tomato seed saving question

I keep coming across the comment on tomato seed saving that seeds should be extracted for fermentation from only 'fully ripened' tomatoes. Each time I see that comment questions start bouncing through my head...Why not seeds from tomatoes which were picked green and allowed to ripen indoors: or what is wrong with using seed from an over ripe tomato which may have fallen on the ground? Ripe is ripe...yes...no???

Seeds in totally unripe immature tomatoes are not yet mature so no sense saving them. If a greenie has a blush on it already then you can use those if you don't have ripe ones from a plant. And of course if you have some fruits with a blush on them and ripen them up inside that also will work. No need to put them in bags, or whatever, which is just the same as the artificial gassing with ethylene that our winter tomatoes are subjected to, the ones sold in the stores.

Ones that fall to the ground as ripe are also OK to extract seeds from as well as rotten ones as long as they didn't have internal BER.

I think most of us want to save seeds from the best ones off plants and in orfer to preserve the biological diversity of a variety fruits of all sizes off one plant should be used, off two plants is even better, well you get my drift here.

I know of only one person, Tom Wagner, who says he saves seeds from totally unripe fruits but he does so with just one fruit from a breeding line and also uses TSP ( tri-soldium phosphate), which is very caustic.

Carolyn

TYVM Carolyn

I know this is a little off the topic, but recently I read your comments on fermentation of tomato seeds, Carolyn. I'm not sure if it was on a forum here at Daves. You said something to the effect that pathogens are carried on the endosperm of the seed. Am I correct in that, because I have been unable to find the post to quote it directly. If that is correct, then fermentation would not elimate those pathogens, right.? What does that mean for us home gardeners saving our own seeds in terms of diseases?

Nancy, when the topic of fermentation or oxidative methods has come up I've usually talked about what can and can't be removed by seed processing and have done so here and several other places.

The endosperm is inside the seed and is the energy source for the seed after the seed germinates until the cotyledons are formed, which are not true leaves. Then when true leaves are formed then energy is made by photosynthesis.

What I have said is that most, and I have to say most b'c I can't say all, bacterial and viral tomato pathogens have been found INSIDE the endosperm of the seed, which is INSIDE the seed, so they can't be removed by the most common seed processing methods which can remove some pathogens from the seed coat..

The bacterial pathogens inside the seed can be lessened by hot water treatment but that's accompanied by loss of seed viabiity as well. When you look at certain seed catalogs you'll see that hot water treated seeds are available, and those mostly for commercial growers. It's not a method to be used at home and I've never seen any home gardener who has either purchased such treated seed, which is very expensive, nor attempted to do hot water treatment themselves.

Where you are the two most common bacterial diseases would be the two that are foliage diseases and those would be Bacterial Speck and Bacterial Spot.

Carolyn

Thanks you for that explanation. I guess I can conclude then, that most seed I save or purchase already has some disease prepackaged within the seed. If I recall, bacterial speck and spot are also carried to plants via rain and splashback from soil. Sounds like there are out to get us, eh.

Nancy, of the four major foliage diseases Early Blight and Septoria Leaf Spot are far and away the most prevalent. I'm sure you would have known if your plants had Bacterial Speck or Spot b'c the lesions on the leaf surface are completely different than those for the two fungal ones.

Carolyn

Nancy, for what it's worth I had some similar problems last year with my sprawled tomato plants and Carolyn recommended mulching with straw. I was too late to get more than one bale of alfalfa straw so I didn't manage to mulch all of my tomato plants this year, but I can tell you there is a remarkable difference in the tomatoes which were mulched. I have oredered six bales for next season which I will pick up shortly to make certain I have enough for all my sprawled plants.

One more question regarding the tomato diseases, both viral and bacterial, that can be inside the endosperm, just so I can get this straight. Do most seed have diseases in them? Just say I purchased or saved seed with these prepackaged diseases inside. Will my tomato plants then develop these diseases?

One more question regarding the tomato diseases, both viral and bacterial, that can be inside the endosperm, just so I can get this straight. Do most seed have diseases in them? Just say I purchased or saved seed with these prepackaged diseases inside. Will my tomato plants then develop these diseases?

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Nancy, you live in MI and other than CMV from time to to time I can't thnk of any other virus diseases you have there.

And other than the typical four foliage diseases, two fungal and two bacterial, that I've mentioned before, You don't have that many systemic diseases either.

No, most seeds do not have the actual pathogens inside them but I can't give you a link on that.

And I have no way of knowing, no one does, if purchased seeds have bacteria in the endosperm although it would be more common if purchasing organic seeds I would think.

I don't think there's ONE person who hasn't saved seed from fruits that came from diseased plants. And as you know, I always ask for feedback from any seeds I offer and have in seed offers for about 20 years now.

But the question is WHICH diseases. Fusarium, for insteance, is a huge problem for folks and is well known to be seedborne, so if the seeds are not processed by fermentation or oxidative or acid means Fusarium can still be on the seed coat.

Finally, I've also said that infection is quantitative, and that means how many pathogenic agents ( disease microbes) are on the outer seed coat need to be present on the upper leaf surafce to initiate infection. No data, but the lower the number, the less likely is infection.

Carolyn

I saw a video on cleaning & fermenting large numbers of tomato seeds for commerical sale. I think it was from Johnnies Seeds.

They add some yeast and sugar to the slurry of seeds plus "juice", before fermenting.
It sounded as if they only needed to ferment it for one day or so, with yeast, instead of 3-5 days.

Is there any advantage to fermenting tomato seeds with yeast and sugar, besides speeding up the process? And do you think it really does speed things up?

I'm not in any hurry, but if it reduces the smell or produces cleaner or more disease-free seeds, I would try it.

Corey

"I'm not in any hurry, but if it reduces the smell or produces cleaner or more disease-free seeds, I would try it."
--------------------------------

That's something I've never thought of, but now I think I'll start adding a pinch of brewer's yeast and a pinch of sugar to my tomato-seed fermentations. Good idea!

I'm a homebrewer, and in brewing there's no such thing as being able to completely sterilize equipment and unfermented beer. The best you can do is sanitize, which means there's a little wild yeast and bacteria present everywhere and in everything. In brewing, you introduce brewer's yeast so it will be able to ferment the nutrients into alcohol and CO2 first - keeping any unwanted products of wild yeast and bacteria below the flavor threshold.

Doing that should be beneficial in tomato-seed fermentations also. As it is, those fermentations are done by whatever micro-organisms happen to be present or drop out of the air, and some of the bacteria might be disease pathogens. At the very least, bacterial fermentations smell bad - and there's no need to put up with that. I think introducing a little yeast and sugar should speed up the process and make it a lot cleaner - and it might tend to make seeds more disease-free also.

I can't see adding sugar and yeast would make things go faster, nor make less smell either, although that would be just fine if it were true.

Johnny's is processing huge numbers of tomatoes at a time and I can see hurrying up fermentations to be advantageous for them.

But you can do the same thing by filtering off the juices from a previous fermentation and adding that to the fermentation instead of discarding those juices.

The smell is from mainly the organic compounds that are formed as part of that fermentation and sugar, glucose, is already in there b'c it's part of the components of the fruit itself that become available when you squeeze out the innards of the fruits.

But why not try two fermentations with the SAME number of fruits of the SAME variety in two containers, well three if you want to use another control by just adding the juices of a spent fermentation and see how that goes.

Right now I actually have one fermentation going, from the smushed fruits that Ted sent me for that presumed pink currant, and there's only a thin layer of white on it, but then that happens with lots of varieties that have different pH's which also determines which fungi and bacteria can grow atop the fermentation.

Or maybe my home right now doesn't have many fungi and bacteria flying around in it, but I doubt that highly. LOL

And what the heck, there could be a positive spinoff if the drained juices from the one you added sugar and yeast to go a bit further towards beer or wine. LOL

But there are different kinds of fermentations, as to end products, and yeasts produce primarily alcoholic end products whereas natural fermentations produce both acidic and alcoholic end products. Yeah, I taught all that stuff when my brain was still 110% working. I think I want more acidic end products to destroy and rip off those gel capsules. ( smile)

Carolyn, where it's a winter wonderland out there right now from the snow that fell yesterday and last night, maybe 3 inches or so, but now we're in for it again tomorrow with where I live being on the cusp of 3-6 and 6-12 inches, Sigh,

"But there are different kinds of fermentations, as to end products, and yeasts produce primarily alcoholic end products whereas natural fermentations produce both acidic and alcoholic end products. Yeah, I taught all that stuff when my brain was still 110% working. I think I want more acidic end products to destroy and rip off those gel capsules. ( smile)"
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That makes sense. Brewing yeast would produce a "clean" fermentation, simply changing glucose into equal amounts by weight of CO2 gas and ethyl alcohol. Some of the most common bacteria would acidify the solution, though, with lactobacillus producing lactic acid and acetobacter making acetic acid (both of those guys can be a problem in brewing).

I have no idea what compounds are produced by other bacteria that make tomatoes "rot", but from the smell, I bet sulfur is involved. Like always, nature probably has this figured out a lot better than we do - and the micro-organisms that appear naturally in our broth of squished tomatoes are exactly the right ones to do the job best!

It's too late this year, but next year I'll add a pinch of brewing yeast to some of my tomato-seed fermentations just to see if it makes a difference.

Ozark, how kind of you to say that I made sense. LOL

A wee anecdote.

When I was in college I was a Microbioloy major and one of things I did was to get raw apple juice from the Ag co cop store, hoping to make cider or something more powerful. I had access to wine yeats b'c Cornell maintained those for several wineries in the Fingers Lake region.

It was illegal to do stuff like that in the place I was living, so I carefully set up the first gallon jug, stoppered the top with a small hose coming out of that that went to a large test tube filled with water to keep the fermentation oxygen free.

And I hid it in a closet.

So when I went too look at it somehow the hose had come unattached and there was a lovely mat of acetobacter, your arch enemy.

I snuck the jug outside at night and poured it on the lawn, not thinking of the consequences and not wanting to be caught by the Housemother.

For two straight years NO grass grew in that area and others who lived there thought some huge dog had peed on the lawn. LOL

Carolyn

I don't know which is funnier: your apple-jack-in-a-closet, or that they "thought some huge dog had peed on the lawn"! Science leads us down strange pathways.

I tried to brew root beer with natural carbonation, but the bottles exploded. Fortunately I had allowed for that possibility to the extent of letting them brew inside a steel trashcan on the roof of the dorm. But I loosened the caps on the rest of the jugs RATHER carefully - like disarming unexploded bombs.

>> But why not try two fermentations with the SAME number of fruits of the SAME variety in two containers, well three if you want to use another control by just adding the juices of a spent fermentation and see how that goes.

It's hard to beat the scientific method, althoguh I was hoping to use the scholar's method: find someone else who already DID the work, and then use THEIR observations. (Always remembering that quoting 3 people is "research", but qouting one person is "plagiarism".)

The point is well taken that acids might 'clean' the seeds of inhiniting gel and bacteria better than alcohol (considering that the alcohol is never going to rise above a few percent or 5-10% in "tomato wine". And that seed gel might very well require exo-enzymes from this, that or the other organism.

I was also wondering about rinsing away as much of the "juice" as possible, before fermenting, to have a cleaner or less smelly process. But here again, "experimentation" would provide the answer.

To do an informative test, I would have to find a way to measure residual tomato pathogens on the seeds (not just generic microorganisms). That, I have no idea how to approach. Maybe just measure how many TOTAL microbes remain, that will grow in some kind of broth, and guess that that refelts approximately how many tomato pathogens remain.

Proably first figure out a fast assay for "how much gel remains". Look and touch?

If I figured that out, I would test a variety of things:.

- rinse away juices before fermenting
- adding selected innoculum from previous fermentations
- adding brewer's yeast
- adding baker's yeast
- adding different amounts of sugar

Instead of fermenting, or as a follow-up to some faster or modified fermentation:
- rinse then soak in vinegar
- rinse then soak in lactic acid
- rinse then soak in alcohol
- rinse then soak in 0.2% hydrogen peroxide
- rinse then soak in dilute Clorox
- rinse then soak in combinations of the above
- rinse then hot-wash

Of course, some of these would reduce seed vitality, and that would have to be measured also.

This reasearch plan probably adds up to more effort than thousands of traditional fermentations would.
PERHAPS a big waste of time!

BTW: I noticed that some seeds I bought from The Seed Kingdom tended to stick together into clumps of 2-3 seeds, making them harder to count and sow singly. The Hazzards seeds I bought had much less tendency to clump. I'm guesing this reflects the post-ferment rinsing.

Corey

Holy Moly! Someone HAS gone down this path before.
They were even more brutal than I thought of being.

From Morgan in "South East Texas Tomato Festival":

He mentioned that traditional fermentation can be too smelly to do indoors, and it might be too hot outdoors. Also, if you have to be away from home for a week, it may be convenient to be able to squeeze and clean your seeds in a few hours rather than a few days.

He uses a 30-40-minute soak in "Oxyclean", and knows someone else who uses
the chemical cleaner Tri-Sodium Phosphate!

http://www.settfest.com/2009/01/saving-seeds/

Squeeze the juice and seeds into a measuring cup. Add water to make 1 cup.

Add 1 tablespoon of Oxiclean washing powder to each cup of tomato seeds / pulp / water

After 30-45 minutes, stir, then pour seeds through a fine mesh strainer.

Rinse off seeds until they no longer feel “slippery”. Dry the bottom of the strainer.

Turn the strainer upside down and whack it onto a non-coated paper plate to transfer the seeds to the plate.
Spread the seeds around so they are not all clumped together.
Dry for a week or more, then store.

Yikes!

Corey

Wow!

Rick, thanks for that link- it looks like the perfect way to save seeds. I have bookmarked it for later reading.

Well, assuming that he and the person who replied are right, and it doesn't kill the seeds outright!

I was afraid that dilute Clorox would be too brutal, and I'm guessing that Oxyclean is even stronger ... but I realize that I don;t know either of those assumtpions to be true.

Personally, I would start using it more dilutely, and also test somewhat stronger solutions until I found the lethal dose, then use no more than 1/4 or 1/8 of the lethal dose.

And maybe use something much more gentle for 45 minutes to get the gel off,
then a shorter and more-dilute treatment with hydrogen peroxide, bleach, or Oxyclean to kill germs and remove remaining inhibitors.

I'm a sissy!

Corey

The major problem I have with the Oxi-clean method is that there is NO data to indicate what is removed from the seed coat, and don't think that several folks haven't scoured Google looking for data, b'c they have.

Some follow up with Clorox, but I've never seen any good data on that either,

So at this point I prefer to use the natural fermentation method where data does exist as published primarily by Dr. Helene Dillard of Cornell with the work she did for either Heiz or Campbells, I can't remember which.

And I've tried to find those papers online but can't. What I did do was to have several chats with her on the phone when she was still at the USDA station in Geneva, NY..

And yes, I know Morgan very well, even after he'd grown just a few tomato plants and became hooked and I wonder if he's really that eager to return from Copenhagen b'c I know he does like it there but it's lousy tomato growing there as well. ( smile)

Carolyn

Ditto. I haven't heard or seen posts from Morgan in years, but he sure seemed to like experimenting! (As I do, to a point.)

"He mentioned that traditional fermentation can be too smelly to do indoors, and it might be too hot outdoors."

I fermented all my tomato seeds indoors this year and there was no overwhelming smell because I use glass jars and am able to cover them either with Saran wrap, foil, or even plastic grocery bags held tight with a rubber band. Last year, as in all past years, I fermented outside but our temps were many weeks at 100+ degrees and some seeds sure did cook; poor germination was the end result of that. (Sorry again, Carolyn.)

I'm "mr. natural", too. I think Ma Nature has a better grasp on things in many areas than us silly humans do so I'm staying with what I know, in this instance anyway. Clorox, TSP, etc...I'm such a miser I won't go out and buy a product when I have the natural product/ingredient to do the job at hand! *grin

Corey, your exploding root beer happened to me with real beer. I wished I'd had your foresight to use a metal trashcan as containment! :>)

Shoe

I'm always impressed that yeast plus sealed container equals explosion.

The 30-minute chemical approach for stripping the gel is interesting but I don't think I'll try it.
The idea of a dilute Clorox rinse afterwards, or perioxide, is more appealing, but in the absence of proof, it's just an idea that "sounds good".

The idea of getting past the funky stage faster IS appealing, but why should bakers' or brewers' yeast be the best way? Carolyn's idea of staging an active culture from one batch of tomatoes to another, maybe while in the rapid growth phase, sounds better than generic yeast. Whatever multiplied fastest in last weeks "juice and gel" ought to be best at dissolving that juice and gel.

I wonder whether the "juice" part is the same material as the gel layer that's right on top of the seeds, containing the inhibitory compounds and any pathogen populations we are hoping to reduce? "Re-innoculating" a culture from batch to batch might be less beneficial if it only selected for digesting the bulk juice, not the gel that we really want to remove.

(In this case, the "selection" might actually be more like the activation of certaqin sets of enzymes - I assume enzymes that are exported into the juice. Or literally selecting individuals with genes for digesting "tomato gel".)

I'm so small-scale, it would be more like "ferment one tomato or one variety a few days before the next one". In other words, doing a few varieties over an even longer time than just the 3-5 days that each batch will take.

However, that way, I would have to be sure to have a few hours free every 3-4 days to harvest, clean, squeeze, and prepare clean jars.

The idea of "soak one day with yeast and done" is appealing the same way "fast food" is appealing: easier, but maybe not the best results.

Corey

I believe I will stick with the simplistic method of just allowing the seeds to ferment naturally in a jar on top of my refrigerator. I stir the jars three or four times a day, and I haven't noticed any unplesant odors from the fermentation process. I like the strainer idea for removing excess water after flushing the jars thoroughly at the end of the process. However, I place the strainer on a paper towel for a few minutes before tapping the seeds onto a plate. After a few days the seeds are then ready to be separated. All my seeds clump together to some degree since I don't take a great deal of time initially to separate them. When dried I sit in my TV chair, watch a game or movie, and carefully start separating the seeds before placing them in a refrigerator crisper in a marked envelope.

Is there anything wrong with the clumping of seeds during the drying process? I can see where there might be damage to some of the seeds in the separation process, but wouldn't they be eliminated in the soaking process prior to planting next season?

>> Is there anything wrong with the clumping of seeds during the drying process?

I thought they would dry faster if spread out thinly, and I like to count them for trading. Maybe it is just cosmetic.

>> I stir the jars three or four times a day, and I haven't noticed any unplesant odors

Maybe that keeps it more aerobic. Do you see "the mat" developing?

Corey

I use a glass about the size of a "rocks" glass, mark it with a permanent marker (not "permanent" on glass; wipes off nicely), and cover the top with a paper towel folded in quarters and secured with a rubber band.

My preferred location is also the top of the refrigerator, and I've never noticed an odor problem, although it can be fairly intense if I put my nose close to the top and sniff.

After rinsing, I pour everything through a coffee filter held in my kitchen strainer, then lay that on a marked paper plate to dry.

When I dry any kind of wet seeds, I try to blot them if practical before putting onto the coffee filter.

Then I put the filter on top of a very dry towel, or paper toweling, or a section of newspaper. Any of those wick away water, cutting time off the air-drying period.

BTW, newspaper is a cheap way to measdure humidity.
Newsprint is "crackly" when truly dry.
Semi-stiff but not noisy when crumpled means moderately humid: NOT ready for storage.
If it is at all limp, it's very humid and practically soggy for seed-saving purposes.

When I have a sealble tub of seeds that I don't plan to open frequently, I add a Kraft-paper coin envelope with a tablespoon of silica gel to keep them dry even if the air in my house is humid.

Humidity-measuring cards are (20 or 40 cents each from Drierite, or ULINE sells 200 for $35. )

www.drierite.com
https://secure.drierite.com/catalog3/page15b.cfm
http://www.uline.com/BL_1002/Humidity-Indicator

Morgan, when you pour your seeds from the jar into the strainer...if you run it (the seeds/strainer) under the tap, as if rinsing the seeds, it will separate the seeds in a wide pattern. Then when you flip the strainer over and onto your paper plate they won't be clumped up, drying much faster as well as making it so you don't have to 'un-clump' them. And if a few are clumped I just roll them in my fingers, seeing no damage at all.

"before placing them in a refrigerator crisper in a marked envelope."

Remember, a crisper is designed to offer a bit of moisture to fresh vegetables so if you choose to store your seeds there they should be in an airtight jar or something, away from the humidity/dampness of the crisper environment.

Hope this helps.
Shoe (who just rinsed and "paper-plated" his last tomato saved seeds of the year)

mraider, fermentatiob is an anaerobic process so by stirring that much you're introoducing a lot of oxygen which then changes the nature of the end products.

Initially oxygen is used up and then the fungal/bacterial mat forms which keeps the contents relatively oxygen free.

It's the products of a true mixed anaerobic fermentation that have a smell to them, usually not the end products of too much oxygen.

And I agree that seeds should be spread out on a plate, I prefer true paper, not coated paper plates b/c the former absorb water and the latter don't. If you leave the wet seeds in a clump sometimes they'll germinate. Ja, has happened to me when I've been in a hurry and didn't take the time to spread out those wet seeds.

Carolyn, who also notes that true paper plates allow for any maggots to die ASAP rather than having water around that allows them to live. Ja, flies lay eggs, eggs morph to maggots; it can happen. LOL

I like getting a good sample of my seeds from beginning to mid season, not from a few tomatoes at one point in time. I also can't bring myself to waste a perfectly good tomato by blenderizing or rotting it for the sake of seed. To that end I take the very best tomatoes of the varieties grown that season, cut and squeeze the gel and seeds into a cup and then dump the mixture into one of those two ounce solo cups that come with take out. Since I cater there's a supply on hand but I also save cups and lids. I write the name and date on the lid with a Sharpie (fine) and seal it. The lids sometimes swell but have never popped. There is no smell and I can stack the cups. They are reusable. If you take a toothbrush and a tad of scouring powder the marker ink will easily come off the lid.

When the seeds are fermented I dump them into a bowl and add water, rinsing out floaters and junk. They then go into a sieve and get washed, using a spoon to move them around. I don't use my fingers to prevent seeds from accidentally sticking to me. Since I'm usually doing a number of varieties at this point I try to avoid handling. After the wash I use what no one does...good quality paper towels. If I dry extraneous water from the bottom of the sieve with a kitchen towel before dumping, then dump the seeds on one end of the paper towel and spread the seeds across the towel several times back and forth they do not stick. I like that I can label the towels on the underside and then when the seeds are moderately dry I can fold them up lightly, rubber band them and get them out of the way. The info is right there on the outside and the tomatoes can cure out on the breathable inside. They are easily removed with a butter knife or teaspoon but I generally run over the towel with a pastry scraper in one swoop.

I have been saving seed and growing tomatoes for many years. I have never used any extra fancy storage techniques. My seeds have always been saved in plastic craft bags, in the fridge and in an open container. I save a lot of other seed besides tomatoes including lots of pepper varieties that are supposedly more finicky. I have grown five year seed with no problem but am not trying to set a record here. I sometimes want fresh seed but am not interested in a major harvest of that variety so I grow a few varieties each year primarily for a fresh seed supply.

good advice all...I shall amend my ways...