Saving Tomato Seeds and the Tomatoes too

August is my busy month for seed harvesting. I alternate tomato seeds and watermelon seeds, getting one batch of each done each week. Today (Tuesday) I packed away a dried batch of Roma tomato seeds and washed and set to dry a batch of Crimson Sweet watermelon seeds. These are both the Virginia Select strains which I sell to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. I harvested two buckets of Romas on Thursday and left them to fully ripen until today (day 5 for those not counting).

Each year since 2001, I’ve been selecting the Romas for earliness, productivity and resistance or tolerance to Septoria leaf spot disease. In the photo above you can see pink flagging tape on two of the T-posts and yellow on the nearer one. Pink flagging tape marks the plants that had large early yields and OK foliage. Yellow tape marks the plants that have healthier foliage and at least average early yield.

Today I processed the two bucketfuls of Romas from Thursday for seed. I like to do this task on the porch steps as this gives me various heights for the different buckets, and reduces bending double. The next step is to cut each tomato in half lengthwise, pitching any rotten ones in a compost bucket, and putting the good halves in a clean bucket.

In the photo above, the compost bucket is on the right and the food bucket on the left is getting any edible parts that I don’t want to save seed from for one reason or another. For instance, if the end of the fruit was bad, I don’t want seed from it in case the disease is also in the seeds, but the rest of the fruit is perfectly edible. For the cutting I like a small serrated knife, as shown in the picture.

Next I use a soup spoon to scoop out the seeds into a smaller bucket and I put the scooped out halves (“shells”) into another clean bucket. I’ve trained myself to keep moving on this task and only scoop once in each half tomato. I don’t go back for one odd seed that got away!

The “shells” are then all ready for cooking into sauce, or chopping and making into salsa. The seeds bucket gets a loose lid and is put in a cool dark corner of the shed for three days (until Friday). The goal is to ferment the tomato seeds, which kills the spores of some of the diseases, and makes it easier to remove the gel around the seeds and the bits of tomato flesh. I stir once to three times a day to let the carbon dioxide escape, and to break up any surface mold that develops. After three days I wash and dry the seeds.

I like seed crops where the food part is also harvested (or most of it). Peppers and melons are that way too, but not crops that we eat botanically immature, such as eggplant and cucumber. And obviously not crops where the seed is the food crop, such as peas, beans and corn.