Saving Seed
 

I've gotten seed in from friends here, and am curious how much seed is saved. For example, if you have a particularly favorite tomato, how many of the fruits do you save for seed, and what is a conservative estimate of the number of seeds per fruit? Seems like a couple of tomatoes would produce enough seed for the owner, with plenty to share with friends. I'm guessing at least 50 seed per tomato? If you're doing it just for fun is there really any need to save over 50-100 seeds per variety each year? And what about those who save for distribution within the SSE program?

Thanks!

Don

Thanks for asking this, Don. I've always wondered how much seed the SSE members save up when they offer a variety.

(Me, I'm small potatoes and just save from two tomatoes per bush for myself. Usually it's more than enough. And I haven't counted. :dizzy: :lol: )

~Thalia

Kind of depends on the tomato, too. A seedy cultivar
might give you 100 seeds from two small fruit, and it
is no problem accumulating several hundred if you have
2 or 3 plants of it, while a big oxheart or some other
sparsely seeded variety might only give you 10 seeds
from a fruit on a plant that is not a heavy producer.

(With the rain we had last year, seeds saved from split
fruit alone was plenty.)

It depends on what you are trying to achieve in your seed saving efforts.
For personal use, seed can be saved from a single tomato, although this is risky of course because of the potential of cross-pollination, unless you bag blossoms. Two tomatoes would give you a better margin of comfort, each from a different plant is even better.
If you want to do a good job at maintaining a variety, which means maintaining the diversity within the variety, then five fruit, each from a different plant, would be a good workable minimum. More is better.

The thing to keep in mind is that, as long as you don't get any crossing (so all flowers on a plant are self-pollinated), seed from every fruit on a particular plant are identical. It was proven long ago that single fruit selections don't improve a variety (early seed companies proposed that saving seed off of the earliest, largest, etc fruits let to this trait carrying through). This is good news for a seed saver that has a very rare variety that is just having a tough season - let's say your prize variety is in a bad location, got hit by deer, and you end up with one pitiful looking small blossom end rot fruit (the variety typically thrives, but it was just one of those years) - seed from that fruit would be perfectly representative of the variety when grown in ideal conditions.

It is incredible how the seed number varieties fruit to fruit, variety to variety. You can get hundreds of seeds from 12 ounce Black Krim, but only 5 or 10 seeds from an 18 ounce Lillian's Yellow. You will also note that seed size varies widely, and doesn't always correlate to the fruit size - Hugh's produces quite small seeds relative to the fruit size, Tiger Tom produces quite large seeds.

Just a few points!

Ditto what Craig said and as for how much seed to save for my listings in the SSE YEarbooks, I want to have on hand at least 500-600 seeds/variety so that I don't have to continually be producing/fermenting new seed. Sometimes when i'd run low I would go ahead with new seed if the variety were popular such as Neves Azorean Red, Opalka, Aunt Gertie's Gold, and the like.

I and several others will not offer seed thru SSE that's more than 5 yo.

And there were two years when I couldn't continue listing Lillians Yellow and Opalka b'c they both have so few seeds I couldn't get enough to make a listing possible.

I never saved seed for trading b'c listing stuff to trade just isn't something I want to do. I'll offer seeds outright, as I have here twice and at GW twice, with over 300 varieties offered, but I specify no trades wanted. And that's b'c of the high rate of crossed seed that is traded. I've been posting online about tomatoes since about 1989 and I do stand by that comment. Unless of course, the trader has bagged blossoms, which isn't all that commen.