Tomato Seed Saving

Tomato Photos:

I began saving tomato seeds last weekend from a few varieties that were ready. I also made sure to set up my homemade camera light box for getting closeups of each tomato variety.

Dad's Compost Tomato, originally discovered in 2007, very good yeilds throughout the seeason.

Note: These seeds are very small and some will go right through a fine strainer!

"Crazy" tomato known for early cherries with large amounts on each vine.

The two photos above are "Early Wonder" which has a wonderful rosy-red coloring.

These two are of Striped Cavern. Bright orange stripes outside with its seeds looking almost like a strawberry in the center of the tomato - very tasty!

These are suppose to be "Super Snow White" but they grew to be a golden yellow here this season... Soil conditions?

These Alaska tomatoes were very impressive this year. Mostly golfball sized.

An interesting tomato plant "Ildi" is an early cold climate type with both round and pear-shaped fruit. Many heavy clusters on each plant.

And last for this post, Black From Tula. It's an odd thing to see growing in the garden, as the fruits look like they're going bad with their brownish-red color!

Saving Tomato Seeds:

Many people shy away from saving tomato seeds for three reasons; First, the fermentation process takes time and can be made overly complicated. Second, the fermentation stinks and will attract many fruit flies to that area! And third, many folks don't enjoy having redish-orange under their fingernails for a week after processing a few hundred tomatoes!



Ah, but I enjoy the whole thing. I've learned how to simplify the whole process and take any guesswork out of it. I'll outline the steps below:

1: Work outside, preferably on a sunny day to get the tomatoes nice and warm. You'll need a table, a large soup pan, a large strainer with big 1/4 inch sized holes, some containers to ferment the seeds in (I use plastic cottage cheese and yogurt containers) and most impotantly your garden hose with a nice strong shower nozzle setting.

2: Use a paring knife to score each tomato with an "X" on the bottom and squeeze the seeds through the strainer into the soup pan. Disgard the tomato skins off to the side. I tend to do about 10 to 20 tomatoes for each variety.




3: After all tomatoes have been seeded, take the hose and try to blast a bit through the strainer to force more seeds into the pan. Remove strainer and clean throroughly with the hose.

4: Spray a bunch more water into the seed pan and really mix things up with the pressure. Fill the pan up about half full and let settle for a few minutes.

5: Important thing to note - The good seed is settled to the bottom. With that in mind, take the soup pan off to the side and slowly tilt it to let the water run out. This is kinda like panning for gold, you want the good stuff to settle on the bottom while you dump the rest of the junk out of the top of the mix.

6: Dump the rest into plastic containers and be sure to have enough water to make the container 3/4 full. Be sure to label with permanent marker and place on a warm shelf to ferment for one week.




7: A week has zipped by and look at all of those happy fruit flies flying around those stinky, mold-covered tomato seeds! Using the same large soup pan, hold your nose and dump the moldy mess of fermented tomato seeds into the pan.

8: Use your trusty hose to fill the pan half way with water then do the same "panning for gold" technique of letting the junk pour off the top while the good seed will remain on the bottom.

9: Use a small strainer to catch all of the good seed and then spread the seeds onto a screen in the sunshine. Let the seeds dry out for about 4 to 6 hours in direct sun.


10: Use a spatula to get the semi-dried seeds off of the screen and place them onto wax paper. Never use paper towels! Once a tomato seed dries on a paper towel, it's impossible to get it off without taking some of the paper towel with it!


The seeds need to dry completely indoors. I use a specially built seed dryer which is surrounded by a protective galvanized mesh to make it mouse-proof. Depending on temperature and humidity, it can take months for seeds to dry completely - usually well into the wood burning season.


Happy Seed Saving!

:)