Fruits are an important part of most everyone’s diet. In fact, the word is you should have at least two servings of fruit each day along with your three kinds of vegetables.
As we get into warm weather, we will be able to treat ourselves to homegrown, Iowa, straight-from-the-backyard varieties. But until then, we rely on what is offered in the supermarkets and grocery stores.
One reader questioned me as to how to know if fruit is ripe and what you can do at home to ripen it. Shannon Bielicke from the Johnson County Extension Office led me to a great website from the University of Illinois that answers many of the questions about ripening fruit.
For one thing, most fruit is picked and shipped before it is ripe. It may arrive at the store still unripe, but the process can be continued at home. We all know how fast those green bananas seem to change overnight.
Here are some fruits that can be ripened at home: Avocados, papayas, persimmons, cantaloupe, honeydew melons, mangos, nectarines, peaches, pears plum, pineapples and tomatoes.
And this is how you do it. Place the fruit in a large paper bag. Punch a few holes in the bag for air circulation. Place the fruit in a single layer, not on top of each other. Then fold the top of the bag over and leave it on the kitchen counter until it ripens.
Check every day to see if it is ripe, and when it is you can eat it and put the rest in the refrigerator. You may have heard not to put tomatoes in the fridge, but once they are ripe it seems to be OK. I like my tomatoes either hot off the vine or icy cold, so am glad to hear this.
Now if you buy a lot of fruit, you may find you have bags all over the counters, as I think the ideas is one fruit to a bag. However, most fruit will ripen in one to two days and the refrigerator will keep it fresh for several days.
Some fruits do not ripen after they are picked. Apples, blueberries, cherries, grapes, lemons, limes, pomegranates, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, gooseberries, cranberries, watermelon and tangerines can be put immediately in the refrigerator.
Bananas are always picked when they are green, but really they don’t need special care to ripen, though putting them in a paper bag may speed the process if you need to use them in a hurry. The brown speckles on bananas are called “honey spots,” and this means it is sweet and ready to eat. You can store bananas in the refrigerator, though it will turn the skins dark brown or black but the inside the banana will be just fine.
This information came from Drusilla Banks, extension educator, and she agrees with the old saying, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away.”
Now from Iowa State University comes the information that this frigid winter may have damaged peach and sweet cherry trees. The flower buds may not have survived and Iowa gardeners should expect poor crops on peaches and sweet cherries and possible damage to the trees, too. On the bright side, they say, apples, pears and sour cherries should be OK.
Judy Terry is a freelance garden writer. Questions or comments should be sent to her at Iowa City Press-Citizen, P.O. Box 2480, Iowa City, IA 52244-2480; faxed to 834-1083; or emailed to firstname.lastname@example.org.