DH knows I can ask all of you experts while he's at work, so he wants to know if, and how, do we go ahead and save seeds from our wonderful heirloom tomatoes... any help? We will attempt to propigate in other ways, but just in case we mess those up, and have ZERO to work with, come the first of the year, he'd love to have some of our own seeds to rely on.
Neither of us have a CLUE how to treat seeds from the fruit we're still enjoying ! Is there a 'how to' anywhere for me ?? Any help appreciated.
Blessings, Pambi

Number one, from what I understand, you won't get true to species seeds unless you cover your blooms before the tomatoes set fruit because of the chance of cross-pollination by various insects. That's just something to consider. Anyway, saving seeds from tomatoes has never been an easy endeavor, imo, but you start out by letting your tomatoes stay on the vine until overly ripe. Think of it this way: in nature, the tomatoes would stay on the vine until they were ripe enough to fall. They would lay on the ground and decay slowly, eventually leaving the viable seeds in place to germinate. I believe I read somewhere that you basically scoop out the seeds of your ripe tomato and let them sit for a period of time (days if I'm not mistaken), then start rinsing them through a tea strainer or cheesecloth to clean. Separate them and place them on a clean paper towel to dry. When sufficiently dry, you can store them in paper envelopes. Sorry I don't have more specific details, but I never really got into saving tomato seeds because it's more trouble than it's worth when you can buy a pack of good heirloom seeds for 2-4 dollars.
If I can find the source I read on tomato seed saving, I'll link it for you.

This spring we had a lot of tomotes come up from seeds that were from tomaotes dropping onto the ground and rotting (last year) or from birds depositing the seeds. We kept a couple of them, not knowing their variety and they produced just as well as the other romas.

_________________
Sandi
Texas Certified Nursery Professional
Texas Master Naturalist
Organic gardener
Tree-Hugger
Native Texan

Saving your own tomato seeds is fun even if they aren't identical to the parent plant. There is an excellent book on seed saving that you should get if you want some great information on saving seeds that works. I have tried what this book recommends for tomatoes and it works great.

Check out:

Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners
by Suzanne Ashworth, Kent Whealy
# Paperback: 320 pages
# Publisher: Seed Savers Exchange; 2nd edition (March 1, 2002)
# ISBN: 1882424581

Try this link:
http://www.seedsavers.org/savingheirlooms.html

We bought this book ("Seed to Seed") last year, and used the techniques. It worked great.

Jim