Adaptation gardening advises against coddling plants - in the first few years, we throw as much adversity at them as we can and look for the lucky few that survive. Yet when it comes to saving seeds, our advice is exactly the opposite - clean the seeds, kill the bugs, store in dry conditions in the right containers at the proper temperature, etc., etc. But in natural conditions, seeds are exposed to all sorts of adversity, and some of them manage to grow into plants. Shouldn’t we avoid coddling seeds for the same reason we avoid coddling plants?
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Dr. White advised against washing seeds because, he says, mother plants pass on their endophytes to their progeny via the seed coat. This yields more resilient seedlings, he says.
In terms of insects, they can rapidly devour a large quantity of seed as the insects proliferate. I had just such an experience years ago. Then when the bugs finished eating all the seeds they went looking for more food, which meant that suddenly there were bugs all over the house. I learned of the infestation at the point when they dispersed in search of more food. It took months to get rid of all the bugs. They got into my dry goods as well. Rice, beans, lentils, they got it all. What a mess that was.
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I’ve been forgoing seed cleaning after taking Dr. White’s class, with no ill effects that I can see. The insect infestation sounds like a real mess, though!
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When you save tomato seeds, do you skip fermentation/rinsing and just let the seeds dry with their surrounding gel?
I love the idea of letting fruits/seeds fall to the ground to overwinter. Maybe planting for the next summer should be done in the fall to select for resilient seeds.
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Yes, I just let the tomato seeds dry with the gel for two years. This year I forgot, though, and went back to the fermentation method!
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Nature has a huge reserve and you don’t. At least reletively speaking. Even if they are in bad conditions, the ones that survive likely aren’t. They are at least a little lucky. Last year when I had lots of late blight infected fruits in tomatoes I buried something like 30-40 litres like I was sowing them, but in the autumn before our harsh z5 winter. About 30-40 eventually came up this year. Partially it might have been affected by dry spring and the infected fruits probably have spoiled quite badly affecting seed quality. Still it’s under 0.1% survival rate approximately which in nature is plenty. But how do you control “bad storage” enough that you wouldn’t just end up loosing all you have? Best might be autumn sowing if it can give some other advantage also and you have more seeds than you know what to do with. That’s definetely an interesting proposition. Right now those most often recommended for autumn sowing here are carrots and parsnips. Others aren’t autumn sown even if some do volunteer fairly frequently. Would be interesting to try once I have so many seeds that it’s more than just for back up/sharing.
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I’ve had good results letting wild arugula, lettuce, and broccoli rabe self-sow (i.e. letting a few plants go to seed each year in the garden beds). But I guess you’re right that if I bring seeds indoors, I could end up losing them all without proper storage.
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If corn is a grass, why can’t we get it to reseed like grass and outcompete even Bermuda grass. I’m all in for that. One reason i like growing flint corn is because i feel like it’s harder for animals and insects to bite into it. The other being all i gotta do is roast it for popcorn and corn nuts with minimal processing and it’s delicious.
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It would be interesting to see what kind of increased survival rate you might see if you planted that next generation the same way.
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I’m moving away from carefully cleaning seeds (except where GTS guidelines require it; I want to share my cucumber seeds with GTS, and they want them to be fermented, so I’m fermenting them). I’m cleaning things just enough to remove the bulk of the chaff so that they are easier to store.
But I think drying/freezing seeds is different. Most of our crops have been bred to have little dormancy; we depend on their readiness to sprout as soon as conditions are right. That means they need to be kept dry. (Also, being wet outside under two feet of snow and being wet inside in a jar in a pantry are two very different things.)
Freezing for a few days will kill insects that would otherwise create problems, as others have said. Given that we want our crops to retain their edibility, it would seem difficult in some cases to breed plants that produced seeds that insects wouldn’t eat. And again, a seed outside under two feet of snow won’t face the kind of insect pressures that it would face in a jar inside.
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Yes, but I don’t think I have the opportunity to do it this year. Not many of those plants are making more than a few fruits and LB is affecting them quite a bit. If I can just get some seeds, I’m saving them normally and maybe there is some difference in general vigour. I’m doing a bit similar experiment however by chucking all the fruits (from all other crosses also) that get spoiled to end of the plot space which have not been rented in years, but is tilled every year. At the moment it’s weeds waist to chest high, but during spring there is a change for tomatoes (and tomatillos that get the same treatment) to try to outcompete them and possibly establish a some sort of a population. Tomatillos at least seem hard to kill.
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I’m letting tomato seeds drop to the ground and overwinter. In zone 6a that works for me. I feel that the resulting “volunteers” are better adapted and can establish their root systems earlier and more securely.
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When I go home next month (and possibly this month), I plan to start seeding for the spring. I’d really like the ground and the environment to self-select plants that want to grow there rather than us struggling to start numerous varieties of plants. It’s a bit harder in z5, but I’d like it if I could start pushing plants to manage their own spring emergence.
Some tomatoes and most brassicas will be in this group, with a lot of my herbal/medicinal garden plants getting sown early as well. I imagine if the plant would normally drop seeds from its flowers in the fall, then why shouldn’t I mimic that? The fruiting plants are slightly different, but I can’t find out who’s willing to grow if we don’t test them. 
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