Fermenting is not necessary but is a good way to get clean loose seed. I don't go through the hassle myself. I just squirt them on a paper towel/TP, spread them out and stick them on the frige to dry for a couple weeks. Then bag them towel/TP and all. When I get ready to use them (depending on how many saved or how many needed)I either tear the towel/TP and pot them individually or pour some water in the bag and blow it up them zip shut and lay them in a pan on top of my range and watch for sprouts. When most have sprouted pot them up. This is how my mother did it and how I've done it for years. My germination rates are very good from saved seed.

Here's a basic instruction sheet of how to do it.. Just click the link.

It's not hard to do.

Here is a link that might be useful: Fermenting tomato seeds.

i use the "Seed to Seed book to save tomato seed and it works well.

we have 5 and 6 generation seeds this year and they are doing just fine.

i put my seeds i a jsr of water until i get bubbles. that is about 2-3 days. then i rinse them well with a fine screen strainer and pat them dry with a paper towel. i them spread them out on a glass plant to dry. i live is a ver dry area and the seed will dry to less then 10% humidity at room temp. the seed tends to stick to gather so i rub them between my fingers to separate them every two days.

them i put them in baggies and in to the refrigerator.

oh yes i put a piece so duct tape on the plate and on the jar with the kint of seed it is and the date i started so i can keep me from getting confused. label the baggies too.

Dean

I wrote the FAQ that Planetes linked to, but I no longer advocate fermentation for saving tomato seeds. It takes days, draws flies, cups get knocked over, and the mold on top is disgusting. Nowadays, I prefer doing a sanitizing scrub that takes 35 minutes start to finish, but you do get a half hour break in there while the seeds soak in disinfecting powdered cleanser.

Here is a link that might be useful: Click on 'Lil Scrubber' to learn how easy this is.

Thanks, Trudi, much appreciated for both what you wrote in the one link and also letting us know you no longer advocate fermentation for saving seeds, with the newer link.

Vivian

Trudi's new method is clever. However, the old method is very easy and I've never had any trouble with it.

I just mix the tomato pulp with a small amount of water in a foam coffee cup which has been labeled with ball point pen. I loosely cover the cup to keep insects out. After three days I rinse the seeds in several changes of water and spread them on a paper plate which has been labeled with sharpie pen. After several days drying they are packaged.

Jim

I do the same thing that taz6122 does, except putting them in the fridge. I just spread them on a paper towel and let them dry about a week, pop the pt in a baggy and store.

Just a modest proposal as a general improvement to all the excellent methods outlined above: I always slice and eat the tomato first--pick out the seeds as I go and kinda group them over at the edge of the plate till I finish.

Salute!

Great! Thanks to everyone,

Vivian

There is no one way of processing tomato seed and thus no one way of doing fermentations.

Although I'm well aware of the methods that use Oxi-clean or Comet or bleach or acid or TSP or whatever, I continue to use fermentations as do my good friends who help with seed production for me.

I prefer using a method which is natural, which fermentation is, and there's also good data to show how effective it is in removing pathogens from the seed surface.

At another site I asked what data wwere available to show how effective oxi-clean and similar methods are in removing those surface pathogens and there were several really good experienced folks there and not ONE person could come up with any data at all.

Fermentation was initially said to do three things:

Remove seed coat surface pathogens; it removes most of them.

The fungal mat was supposed to have fungi that produced antibiotics that could kill bacteria; not all fungal mats have fungal genera and species that are antibiotic producers.

The acidic organic compounds formed during the fermentation were supposed to kill any viruses; Viruses are not very stable anyway outside of a natural host but most tomato viruses are found in the endosperm of the seed but I know of no data to show that those viruses can be inactivated by hot water treatment which is the only way that bacterial pathogens can, also in the endosperm, with also a loss of seed viability.

So for me using a natural method is best. And those who live in those areas where Fusarium and Verticillium and other major systemic diseases are present, which is not everywhere, might want to consider using fermantation where data has shown that most of them are removed whereas there's no data to show that for other methods. Although I will add that if one uses TSP to process seeds, which I don't suggest, TSP is known to kill TMV, which isn't a major problem these days.

And I think it's especially important if one is listing varieties in the SSE Yearbook or trading seeds, which I never do, for several reasons and with few exceptions.

Hope that helps.

Carolyn , who does know if several instances of seeds offered online that transmitted Fusarium to an area where it was not known and the same thing can happen if plants are purchased from an area where Fusarium is found and I know of a couple of circumstances where Fusarium has been introduced into soil by those infected purchased plants.

Carolyn, no one has provided you with data that chlorine bleach kills germs? No data on this exists? LOL.

We're not reinventing the wheel here. If chlorine bleach killing pathogens on surfaces in homes and hospitals, I'll take a good guess and say it works for killing the external pathogens on tomato seeds too.

35 minutes or three plus days. It's not really that hard a choice. Clorox isn't organic, so it's not a green method, but expediency and efficiency are way in its favor.

Lots of info about clorox and pathogesn at this link, and oh my, they do mentions tomatoes too.

Here is a link that might be useful: Managing Bacterial Pathogens

Yes Trudi I'm well aware that Clorox can be used to hopefully destroy some pathogens on the seed coat surface, but if you look at that link you'll see that all they're talking about for tomatoes are the bacterial pathogens Bacterial Speck and Bacterial Canker and the latter is not all that common.

For home saved seed most of my tomato friends will initially ferment seed and then right before sowing it use a bleach treatment, but seldom just a bleach treatment alone. But those are my long time tomato friends who may be more obsessive than most.

Continue reading and you'll see that hot water treatment is much preferred over bleach for those two pathogens but with loss of seed viability as I mentioned above since bacterial tomato pathogens to date have been found in the endosperm of the seed.

I don't think it's good to equate use of bleach in both homes and hospitals with Clorox being used to disinfect for several reasons. First, the kinds of pathogens found in both places are very very different and not all are susceptible to bleach disinfection. I guess I'll just mention that when I was still working I spent most of my career teaching med students about basic pathogens, humans and otherwise, b'c my specialty was infectious disease so I'm quite familiar with the area of disinfection.

No mention was made in that article about the systemic diseases of Fusarium and Verticillium and friends, other systemic diseases.

And no mention of the two most common diseases of tomato which are the fungal pathogens Early Blight ( A. solani) and Septoria Leaf Spot.

And NO data was given in the article on how effective ANY treatment was.

The data I've referred to was obtained by Dr. Helene Dillard when she was at the USDA/Cornell station in Geneva, NY when she had grants from both Heinz and Campbell to study the elimination of common tomato pathogens from the seed coat. I had the pleasure of talking with her a couple of times when she was still there and the point she made was that in her experience the pathogen burden was lessened but not eliminated but that since infection is quantitative that the lessened number of pathogens usually prevented seed borne transmission to plants.

Carolyn, who I think also mentioned above that data was sought as to the efficacy of oxiding agents such as Clorox, Oxi-Clean, Comet, etc., in reducing the pathogen burden on tomato seeds and the thread included several very experienced tomato persons and they came up with nothing in terms of actual data for tomato seed.So while Clorox and similar products are certainly useful and much easier to process seeds with, in my mind and the minds of some others the question remains.....how effective are they since there's no data available.

Are you saying you can post for help here but cant google search ?

Like larryw, I often eat the meat of the tomato and save the seeds. Consequently, the amount of tomato and water in each batch varies quite a bit, and not each batch ferments at the same rate. And I tend to save seeds in fits and starts, so I may have quite a few cups lined up on the shelf at a time.

I discovered a shortcut last year that saves time and confusion. I write the variety name and the processing date on a piece of paper and tape it to the fermenting cup. Then after washing the seeds and transferring them to the folded paper towel, I simply remove the paper label from the cup and stick it on the paper towel.