Saving Seeds

 

As I mentioned last week, a post not long ago by Kevin over at An English Homestead, inspired me to save some seeds, especially tomato seeds. Last year was my first year of planting Amish paste tomatoes which are especially good for canning as they are very meaty and have quite excellent flavor. They also yield about twice as much canned tomato product since they don't have to be cooked down forever to remove all the water. I liked them so much, that I bought more seed that I planted this year. Buying seed only became an option two years ago with completion of our greenhouse build. Before that, we had to buy tomatoes with everyone else at the local plant nursery which didn't carry such exotics like Amish paste. Mostly they carried hybrids designed for slicing and eating on sandwiches and only if we were lucky, could we get a few poor looking roma tomatoes that everyone else had picked through. 

While buying seed is still an option and it isn't very expensive, Amish paste are open pollenating tomatoes which means their seed can be saved and so after reading Kevin's post on the subject, I read up on it myself and started my own seed saving project. Above I selected about six of the nicest most perfect Amish tomatoes I could find, cut them in half around the equator, and scooped the seeds and liquid pulp out of the pockets in each half of the tomato. I put them in a mason jar covered in plastic rap with a few slots cut in the top and set it in our dark pantry for three days. This is to allow the seeds to cure or mimic what nature does when a ripe tomato falls onto the ground and marinates as it rots. Doing this will supposedly increase germination rates and allow you to save them for up to five years.

That turned out to be a good fruit fly trap as well, note to self, so after three days, I drowned the collection of fruit flies in the liquid and then rinsed everything a few times. I would fill the far with cold water, let it set for a minute to let the good seeds sink to the bottom, and then pour off the top water/pulp/bad seeds. After a few times of doing this, I cleaned out the majority of the pulp and hopefully bad seeds.

I next put them in a small strainer and finished rinsing them and removing a few heavier pieces of pulp that hadn't floated to the top. I let them drain a bit in the strainer to let excess moisture drip off.

I them dumped them onto a piece of paper to dry. It is recommended not to use paper towels and based upon my experiences in the past, I agree. Seeds tend to stick to paper towels after drying and the towel will leave behind a residue on the seed coating. I read that by using a piece of paper, this will be prevented.