about it for a couple of weeks and then have a look.
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I’ll try that Catkin, thank you. The banana experiment is a write-off. They say apples work, so I may have a go at that too. Luckily there are lots of green toms to work with.
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