Saving Tomato Seeds, several ways

[897tgigvib]

Saving tomato seeds can be done a bunch of different ways.

If your tomato plants are especially healthy and look like they really don't have any diseases caused by germs the seeds don't have to go through any fermentation process.

EASIEST WAY to save tomato seeds works well for saving less than 100 seeds. Main constraint is simply patience. For the simplest method all you'll need are clean old blue jeans, comfortable chair, table or desk, paper plate, envelope, and at least one fingernail cleanly clipped at a length short but just long enough barely to separate say 3 fourths as long as a tomato seed diameter. Your favored length can vary. Tomato pulp, juice, and gel straight from a tomato will not permanently stain blue jeans. A cotton towel works too. Jeans have perfect texture.

Label your envelope first, set it aside. Set down at the table get comfortable. Turning on an ole Arlo Guthrie tune often helps, especially if you'll be doing several large tomatoes. Slice your tomato open. Reach into it after spotting a seed. Sort of squeeze the tomato and get the seed onto your fingertip. Should have just the seed inside a little transparent gel looking stuff. For all the world it'll look like the seed is in a placenta. What you want to do is remove that placenta. Bring the seed to your upper leg just above your knee. Set it there on your jeans.

Now with your perfect length fingernail, draw the seed lightly across your jeans with enough pressure to let that placenta burst and come off after 1 to 4 inches of rub. A couple tries and you'll get better with each seed. Flip the seed over and do another light rub to get more wetness off the seed. See how the seed pulls best just under your fingernail? Now set the seed on your paper plate with the envelope marked. I also label the paper plate.

Repeat this until you have as many seeds as you want.

Set your paper plate of seeds at a good dry and slightly warm place. In a few hours or a day, pop the seeds loose from the plate. See why you want to get most of that placenta juice off? Leave too much on and it acts like glue. All the seeds on the plate are now loosened. Let them dry for a couple more days, well separated on the plate, envelope still setting on the plate. After a couple days pack the envelope.

Voyla!

Beauty of this is you can even serruptitiously do this in a restaurant if they serve some amazingly splendid fresh tomato on a plate...No messy bowls of fermenting seeds and rotting tomato pulp...and it inspires you with another reason to grow healthy plants.

All seeds should be saved in any case from healthy plants.

Your turn...what's your favorite way?

 

[Chickie'sMomaInNH]

thanks for the info Marshall! i'll have to remember this when i start getting some nice tomatoes this year! i should have kept my dh's last pair of torn jeans so i had some backup material to set out lots of seeds on!

heh, Arlo Guthrie gets played every year at my parents' house around Thanksgiving-the long version of Alice's Restaurant which is usually played by the local radio station. but my dad has his backup on record if he ever needs it! and he still has a record player working to listen to it on! some day i will get him a copy on a CD so he's not wearing the groves out!

 

[897tgigvib]

YOU CAN GET ANYTHING YOU WANT AT ALICE'S RESTAURANT,
'CEP'N ALICE...

Another advantage of this method is you can take seeds from a single slice if you only want a few seeds, and eat the rest...or even eat that slice too if your fingers are good at seed removal.

Once you do tomatoes this way you feel other wet seeds to save are even easier. Peppers don't even need to be rubbed.

Chickies Mama, even jeans only washed once will work. Tomato pulp does not permanently stain. Least never stained my pants. Oh and heck, leave the pants on while gardening and you'll notice a nice

EAU DE TOMATO aroma

 

[MeggsyGardenGirl]

Thanks for this info Marshall. The one and only jeans-clad pant leg method of seed saving! Love it. I've never tried to save seeds before and I always thought the ferment/rot process was needed to prepare the seed for sprouting the next year. I didn't have any idea it was to destroy disease or virus. That's very interesting. Can most healthy veg seeds be simply cleaned and dried? I don't know if I will try my hand at seed saving but I sure would like to learn how in case it's ever needed.

 

[897tgigvib]

Meggsy, some seeds only need to be set n a plate to dry a bit more and then plopped into a marked envelope and stored in an old shoe box.

Oh shoot, even simpler, get some seeds and put them in a sock and stick it in the back of your sock drawer...

 

[Carol Dee]

Morning Marshall, you are so full of great ideas and helpful hints. Thank You, as this is the summer we hope to try some seed saving of our own.

 

[digitS']

So!

As the matre d' grabs your ear, escorts you to the rear door and has the dishwasher kick you into the alley - you've made an escape with some tomato seeds glued to your knee!

I have the advantage of living where seed is grown. Lots of seed, tons of it, enuf seed to ship to China so as to chip away at that trade deficit. Unfortunately, a lot of our top soil ends up going to China too but, that's another story. The seed, of course, is grain.

Generally, the conditions are ideal for the production of seed of many different sorts but wheat is the dominant crop. Dry weather late in the season is important for the maturing of the crop and for harvest. Heck. Storage is sometimes outdoors. Yes, I've seen great piles of wheat lying naked under the sky without even a tarp over them . . . not even a pair of old jeans!

Summer rains? Well, 4 weeks with zero rain is normal in late summer. In fact, the average amount of rain during the entire 3 months of summer is 2 inches, or less. Most of the soil moisture for the dry land wheat comes from winter snow melt.

I have no problem with slicing a tomato on the cutting board, separating out a few seeds from the tomato or, just sliding them off the board after the slices have gone on a plate --- and, pasting them on a paper towel. I have found it best to take a few moments to be sure that the seeds are spread thinly on the towel, no clumps of seeds.

The towel then goes out on the railing of my deck. Tomato ID is written in one corner of the towel. Two bricks hold down the edges of the paper. And, I'm done! For the next 2 or 3 weeks, I'm done. Then begins the laborious task of folding the towel and placing it in a plastic bag - ID clearly visible. In late winter, I will flick these seed loose from the paper with the point of a knife - careful, those toasty dry seeds jump!

By the way, the fermented seed technique really sounds quite simple. Bleach may be a component of the process, however.

Steve

 

[canesisters]

Marshall is going to start up The Sock Drawer Seed Store. Isn't that a GREAT name?

 

[bobm]

That sounds like a lot of serious work. I would think that if one gives a bunch of selected tomatoes to the kids, who then have a tomato fight then an a couple of days one can go out and pick any dry seed that one can pick up from the side of the house, or shed, fence, stuck on kids' clothes, etc. one could then put them in a baby food jar for safe keeping untill planting time. row Better yet... the lazy man's way, one will simly have dozens of tomatoes showing up all over the place next spring in the areas of the tomato fight without the muss and fuss of gathering or storing the seed. Mother Nature's way !

 

[897tgigvib]

My socks get so dirty that I am sure they have more living fungus by weight than fabric, so, at the laundromat the gal working there no longer looks funny at me when she sees me using twice as much laundry soap as anyone else, and then putting more quarters in to run them a second wash with very little detergent, still making lots of suds.

Sump'n about a sock drawer stores seeds super well. Extra cool wayback and under there, and extra well cushioned, plus super dry. I know for certain because I've had seeds from my days of being a kid gardener that had been stuffed into socks that my mother put into a box as I grew up and out that decades later she gave me all boxed up, and they grew!

Not exactly as famous as pyramid seeds or cave seeds, but still pretty good!

Cane you have a splendid way with names!