“Why do grocery store tomatoes taste like rubber balls?” a visitor to our 4^th Annual Tomato Tasting event asked. 

Today, tomatoes travel farther and farther to get to our plates.  And all this traveling means hybrid tomatoes are being bred for traits like storage and disease resistance at the expense of taste, color, and texture.

But then there’s that other question, “Do heirlooms really taste better?” 

At the Tomato Tasting, attended by an estimated 1000 people on Labor Day weekend, we tried to get at the heart of this question the best way we know how: “Here, taste an heirloom tomato.  In fact, taste 35.” 

And as with most questions in life, there were many answers:

“Hard to believe these are all tomatoes”

“I can’t believe how many different flavors there are”

“These tomatoes really are better.”

“Gross!”

So maybe not all heirlooms taste better, but with so many to choose from you’re sure to find one that’s right for you and your brood (it just so happens that Velvet Red won “crowd favorite” by a landslide). And once you find that perfect tomato, you only have to buy it once.  That’s because heirloom tomatoes are a great way for home gardeners to get started saving seed. 

In nature, ripe tomatoes fall from the plant and slowly rot exposing the seeds, allowing natural weathering to break down the slimy gelatinous coating on the seed.  This is easily replicated through the process of fermentation.  To save tomato seed, seed savers must deliberately remove the coating from the tomato seed. 

Here’s how:

1.      Take the seeds out of your best looking tomatoes and put them into any container that can hold liquid.  Don’t worry if there is pulp in with the seeds.  Keep as much juice with the seeds as possible.

2.      Some seed saving techniques suggest adding water to the mixture.  We recommend not adding water unless the mixture evaporates before it starts fermenting.  This can be done by adding about ½ cup of non-chlorinated water to 1 cup of tomato seed and pulp. 

3.      Fermentation should happen in 24 hours-4 days.  This depends on many variables such as air temperature or how ripe the fruit is.  A layer of white mold may grow across the top.  Once this mixture has fermented continue to the next steps so seeds do not germinate.

4.      Think about where to put the tomato seed mixture because inevitably it will smell. You may want to cover your mixture with a mesh screen to keep out fruit flies.

5.      After fermenting, add water and stir.  Mature seeds will sink to the bottom.  If the seed is light enough to float, it is probably not fully formed, mature, or viable.  Don’t save these seeds. 

6.      Pour off pulpy mixture, but not the viable seeds in the bottom of your container.

7.      Pour the remaining liquid into a kitchen strainer and wash thoroughly under the faucet until clean.

8.      Drain, and then spread the seeds out thinly on surface to dry.  Any substrate to help them dry as quickly as possible will work: coffee filter, paper plates, paper towel, or wax paper.  It is best to dry seeds out of direct sunlight; this could take up to 4 weeks.

9.      Store the seeds in an envelope or seed packet and place in a dry, cool location.  You can assess the quality of your storage conditions by adding the room temperature in Fahrenheit plus relative humidity.  Try to keep that number under 100; the lower the number the better the conditions for seed storage. 

But don’t forget to follow the most important rule:  Put a label on everything, every step of the way.  Because in the words of our collection curator, “No one wants to plant something, thinking they have one variety and end up with something else.” 

So, save seed from your favorite tomato, plant them out next spring and help put an end to rubber ball syndrome, one tomato at a time.

Tomatoes weren’t the only food being tasted at the Tomato Tasting event, check out the recipes from our first ever salsa contest on our website:  www.seedsavers.org/pdf/salsa_recipes_09/pdf

Note from a seed saver: Tomatoes will, most commonly, self-pollinate, so seeds saved will remain ‘true to type’ without worrying about cross-pollination.  However, there are always exceptions.  Some tomatoes can cross pollinate, this is dependent on many factors such as flower shape, environment, and biodiversity.  To ensure seed purity you may want to plant only one variety,spread different varieties throughout your garden, or know which varieties you are planting.

Below: Tomato tasters at our 4th Annual Tomato Tasting Event

Below:  Seed Savers Collection Curator reminding home gardeners to label everything, every step of the way.

Have you ever wondered about those plant descriptions on the back of your seed packets? 

 Who is that lucky person who gets to sample Sweet Siberian Watermelon and write “extremely sweet, juicy apricot –colored flesh”?  Or, perhaps, the not so lucky person who bites into a yellow-hot Fatalii and scribbles “the hottest pepper we offer.”  You can see the sweat pouring off their pen.  Surely by now you’ve figured out that “heavy producer” means you’ll have more than you could ever eat and anything with a “vigorous vine” will take on a life of its own devouring everything in its path.

 For the preservation staff that plants varieties from our collection, descriptors are one of the most important tools for differentiating among thousands of varieties. Recently our horticultural staff has been documenting potato varieties, identifying as many as 72 different characteristics for each plant.  They inspect potatoes five times throughout the growing cycle, describing characteristics: sprouting, leafing, flowering, and fruiting, as well as the tuber itself after harvest. Descriptors can range from the simple (color, size, shape and number of eyes on the tuber) to the complex (looking for abaxial leaf pubescence, or, for us common folk, the degree to which lower surfaces of the leaves are colored by hair).

  Did we mention that “attention to detail” is in this job description? 

 Or how about another job at Seed Savers: “must enjoy looking through seed catalogs.” Hired!

 Here at Seed Savers it is someone’s job to write seed and vegetable descriptions, but did you know that there is someone hired to read them?  This is exactly what our Seed Savers’ database manager did when she compiled the first Fruit, Berry & Nut Inventory.

 This inventory combines descriptions of fruit, berries and nuts available commercially in the United States.  She goes through commercial fruit and nut catalogs and websites she can find recording them into one publication.  Now the Fourth Edition is due out in October.  Some of the varieties have no description, but some of the more popular varieties have many sources, which mean they may have as many as 20 different descriptions.  It’s her job to turn all of those descriptions into a single listing.

 Take the Stanley Plum as an example: Firm, tender, fine grained, yellowish green, freestone flesh.  Sweet rich flavor.  Excellent for fresh eating, canning, preserves and drying.  Flesh turns purplish red when canned.  Large, vigorous, spreading tree.  Early bearer. Late Bloomer.  Heavy, annual producer.  Self-fertile, but yields more heavily when pollinated with another variety.

 Okay, quit drooling.

 So, if you’re really concerned whether or not your New Zealand Pear Tomato is going to have a “refreshing, perky sweet-tart flavor”, you needn’t worry.  Become a seed saver, and get started writing your own mouth-watering descriptions!   

Below: Page of pepper descriptions from Seed Saver Exchanges Yearbook.

Below: Horticultural staff recording tuber descriptors from the potato collection grow out

This week on the farm, the talk has been all about our garlic harvest.  Seed Savers Exchange has been busy digging, drying, cleaning and picking this year’s crop.  The smell is terrific around here!

For our commercial sales, we harvested 16 varieties of garlic, totaling nearly 60,000 plants in all (we’ve already sold out of 10 varieties)! 

The garlic harvest starts when a tractor pulling a modified potato digger turns over a 3-row bed of garlic.  Then the garden crew pulls out the garlic by hand and shakes off the soil.  This all works great as long as it hasn’t rained.  If the soil is wet, it’s back to digging with a garden fork.   This year, the weather cooperated for the most part.

After digging, the garlic is hauled to one of our high tunnels to dry.  Fans circulate air and a shade cloth protects the seed from the hot sun.  Cleaning cannot happen until the garlic is dry as it relies on its roots, outer layers, and stem to help draw the moisture away from the cloves.  When the heads are dry enough we cut off their necks (not nearly as painful as it sounds) and the bulbs continue to dry. 

But there’s never a break for the garden crew.  Soon enough - September 15 until November 30 when the soil temperature is around 60 degrees F - it will be time to plant bulbs for next year.  This means we’ll have to select our seed, looking for the biggest, disease-free, healthiest bulbs.  Meanwhile, over at the Seed House they have all those garlic orders to fill for fall planting!

But wait there’s more! This isn’t the only garlic being harvested on Heritage Farm.  While commercial sales focus on growing enough garlic to fill sale orders, the Seed Savers Exchange collection must focus on growing all of the different garlic varieties in the collection.  Cultivated varieties of garlic are usually sterile, and are propagated from cloves.  This means, unfortunately for us, they can’t be stored like other seed.  That’s why we grow out more than 300 varieties of garlic in the collection every year. 

All of this garlic talk has us thinking garlic thoughts: A soft neck can become a hard neck under stress, but only hard necks produce scapes, those tasty little garlic samplers that are perfect for pickling or in a stir-fry.

Below:  Garlic dries in high tunnels

Below: Commercial garden crew harvesting Broadleaf Czech Garlic with modified potato digger.