After listening to Matthew Gammett talking about his way of letting his potato fruits ripen in a box for months until they’re basically rotting until he processes the seeds, I wonder whether the same could be done for tomato seed. Matthew, and others like @julia.dakin that have grown his seed, report that his seed germinate very fast. Perhaps because the rotting leaches out germination inhibitors.
My primary reason for wanting to do the same thing to tomatoes is convenience. These days, I go picking ripe or almost-ripe fruit from interesting tomato plants. I’d like to not have to process a lot of small batches. So if I could just let them be and continue to ripen on their own to the point of rotting, until I have enough to process them all in one go, I’d be happy. And if that helps germination in the other end, so much better.
Anyone here that does something similar or have related ideas?
Generally tomatoes store couple weeks after ripening. I just collect enough and then make patch to ferment. Just mark the date and what is there with tape, changes are that you’ll forget what there is or when you have put them there. I have forgotten some to plastic bags and can tell from experience that you don’t want to save seeds once they are rotting. It’s nasty, complicated and some seeds might spoil. Fermenting the gel will get rid of all those germination inhibitors.
The nasty part I can attest to as well. My hands have been stinking for days the years I have processed rotting tomatoes. The convenience makes it worth it for me. Do you know for a fact that the seeds spoil from being left to rot like this? That would persuade me to not do it.
You can save seed from tomatoes at the fully-ripe eating stage–all you need to ferment is the juice and seeds. I just squeeze my tomatoes into a jar on the counter when I cut them up for serving, making sauce, etc. Then rubber-band a piece of cloth to the top of the jar and leave it a couple of days. It is ready when there is a layer of white mold on top. Leaving it longer just invites disease organisms. In summer temps, it should take only 3 or 4 days. Really rotting–to where the white mold turns to brown goo-- is not necessary and may even be detrimental.
What you want is for the juice to ferment and become acid enough to dissolve the gel sac around each seed. When that is accomplished, add water and stir, pour off any solids, rinse in a strainer and dry the seeds on a plate or coffee filter.
That’s how it’s done by small seed companies. There’s no need to waste the fruits or put up with lots of nasty goop. When I stopped fermenting whole fruit and started squeezing out the seeds, seed-saving became much easier, because it’s the skins that are so hard to remove from the seeds at the end. If you exclude the skins at the beginning of the process, it becomes fast, easy, and much more do-able.
Just make sure the fruits are fully ripe. The color should be at it’s most saturated and intense, and the fruit should have softened to the touch. If it has cracked before fully ripe, it probably won’t be edible when fully ripe, but if the skin is intact, you should be able to use the tomato. More than once I’ve saved seed from tomatoes as I cut them up for cooking down into sauce, often with germination rates exceeding 90%.
What is your process for fermenting seeds that isn’t the whole fruit?
I slice the fruit in half and squeeze into a jar. It only takes a while when I have heaps of tomatoes to do. But each batch is quick. And I can still eat the fruit or make sauce.
Some seeds have been weird colour so I can’t say how good they have been. Everything has been sown in patches so cant say about the viability of those seeds. I would still worry about loosing part or most of the most important seeds. If you postpone, you can’t never say when you have more time and I have noticed that it’s easy to just keep on postponing. There should be enough time to make patches of ferment once in 1-2 weeks and the subsequent cleaning (which only takes few minutes even with bigger patches). Also I think you have to consider how many seeds some tomatoes have. If you have beefstakes that can have under 10 seeds per fruit, it’s a lot easier to look for them from whole ripe fruits. If you miss óut that some have little seeds, then you would be favouring fruits with more seeds.
I take the seeds out of the tomato fruit and I ferment them in small amount of water for 3-4 days. Then I rinse them and dry. My tomato seeds mostly germinate in anywhere from 1 to 3 days, I discard all that do not germinate in 7 days. That selection helped a lot with germination speed. I prefer eat the fruit or use otherwise in the kitchen, rather than let it rot for a long time.
