Tag: Saving Tomato Seeds

Washing tomato seeds, Heritage Harvest Festival, Organic Broadcaster

Wet Roma tomato seeds set to dry with a fan.
Photo Pam Dawling

Last week I wrote about saving tomato seeds and eating the tomatoes too. We left the extracted tomato seed in a bucket to ferment for three days. On Friday I washed the seeds. They look quite unappetizing at first, with a thin layer of mold on the surface of the liquid.

Roma tomato seed ferment on day 3, ready for washing.
Photo Pam Dawling

The process of washing the seeds and pouring off the detritus is almost magical. The fermentation kills some disease spores, and also dissolves the gel that coats the seeds. If you dry tomato seeds without fermenting, they all stick together.

Tomato seed processing: adding water from a hose and stirring the mix.
Photo Pam Dawling

With each successive wash, more of the tomato flesh floats off, along with poor quality seeds. I add water using a hose and stir. Here I’m stirring with a short length of green plastic pipe that was conveniently nearby. When the bucket is about two-thirds full I turn off the hose and stop stirring. Good seed sinks to the bottom of the bucket. When I think it has settled, I pour the liquid along with lumps of tomato flesh into another bucket. This is a safety precaution to ensure I don’t throw away good seed. If I just poured it on the ground I could slip and dump the lot.

Roma tomato seed ferment after first pour.
Photo Pam Dawling

I repeat the wash and pour a few more times. Even after the second pour the seeds are plainly visible.

Roma tomato seed ferment after the second pour.
Photo Pam Dawling

The seeds which float and get poured away are very light and are either very thin or they show a black spot in the center. So it’s counter-productive to try to catch every single seed.Let the useless seeds float away!

Tomato seed extraction after the third pour.
Photo Pam Dawling

After four or five washes the water I pour off is clear, so then I add more water, stir and pour the swirling stuff through a sieve balanced on a bucket.

Tomato seed extraction, fourth wash water. almost clear.
Photo Pam Dawling

In my case I have a small sieve balanced in a bigger one, which sits more safely on the bucket, but has a mesh too big for tomato seeds. This sieve contains seed from 10 gallons of Roma tomatoes.

Roma tomato seeds strained in a sieve.
Photo Pam Dawling

From here, I take the seed sieve indoors and empty it on sturdy paper towels on a tray by a small fan. See the first photo. After a few hours I come by and crumble the clumps of seeds to help even out the drying. For two days I turn the seeds over a few times a day. Once they are dry I put them in a labelled paper bag, and ready the space for the next batch of seeds to dry. Watermelon in this case. I alternate tomato and watermelon seeds, processing one batch of each every week through late July to early September.

Heritage Harvest Festival

I mentioned the Heritage Harvest Festival a few weeks ago. I’m presenting one of the Premium Workshops on Friday, about growing sweet potatoes. See my Events Page for more about this. Pictures of sweet potatoes at this time of year are a monotonous swath of green leaves (now we have got a double electric fence to stop the deer eating the leaves off.) Last year we didn’t do a good job of keeping deer off our sweet potatoes and we got low yields. One of our gardening mantras is “Never make the same mistake two years running!” so you can be sure we are working hard to keep the pesky deer from eating our winter food.

On Saturday September 9, I’ll be out and about at the Festival, and hope to see many old friends and make some new ones.

If you live in North Carolina and can’t make it all the way to Virginia for the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello, you could go to the Organic Growers School Harvest Conference that same weekend September 8-9. I’ve been to their Spring Conference several times, but never the Harvest Conference because it’s always the same weekend as the Heritage Harvest Festival.

Photo courtesy of Organic Broadcaster and MOSES

The July/August issue of Organic Broadcaster has been on my desk for a few weeks waiting for time to read it. This newspaper is free online, with a new issue every two months. It covers more aspects of Organic Farming than simply vegetable production. There are good articles about cover crops, including roller-crimping no-till rye. Also an article on weed control for market farmers by Bailey Webster, who interviewed farmers and researchers. Harriet Behar, the senior organic specialist at MOSES, write about the thorny issues of falsely labeled Organic foods: imported livestock feedstuffs, milk from cows with no pasture access and algal oil in Organic milk. Now that 68% of Americans bought organic foods of some kind (Pew), more Organic suppliers are needed to meet the demand (or else the unscrupulous rush in with false labels.) There are further articles about cash flow for farmers, winter bale grazing for cattle, the 2018 Farm Bill, and transferring the farm to new owners.

Now we are getting some rain from Cyclone 10, which might have become Tropical Storm Irma, but now looks less likely to qualify for a name. But, enough rain to want to stay indoors, so maybe I can read for a while.

 

Saving Tomato Seeds and the Tomatoes too

Roma paste tomatoes in mid-August, with stakes flagged for seed collection.
Photo Pam Dawling

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.

Roma tomatoes getting washed ready for seed extraction.
Photo Pam Dawling

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.

Roma tomatoes cut in half for seed extraction.
Photo Pam Dawling

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.

Roma tomatoes with the seeds removed, all ready for making sauce or salsa.
Photo Pam Dawling

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.

Roma tomato seeds just after extraction from the tomatoes.
Photo Pam Dawling

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.