Short answer: Draping sheets of radiant barrier over my tomatoes did nothing to keep them warm last night. If I want my remaining tomatoes to begin ripening on the vine, I’m going to have to build a temporary air-tight plastic-sheeting greenhouse around them. Then put the radiant barrier over that.
Not sure if a couple-dozen tomatoes are worth the effort.
Background
Top picture: My late-season tomato plants still have quite a few large green tomatoes. Those tomatoes will be damaged, and will rot rather than ripen, if repeatedly subjected to temperatures below 50F. Unfortunately, the weather turned cold yesterday, and with nighttime temperatures in the 40’s F for the near future. Between these and another tomato patch, I probably have a couple-dozen perfect baseball-sized green tomatoes still in the garden.
The question for today is, can I save those green tomatoes, and get them to start ripening, with little effort. The least effort I could think of was to drape radiant barrier sheets loosely over the plants. So I tried that last night, as seen in the second picture below.
That was a total failure.
I placed a temperature data logger on top of a couple of tomatoes, under the radiant barrier. I let that run all night, after checking that the temperature on the logger matched the surrounding air temperature, which in turn matched the weather report. The outside air temperature was predicted to get down to about 46F just before dawn. Which is exactly what the temperature under the radiant barrier did.
The loose-fitting radiant barrier did nothing to keep the plants warm. Not really a surprise, but worth testing, to see if I could avoid the hassle of trying to work some sort of air-tight cover around those plants. But the bottom line is that if I want to keep them warm, they need to be in some sort of improvised poly tunnel or greenhouse enclosure.
So, either that’s next on my list, or green tomatoes will feature heavily on the menu for the next couple of weeks. I do not like green tomatoes, other than pickled (Post G31), and a gallon of pickled green tomatoes goes a long way. So I guess I’ll be setting up a poly tunnel over my existing plants.
