Saving tomato seeds

About a month and a half ago I was involved in an emergency preparedness fair for my church. The fair covered everything from first aid to food storage. In the food storage category there was a booth on gardening and I was asked to make a pamphlet about saving garden seeds. I thought it was an interesting topic and was looking forward to doing more research.

I didn't expect to be convinced that one day this is absolutely how I want to do a garden.

Admittedly, there would have to be a really big crisis for the majority of people to resort to living off their own land, but it may not be so hard to imagine. Say we had a major gas crisis and trucking as we know it would cease. That would mean no fresh fruits and vegetables in the grocery store all year round. Say the price of food continued to skyrocket beyond what the average income could support. We've already seen it increase considerably in the past two years.

Ok, back to my garden seeds. One of the first facts that was brought to my attention was the problem of hybrid seed varieties. I know there are a lot of hybrid vegetables out there, and they make some delicious eats, but their seeds are sterile or unpredictable. It's a great way for the seed companies to guarantee an income every year, but not so good if you don't want to buy seeds every year--or if you find yourself in a major crisis and seeds (or vegetables) aren't available.

The second fact that appealed to me was the tradition of heritage seeds. Heritage seeds have been saved from year to year for generations. Gardeners take their healthiest, best fruit at the peak of the season and keep the seeds. If you grow a heritage variety that has grown locally it will be naturally resistant to most local diseases and bugs and appropriately hardy for the climate.

So preserving garden seeds seems like a smart idea to me. I got most of my information from the book "Seed to Seed" by Suzanne Ashworth. It's an awesome book if your interested. For the poster that went with the brochure I decided to take pictures of the steps of saving tomato seeds. My tomato was not from my garden, unfortunately, but from the ever abundant garden of HyVee. The brochure I made is saved on a different computer, so I don't have the nicely worded instructions, but here goes.

Start with the best tomato of your harvest. Cut it in half around the "equator" or horizontally across the middle.
Squeeze the seeds, juices and slime out into an open container. I used a cleaned-out yogurt container.
To get all the seeds, you can also use a spoon to gently scoop out everything.
This is what it looked like in the container.
Now is the fun part. Let your open container sit at room temperature and ferment for at least three days until it grows a nice layer of fungus on it. Tomato seeds have a layer of gel around them that can't be removed safely any way but fermentation. Make sure it's in a location where the stench of fermentation won't bother anyone. I put mine in the garage. Here's what it looked like after 3 days. Oh, and it didn't smell that bad.
After this, you put the whole kit and caboodle in a strainer and rinse, rinse, rinse. I hand-picked out the bigger chunks as I went along.
Finally, after patting off as much moisture as you can, you need to spread the seeds out to dry on a flat hard surface for 7-10 days, stirring them around at least once a day so they don't stick to each other or the surface.
Voila! You have seeds for next season! Store your seeds in an airtight container if possible (to keep out moisture) and in a location without too much variance in temperature, like a basement or cellar.

I know it may seem like a lot of work, but it took only a matter of minutes to do everything (minus the waiting time).

I don't know how to end this post. I wish I could praise the benefits of doing this but since I've never actually done it, that would seem awkward. I had some good quotes in my brochure, but I don't have that, so just imagine some really inspiring quote about saving garden seeds and how it will save the world. The end.