Saving tomato seeds Part 2

Now that we have tomato seeds scooped out and left in a cup to ferment, we watch for the signs of actual fermenting. These will be cloudy water and foam or film on the top of the water with the seeds. This process takes anywhere from three days to a week, sometimes longer, depending on the temperature in your home. But when you see foam or film on the top of the water, the seeds are ready:

Now put the seeds into a strainer and rinse with cold water until there is no tomato particles and seeds are clean:

And spread the seeds on a coffee filter. I usually write the variety name on the filter because if I save many seeds of many varieties, things get mixed up pretty fast:

Set the coffee filter somewhere where it will not be disturbed and let dry for a week or two. You will know that the seeds are dry when they easily separate from the coffee filter and from each other. At this point you can store the seeds in the bottom of the refrigerator for the next planting season.

If you want to seed some tomatoes now, you do not have to wait until the seeds are dry. Just plant rinsed fermented seeds in a nursery container and you should be just fine.

Saving tomato seeds, save tomato seeds from a tomato

If you have some tomatoes in you garden that you want to save seeds from, or just want to have some seeds for planting, here's how we can harvest seeds from a tomato. Before we go into a step-by-step explanation, let's think about how a tomato propagates itself in nature.

A tomato falls on the ground where it rots and the seeds get into the soil, then they germinate. Not every vegetable need to rot in order to produce new seedlings, but for tomatoes it seems to be an important step. So in our seed saving venture we want to imitate nature.

Get some tomatoes. If you are just starting a garden and do not have your own tomatoes, as well as do not have any seeds, get some tomatoes from the store. To increase your chances for success, get a few tomatoes of different varieties. The problem with germinating store bought tomatoes might be with "terminator seeds" - seeds that were processed to disallow germination (not likely), or that tomatoes were picked very green and seeds had no chance to mature (more likely). In either event, trying a few of different varieties will increase your chances for success.

Cut tomatoes in half:

Using a pointed teaspoon start scooping the seeds into some bowl:

About that many seeds will be scooped from two tomatoes, I would estimate about fifty seeds:

Top the seeds with water, not tap (chlorinated) water, but some well water, or spring water from a bottle or a gallon or even distilled water. Chlorinated water will halt fermentation, so do not use your tap water. 

Now put that bowl on the window sill or simply on the counter. In a few days you will see foaming and film on top of the water covering the tomatoes. That's a good sign; that means your seeds are fermenting. Fermenting tomato seeds emulates nature's rotten tomato. Granted, I cannot attest that a non-fermented seed will not produce germination, but the consensus in a gardening community is that you want tomato seeds fermented. 

After you see the signs of fermenting, give it another couple of days, then rinse the seeds in the strainer and spread them on the coffee filter. Set aside to dry. For storage, the seeds need to be bone dry, which will take a week on average. If you want to plant the seeds, they do not need to be dry and can be planted right away.

What can we plant in July in Florida?

What can we plant in July? Surprisingly, a lot of things! July is one of the busiest months of the year for seeding future crops. We are now officially in a fall preparation mode. Florida has three, or in some sense four growing seasons, and fall is one of the most important ones. Most popular vegetables to grow in the fall are tomatoes, eggplant and peppers. But all these need six to eight weeks from seed to transplanting into the garden, which gets us here, in July, to start the seeds.

If you have never seeded a plant you might feel intimidated. But no fret, it is really very simple. Once you get a hang of it you will never resort to buying plants from the box store again. Plus, did I say seeds are cheap?

First, you need to get yourself some seeds and some "nursery" containers to plant them in. I use blue styrofoam containers that are leftover from the mushrooms you find in a grocery store. If you do not have these, you might look around your house to find something suitable: it has to be at least three inches deep and allow poking some drainage holes on the bottom. Probably glass and metal are not good candidates, but I have seeded plants in cardboard boxes before with no issues.

Poke some holes in the bottom of your container and fill it with soil. I use Miracle Gro potting mix and found it to be very good seeding matter. It is cheap, about nine dollars per two cubic feet bag, which is a lot of soil.

Here's a container filled with potting mix and holes on the bottom:

Next, you want to moisture your soil, even if it came from a fresh bag. Fill some container with water, I use a sink for that, and let the nursery container sit in the water, about half of it's size deep. The water will moisturize the container from the bottom eliminating the chances of having dry pockets that you would have if you watered from the top:

You will know that soil is moist when you see (and feel) the moisture on the top of the soil. It will change color (darken) and will be wet to the touch.

Now you need to make some "rows" where the seeds will be planted. I use a regular pen for that, but any blunt thin object will do. Just make some indentations in the soil about quarter an inch to half an inch deep. In my blue containers I usually make three rows. Put the seeds into the rows. Again, a container like that takes about twenty seeds, but the rule of thumb - the spacing between the seeds should be about a half an inch:

Now cover the seeds with the surrounding soil and you are done. Place the containers outdoors in a shade. A porch or lanai works best, but if you don't have these, just put them under a tree or a bush. Keep the soil moist and in about a week you should see the seedlings coming up. Tomatoes usually come up first; peppers and eggplant might take up to three weeks, so do not give up on them, keep them watered!

In addition to fall planting preparation we can still plant cowpeas, okra and sweet potatoes if you have slips ready.

Double-digging garden beds Part Two

Now that we have our first linear foot of the bed dug out, we should start filling it with organic matter. What constitutes an organic matter? If you have prepared compost, that would be ideal. I am one of these people who do not have ample compost at all times, so I have to improvise. Keep in mind that vegetation, dry or green, will decompose in the soil, so it does not have to be perfect compost that we put into the garden at all times. I have some "forest" on the property, so I go and rake up some fallen leaves, including oak and pine needles as some of my layers:

If you have something like that, put a six-inch layer of it into the dug hole. Then, cover with dirt. The rule of thumb for compost, which includes a compost pile or composting in place, is to mix roughly fifty-fifty proportion of dry and green matter. Fallen leaves will constitute dry matter. For a green matter the best things are grass clippings and kitchen waste. We eat a lot of vegetables in our family, so a 34 ounce coffee can fills up every two or three days. This is perfect green matter for a compost:

Again, just layer this green stuff on the top of the other sprinkled layer and cover with dirt:

The idea behind the double-dug beds is to loosen the soil and enrich it at the same time. There are no hard rules on how to do that. I know an old man in Cape Coral who only layers his new beds with dry and green palmetto leaves, and he grows some awesome produce, in fact he grows for the market as well. Work with what you have and have at least three layers of vegetable matter per the height of the bed.

Too many tomatoes, how to plan tomato harvest

I always overplant, meaning I plant too much of some things that we cannot possibly eat in the amounts harvested, especially tomatoes. When planning a garden, you should not only think of what you want to plant, but also how to take care of these plants as well as what are you going to do with the harvest. Granted, it is difficult to predict if the yield will be substantial or dismal, because it depends on a number of things, such as weather, plant diseases, insect attacks and purely your own time devoted to the garden. Sometimes you end up with too much of a good thing:

These grape tomatoes from Sam's club bought tomatoes that I saved seeds from grew like crazy and the yields were absolutely insane:



When you have that much of a crop coming up all at the same time it might be too much of a good thing if you are unprepared. So, how do we plan for the future harvest in a manner that a certain crop does not overwhelm us, but at the same time providing for a variety of vegetables in a garden?

I imagine, the first thing to think about would be what is it your family likes to eat and in what quantities. If you are buying two pounds of tomatoes per week in the store, then you know that you need that much from the garden. An average tomato plant yields about  four to five pounds of tomatoes, total. That means if you plant one tomato plant you can expect to harvest four to five pounds of tomatoes. Usually, indeterminate varieties will fruit over time, for approximately a month or two in length, but not all at once. So, if you expect to harvest a quarter pound per week per tomato, then you need eight plants to provide you with two pounds per week. This is not an exact science, of course. For comparison, I normally have a hundred tomato plants of various types in the garden per season. You can see now where I run into trouble ... :)

Take a look at this book if you do not already have it. In Vegetable Gardening in Florida James Stephens lists yields for all commonly grown vegetables in Florida, so you could calculate how many seeds or plants you need to put into the ground to sufficiently provide your family with vegetables, as well as not being overrun by them:

How to harvest amaranth

The time has passed and amaranth tassels have grown large and bountiful, and started to show some signs of ripening. Ripened amaranth seeds would be seen on the tassells as minuscule whitish seeds, as well as the tassells themselveses would start to yellow and a bit dry:

Now simply break the tassles off the plant and collect them in some large container. Ideally, you would hang them in a dry place, like a garage, over some clean sheets of plastic to let the seeds fall on the plastic. I do not have such luxury as the garage is full of other "necessary" things, so I simply put my amaranth into a garden wheelbarrow. They will dry in there just fine because the wheelbarrow sits in the lanai, so it is out of the rain.

Now, we have to clean the tassles off the remaining leaves and stems and fluff it up every day to allow drying thoroughly and evenly. The process of drying will take approximately three weeks, or when most of the seeds fall of the stems.

Let's grow some peanuts

I always wanted to try growing some peanuts, even ordered the seeds a couple of years ago, but never got around to it. Recently I bought a bag of peanuts in the store and decided to try some out. For the peanuts to be "germinatable" they need to be raw, not roasted or processed in any way. Here's some raw peanuts from the bag, shelled:

I got some sixteen ounce Styrofoam cups, filled them with moistened potting mix to about two-thirds and placed peanuts on top:

Then covered with soil and watered:

Now I have to wait a week, maybe a couple of weeks for the peanuts to come up, while keeping the soil moist of course. Really, that's all to it.

When it comes to seeding, I do not obsess with it. Trust me, I used to, but not anymore. Nature will take care of it's children, and the children, aka seeds, are very resilient. I have volunteers in my garden all over the place. Whenever you leave a fruit on the ground, like a tomato or some Marigold heads, or radish pods, or been pods, etc. - they will seed themselves, it is inevitable. The only thing to pay attention to when it comes to seeding, is seeding in season and in conditions close to those of natural growing conditions.

Take these peanuts for example, naturally they should be seeded deeper than you would seed a tomato because peanut fruit is buried in the ground, and tomatoes simply fall on the ground. If in doubt, think how a plant would germinate in nature and try to imitate it. That's it. Happy seeding!