Hi John - I store mine in their paper packages in a canning jar in the fridge but anyplace cool and dry will do. Some use ziplock bags or plastic containers to hold the packets. You can even freeze them for long term storage if you wish.

For more info check out the Seed Saving Forum - that's where all the FAQs are. I linked the main one below for you. And a search using "saving tomato seeds" will pull up several discussions for you with lots of tips on seed saving if you are interested.

Dave

Here is a link that might be useful: How to Save Tomato Seeds

John,
If you are going to plant them next season, no special handling is required. Tomato seed are vialbe for many years. I would avoid extremes of temperature and high humidity. This year I got 6 out of 7 seeds to germinate that were 16 years old. They had been stored at room temperature. I soaked them overnight in tap water and they were fine. Do not store them in the freezer. You could store them in a jar in the refrigerator, but it's not necessary.
Jim

Sorry Dave,
I was typing as you were submitting. I don't store in the freezer as I feel it drys out the seed without special packging, IMHO. I know that USDA store at very low temps, but they have very special equipment and handling.
Jim

I store mine in the refrigerator in ziplocks. I've had very good luck in storing them this way.

Tom

I don't store in the freezer as I feel it drys out the seed without special packging, IMHO. I know that USDA store at very low temps, but they have very special equipment and handling.

****

Seeds stored for LONG term in freezing conditions need to have the moisture level taken down to about 8% which can easily be done with silica gel. Moisture plus seeds leads to ice crystals and seed death.

And yes, both the USDA and SSE store seeds long term in freezing conditions. The USDA uses minus 20 and minus 90 freezers and SSE uses fridge freezers and also I believe they might now have a minus 20/

I can't really see the sense of storing seeds in a freezer, or for that matter in the fridge unless the goal is long term storage.

I have a huge colelction of seeds and store them in screw cap vials and some in just plain envelopes at ambient temp and humidity in my home.

There are those here who know that I've distributed seed that was from 8-10 years old and for some of them germination was low, but with a few tricks one can wake up old seeds to increase the germination rate.

If seeds are less than 5 yo I sow normally. From 5 to maybe 12 yo I might double sow. Beyond that I use tricks. LOL

my best personal record was waking up seeds sent to me that were known to be 22 yo.

The known documented record is viable seeds at 50 yo which were found when the precursor of the USDA at Cheyenne WY, was moved to Ames, IA and germination tests were done on all the accessions.

Carolyn

Thank you all for replying to my post. I appreciate your suggestions, and I will read the FAQ on storing seeds (I really did try to find it before posting my question). Hopefully, I'll have some nice tomato pics (and a ribbon or two from our county fair) to post next season from all the good advice I've received here.
Regards,
John

All I know is that I wish I knew how the University of Missouri at Columbia stores their tomato seeds ... because I got some from a batch of 1964-grown Mozark last year and got 70% germination!

I store my seeds in paper coin envelopes packed inside of plastic 3 x 5 card file boxes, with a few silica gel caps, in a room that runs about 70*F 24/7 year around and hope for the best.

I found this interesting:
Bill P.

Back to Story - Help
Arctic vault takes shape for world food crops By John Acher
Thu Sep 20, 2:36 AM ET

In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world's crop seeds in case of disaster.

Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom.

It is the brainchild of a soft-spoken academic from Tennessee who is passionate about securing food for the masses, and will back up seed stores around the world that are vulnerable to loss through war or disaster.

A 20-metre (66-foot) long concrete entrance, still under scaffolding, juts out of the snow-dusted mountain above the coal-mining town of Longyearbyen.

It is reached by a switchback road rising to 120 meters above sea level, offering spectacular views of the fjord below and snow-capped Arctic mountains beyond.

Visitors descend through the mouth of a gently sloping 40-metre steel tube into the frosty cavern which smells of new cement and is dotted with portable lamps as work progresses for February's opening.

"There aren't going to be any better storage conditions than what we will provide here," founder Cary Fowler told reporters during a recent visit to the site in the Svalbard archipelago off northern Norway. "This is a safety deposit box, like in a bank, where you put your valuables."

Although this is one of the world's most northerly settlements, an electric freezer will be used to keep the seeds in the three-chambered concrete-lined vault at minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit).

If the power fails, permafrost will still keep them frozen, but not as deeply.

The project is at the heart of an effort by Fowler's foundation, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, to safeguard strains of 21 essential crops, such as wheat, barley and rice.

Rice alone exists in about 120,000 different varieties.

Ultimately, it is part of the world battle against hunger, as crop insecurity mainly hurts poor nations.

"Crops important to the poorest of the poor have really been neglected," said Roy Steiner, an official at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has provided financial support.

"Millet and crops like cow pea receive so little attention."

Fowler calls such varieties "orphan crops" because they have no one to take care of them.

DIVERSITY FOR EVOLUTION

The aim is to preserve genetic diversity, needed by plant breeders in the future to produce varieties able to adapt to challenges like climate change.

Crops consist of numerous species, some as different from each other as a "Dachshund from a Great Dane," Fowler said.

If such a store had existed 10 years ago, he said, the seeds would have been needed about once a year as seed collections have been wiped out -- for instance by a typhoon in the Philippines and war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I'm sorry to say we will be using it a lot," Fowler said.

Eventually, the vault will have capacity for around 4.5 million bar-coded seed samples and it hopes in its first year to collect half a million.

Not all seeds can be stored by freezing. Banana, the world's fourth or fifth most valuable crop, is one example.

"The longest viability under these conditions would be that of sorghum -- about 19,500 years," Fowler said. Other varieties will need to be replaced more frequently.

"We're trying to capture the diversity not just between different species but within different species -- that's the basis for evolution," said Fowler, an official of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization but his own boss at the Trust.

"Extinction happens when a species loses the ability to evolve."

SEED PACKETS

Norway is contributing some 50 million crowns ($8.6 million) to build the cavern, a sum which Development Aid Minister Erik Solheim said was a pittance for what is gained.

"I consider it a development issue ... Poor African countries have fewer resources to protect their genetic heritage than rich countries," he told Reuters at the site.

The Gates Foundation, the philanthropic giant created by the founder of Microsoft, has given a $30 million grant to Fowler's effort, including money for packaging seeds in their countries of origin and shipping them to the vault.

Some of Gates' money has gone to develop a new style of seed packet, a small silver-colored pouch made of a special foil and layers of other advanced materials to keep seeds dry and frozen -- the "Rolls Royce of seed packets," Fowler said.

The Gates Foundation is also helping develop two software systems, one to help manage seed banks and another to link them globally so that plant breeders can find what is available.

"Seeds are almost the software of the natural world that has taken millions of years to develop, and we don't know how we will need them in the future," the foundation's Steiner said.

Neat story Bill - thanks for sharing it.

Wonder if Gates would consider funding some of us long-time seed savers too? I have 4 kinds of cow peas I can contribute! :^)

Dave