Saving Tomato Seed for 2024

Last week Andrew saw the perfect Copia tomatoes in the field and instead of harvesting them to take to market we kept them for ourselves.

Well not exactly for ourselves as we didn’t eat them but instead are saving the seed from them to use next year.

This tomato variety is very special to us having been one we picked out with our dad in 2004 and then he saved the seed until 2008. We then took seed from then and grew it out last year and saved those seeds which we planted this year.

We are wanting to get more production on this variety and more uniform size as some of the plants produce very unusual shapes which are more challenging to cut when eating.

To save the seed we cut the tomatoes up and scoop out the insides into either a jar or jam so there is some liquid in addition to the seeds. We then cover the tops of the containers and set them in a warm place so that they ferment before separating the seed and drying it.

Saving seeds is not a requirement to do and it is not the most simple task but it has some benefits that we believe are very much worth it.

The seeds that we save more adapted to our farm, our soil and how we grow them than seeds we buy which may have been grown in a completely different climate. Hopefully the variety gets slightly more adjusted to our farm every year and is a strong plant and produces ‘better’ tomatoes.

We also saved seed from all of our cherry tomatoes that we have in our mixed baskets.

Almost all of our tomatoes are ones that we could save seeds from but we only save a few of them. There is time needed to carefully watch each variety to see the best plants and making sure to save tomatoes from those plants which we haven’t prioritized this year for all the varieties.

No other veggies are saved from seed on the farm currently because they are mostly more complex to save than tomatoes for us. Many of them have to go to flower and then dry down before the seed can be saved which we don’t let happen as we are mowing down veggies after we finish harvesting to either plant another veggie there or a cover crop.

Tomorrow we are planning on transplanting our first fall crops and we have a piece of equipment new to us that we are hoping will help us with it. The temperatues are still forecasted to hit triple digits but the plants are adjusted to it and it looks like it will be cooler in the following days.

The crops we are planning to transplant are lettuce, broccoli, broccolini, chard, kale and collards.

The last few weeks we haven’t had much eggplant to harvest with the hot weather not allowing the flowers to form fruit. It seems like there is a decent number of eggplants on the plants now that need to size up and hopefully the flowers are able to consistently turn into fruit going forward.