A Gardeners Forum Forums General Discussion The Food Garden Forum The Tomato Forum saving tomato seeds

Is it worth saving my own seeds or is it messy and a hassle?

If you are looking to save a particular variety, they tend to become hybrids from cross pollination. But it can be both messy and fun to try a few.

Since I have only grown one type of tomato at a time most years I've saved tomato seeds. For me I just gather up the seeds that fall from the tomatoes when I cut them up and put them on the lid of a butter tub until they are dry then I seperate out the seeds and put them in a paper seed packet. They germinate fine so I don't bother with all that special stuff.

I understand you can hand polinate blooms and place a bag over the bloom if you want to make sure it isn't cross polinated.

I try to pick the middle fruit from early set. If you do this and have them spaced a reasonable distance you shouldn't see more than 5% cross pollination. Here where we have little bee activity we see even less.
Then there are many ways to save them. First are you saving for yourself and how long do you want the seeds to be good for? Saving for yourself for a year or so you can save like tkhooper said. Some rub them a little in a wire strainer under water to get most of the gel off. Then if you plan on trading or keeping a long time there are many other methods. The old one is fermentation. Which can be messy and smelly. I personally use oxiclean. I put the seeds in a container and add water if necessary to make 8 oz of liquid then add 1 tbl. spoon of oxiclean. Just let set for 20-30 minutes then put in a strainer and wash. This year I've started using a bleach soak for 2 minutes afterwards. I used 1 part bleach to 2 parts water. Testing germination on some now. Some say 5 parts water to weaken it more. This part is new to me. But this isn't very messy or smelly and in 30 minutes I'm done. JD

To greatly reduce the already low chance of cross pollination, harvest seeds from the first fruits. Usually, there will be one or two that bloom early and they will not be exposed to pollen from others. Bagging a blossom is as easy as putting a bit of cheesecloth over a bloom until the bloom sets a fruit.

The whole idea behind fermentation is to both remove the gel AND to cause any disease pathogens to die in the bacterial soup which forms. This gives you seeds that will last for several years and provide good germination percentages.
It also helps cull out seeds that are not viable. Immature, unviable seeds will generally float to the top of the mixture and can be rinsed away, while the good seeds sink to the bottom.

I've tried it several ways and find the fermentation takes about as little total time as the Oxiclean or scouring powder scrubs - which stink of chlorite and makes me sneeze a lot. :>)

Most folks who trade seeds want seeds that are as near as possible to commercial grade. Thus, fermentation has other incentives to its use.

Great information, thanks all.

I saved seeds from my tomatoes this year I found a really good web site telling how step by step and it was really easy and not all that messy

here's the link
http://www.diynetwork.com/diy/fv_tomatoes/article/0,,DIY_13829_5506601,00.html

If you are set on using fermentation, send me an Email and I'll reply with a file I've been working on (with pictures) that explains the fermentation method. The file is a couple of megabytes in size, but the pictures take so much space.

At this time, you must have MICROSOFT WORD on your computer to open the file. It is done in Microsoft Word 2000 and is friendly to any more recent version of the software. Sorry for the inconvenience at this time, but it IS a work in progress. However, it is complete enough to explain just how simple the fermentation process is.

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Make sure you ask for the seed saving file. I get a lot of Email. And, best of all, it's free.
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