Processing Tomato Seeds

With tomato seed offered by catalogues becoming so expensive it is no wonder that many gardeners are choosing to save seed for themselves. While my early attempts at saving tomato seeds left me with pretty unworkable cakes of seedy pulp stuff I now save tomato seeds very easily through the process of fermenting. All that is required is a few simple tools and a little bit of patience.

First things first – find your favorite open-pollinated (non-hybrid) or Heirloom tomato plant and pick yourself some very ripe or over-ripe tomatoes. Tomato seed is often at its best when the fruit is over-ripe though good seed can often be extracted from barely ripe fruit.




Selecting Hahms Gelbe Tomatoes for Seed Processing

 

Next, you cut the tomato and squeeze out the pulp containing the seeds. When you are done squeezing out the tomatoes, you can add ½ the amount of water to seedy pulp, if desired. This may make seed processing easier for later. You can eat the outside layer of processed tomatoes, if you want. My kids sometimes stand next to where I am processing seeds and eat the outside layer when I am done squeezing out the seeds. Then put a lid on the container, label the container (if you are doing more then one type of seed) and wait.




Squeezing Tomatoes for Seed Processing

 

What are you waiting for? You are waiting 1-5 days until the container produces a rotting odor and develops a bit of fuzz or a floating mat of mold. Yum! You may now be wondering why anyone would even do this. The reason why fermentation is so helpful in processing tomato seed is that fermentation breaks down the bubbles of slimy pulp covering the tomato seeds (which helps with seed storage and use) and kills pathogens that could lead to disease in the next generation of tomato plants.




A layer of mold has now formed on top of pulp mixture

 

Next, remove the floating mat of mold and pour the seedy slimy mixture into some form of sieve or screen, saving the slimy pulp for now. You might need the pulpy mixture later if the mixture didn’t ferment completely. A relative gave me my screen thingy. She said she probably obtained it from a dollar store or Walgreens.




Rinsing out Tomato Seeds

 

Wash out the seeds very well. If you hold a wet seed in your hand you should feel no pulp, but instead notice a very small layer of fuzz around the seed. This means you can now throw away that nasty slimy mixture. If the seeds still have a slimy coat that cannot be removed you will need to put the pulpy mixture and seeds back into the fermenting container and wait to rinse again later. If the seeds do not ferment long enough then they keep their slimy coats while if they ferment too long they will turn dark and may not sprout when planted.




Rinsed out Tomato Seeds in my Sieve thingy

 

The next step should be straightforward. Put the seeds on a paper plate or something else that you can label and put in a dry undisturbed place. I have to say undisturbed because I have small children – so my undisturbed place happens to be above our cupboards. After a day of drying, I stir my seeds to see if they are dry all the way. Then write the name of the variety and the year on a bag with permanent marker, along with anything else I might want to know about the seeds and put the seeds into storage.




Hahms Gelbe seeds ready to dry



Some finished seed - Notice the fine hairs on the seeds

I hope that this little tutorial is helpful. In relation to seed saving, tomato plants are not very susceptible to inbreeding depression, meaning that the seed from just one healthy plant can produce a large number of high quality seeds to grow future generations of tomato plants. The ease of saving tomato seed is probably why so many tomato seed companies have sprouted up recently (no pun intended).

Upside-Down Tomato Planters


Occasionally, when I drive through Tucson I see an upside-down tomato planter with something sticking out of the bottom. The majority of the time the things sticking out from the bottom is some form of vegetation that tried to survive our harsh climate and failed miserably. My neighbor's windchime pictured here reminds me of these dead tomato plants. It is not just another pretty decoration but is, in my mind, a memorial to all those enthusiastic tomato growers who fall prey to a computer generated image of a crop of tomatoes so bountiful that, if it were real, the weight of the tomatoes would pull the whole plant out by the roots!

So why do upside-down tomato planters not work in the desert? Should you be able to put your upside-down tomato planter in the clothes dryer you would find out. I call it the blow dryer affect. In mid-June the daytime temperatures in Tucson are well above 100°F (38°C) and the strong winds manage to wilt anything that does not have a well insulated or deep root system. Unless they are related to cacti, any plant in a small pot can die from either drying out from the wind, a lack of water, or radiant heat. Those gardeners with summer plants in pots may not realize that the sun cooks the pot every day. Even if a potted plant has water, the water will often become so hot that the roots become pasteurized. With all these factors, a tomato pot or bag exposed to more of the wind and the heat (by being hung up) will surely expire. This is definitely one of those cases where, if tomatoes were meant to grow upside down, we would be seeing them growing from the trees. So, where should upside-down tomato plants be grown? Somewhere in the north with mild cool summers and a whole lot of sun.

As an additional note: One gentleman has already tested upside-down planters and found that they do not work effectively while others have even been injured by these things. Additionally, a friend on mine told me her mother had mounted one on a tall awning that turned out not to support the weight of the pot. The pot pulled off some of the awning hit the side of the house, then smashed a glass table beneath causing a total of $1000 worth of damage. Not to scare anyone, but it would be wise to think before growing things upside-down.

 

Neighbor's Decaying Upside Down Tomato Planter

Organic Warfare

With the stress of Tucson’s heat, repeated attacks from Squash Vine Borers and growing from a bed of unfinished compost one of my Long of Naples vines mutated to become the ultimate organic weapon.

Processed food – meet the Female Squash Blossoms!



POW!

Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Deppe

After reading Carol Deppe’s book about growing food staple crops in uncertain times I was excited to join the long list in a queue of library patrons awaiting their chance to read Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties by Carol Deppe. The premise of this book is that most professional vegetable breeders have moved from the field to genetics and now it is up to us, amateur vegetable gardeners to develop open-pollinated vegetable varieties to suit our regional and personal needs. Perhaps a more accurate title for this book would have been The Amateur’s Vegetable Breeding Manual.
  

Carol Deppe's Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties - A must read!

What really impressed me when reading this book was the information Deppe gives about variety selection, variety crossing and the way in which she reveals how the greed of big seed corporations has kept farmers and gardeners dependent upon corporations.

In the process of reading I discovered that selection can be a little more tricky than I thought. Before I began reading this book I said to myself, “I’m smart enough to improve some current vegetable varieties I am growing through selection”. After reading Carol’s list of 27 things to consider when selecting breeding material in the section on variety selection I felt pretty overwhelmed. Even selecting for a trait as simple as disease resistance can be quite a task. To help you save time, Carol also tells about how you can determine when you cannot actually select for a trait. Carol additionally explains how to increase variability in a population of plants by growing enough of one type to select for specific traits. The reader quickly begins to understand that a keen eye and sound understanding is needed to observe new the occurrence of new genetic traits, either through selection or through crossing.

Crossing a variety of a specific vegetable is something Deppe devotes multiple chapters to. She skillfully guides amateur gardeners through the genetics of the first generation after a cross, or the F1, and explains what your chances will be of getting multiple traits you are seeking for from each parent plant. This helps gardeners determine how many plants they would need to grow to have a chance of obtaining a plant with the traits they desire. This goes along well with another chapter Deppe wrote on de-hybridizing hybrids – something that I would love to do with a few varieties myself. One other aspect I found very important in her writing was a breeding method called recurrent backcrossing, which enables the breeder to obtain just one trait of variety B while keeping most all of the traits of variety A. This was something big seed companies probably did before they began developing hybrid and genetically-modified seed.

In no way does Deppe demonize large hybrid or genetically-modified seed companies, though she gives them little excuse for their abusive practices which include supplying seed of hybrid plants without parents of known origin and creating seeds that will grow plants whose seed are completely sterile. Both of these practices only lead consumers to the conclusion that corporations have their own interests in profits far above the interest of those gardeners and farmers whose livelihood would be destroyed if the corporation went out of business.

Considering everything in this book, every gardener who is serious about gardening – even just to preserve the vegetable varieties they already have – should take some time to read this book. This is a no-nonsense guide with stories of breeding adventures and practical applications that you can implement the very next time you plant a seed.

Overwintering Carrots

While my wife was in Colorado this last week visiting her family her parents and she dug up some carrots her dad had overwintered. If you grow carrots and happen to overwinter them during a mild winter, next to the foundation on the south side of the house they will apparently keep growing over the winter. This is a little bit foreign to me because I don’t overwinter carrots – the climate in Tucson means that we sow, grow, and harvest carrots throughout the winter season. They live in Grand Junction, which does happen to have a little less snow than up in the mountains of Colorado. I’ll have to let you know how they taste. My wife jokingly said they’ll probably taste like winter.



Overwintered Scarlett Nantes from Grand Junction, CO



Update: I am happy to report that these carrots turned out to be very sweet. We baked them for dinner one night last week. You know kids like vegetables when they happily eat them up.