Solanum Lycopersicum (Garden Tomato) Class: Magnoliopsida Order: Solanales Family: Solanaceae Genus: Solanum Species: Solanum lycopersicum Common Varieties: Big Beef, Sungold, Mortgage Lifter, San Marzano, Brandywine
Tomato seeds
How to Save Seeds Unlike the beet and sesame, whose seeds are harvested when completely dry, the tomato’s seeds are collected when wet. To do this, seed savers must select the most perfect looking fruit from a plant with ideal characteristics (hardiness, good productivity, and a demonstrated resistance to drought, disease, and pest pressure). The fruit must be at the point of peak ripeness, even a little overripe. A tomato should be ripe enough for eating or, better yet, overripe to the point where you might hurl it at an inept performer or political opponent,” Will Bonsall writes in Will Bonsall’s Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening. Squeeze out the fruit’s pulp and seeds into a glass or food-grade plastic container. Leave the mixture to sit in a warm spot above 80F to allow the pulp to ferment. The seeds will separate from the fermenting mixture; viable seed will sink to the bottom of the container while dead seeds will float. This method, while a little slimy, actually coats the seed with an antibiotic and probiotic layer that protects against disease spores. Marketplace seed (that which is used in industrialized agriculture), on the other hand, is separated from the pulp by exposure to hydrochloric acid (Will Bonsall’s Guide to Radical, Self-Reliant Gardening). When mold has accumulated at the top of the fermented pulp, remove the solids. Some seed savers elect to repeat the soaking process a few more times, until all possibility of dead seeds has been exhausted. When satisfied with the results of the soaking process, rinse the viable seed in running water to clean and then spread the seeds in an even layer on a screen or paper towel to dry for about a week (Seed Saver’s Exchange). When stored properly, tomato seeds will remain viable for 5-10 years.
Heirloom Tomatoes: why do we save their seed? “The loss of genetic variation in crops due to the modernization of agriculture has been denoted as genetic erosion” (Tanksley and McCouch, 1997). The rise of industrialized agriculture, a byproduct of a rising global population’s demand for food, has contributed to the homogeneity present in commercial crop production worldwide. Genetic variability refers to genetic differences among plants in the same variety (A Seed Saving Guide). For example, one tomato plant of the Big Beef variety may differ from another Big Beef plant in that it is more tolerant of insects and as a higher disease resistance; one plant may produce fruits which are especially flavorful compared to other plants. Maintaining genetic variability is important because it allows a variety to adapt to changing conditions. In order to ensure genetic variability, seed savers must cultivate an appropriate population size, or, more simply, the number of plants grown. A larger population size means a greater likelihood of seeds surviving adverse conditions. If bacterial wilt, a common tomato disease, hits a population of 5 tomato plants, the odds of survival are extremely low. But if bacterial wilt hits a population of 100 plants, there is a far greater chance that at least one plant will have a combination of genetic factors that are able to contend with environmental challenges, allowing for at least one viable plant for seed production. Due to the aforementioned genetic erosion precipitated by modern agriculture, many varieties of vegetables, particularly the tomato, have come to the brink of extinction. There is simply no want or need in commercial agriculture to preserve varieties which might be even the least bit susceptible to mildews and molds and various plant-killing fungi. The market’s partiality to hybridized varieties (which are selectively cross-bred to combine the best traits from two or more varieties, resulting in a highly disease-resistant plant whose fruits are perfectly uniform and long-lasting for better transportation) has obscured historical varieties, which were prized for flavor, beauty, and cultural and sentimental significance. Heirloom varieties are usually at least 50 years old, open-pollinated (pollinated by insects or wind), and carefully selected for a single special trait (“Hybrid vs. Heirloom”). One such heirloom tomato, called Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter, was borne out of an Appalachian farmer’s desire to create the biggest tomato possible. Tom Oder writes: In trying to achieve this goal, he used a unique method of putting a plant that produced large tomatoes in the middle of a circle of three other tomato varieties. The central tomato was German Johnson, a large and pretty-well known North Carolina heirloom, although no one knows the exact history behind it. When the plants produced flowers, Byles would take a baby ear syringe and pull pollen from the flowers on the periphery and put them on the German Johnson's flowers. Byles would take seeds from the pollinated German Johnson tomatoes and save them to plant the next year. After some years of repeating this process, Byles claimed he had produced a plant that would produce enormously large tomatoes weighing two-to-three pounds. The farmer named the variety he’d created ‘Mortgage Lifter’ because he would charge $2-$3 per tomato—in a few years’ time, he bragged that he’d been able to pay off his mortgage simply by selling his giant tomatoes. Saving the seeds of heirloom vegetables, endangered by the loss of diversity imposed by commercial agriculture, is critical because it saves the stories of the plants themselves. Seed Saver’s Exchange donor John Coykendall preserves his saved heirloom varieties through a method he calls “memory banking.” He fills notebooks with the details of each variety, the story behind the seeds and the people that grew them, accompanied by illustrations. All of this in the hope of preserving the heritage of these varieties, saving those seeds and their stories from erasure, countering their extinction.