Free tomato seeds

If you go to Campbell's http://www.helpgrowyoursoup.com/seeds, you can get some free tomato seeds by entering the code number of any Campbell soup.

My favorite way to get seeds is to buy heirloom tomatoes from the farmers market and save seeds from the varieties I like the best.

My favorite way to get seeds is to buy heirloom tomatoes from the farmers market and save seeds from the varieties I like the best.

I like your thinking!

be shure to ferment the seeds to prevent to transport tomato-diseases.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrM0yGt1 ... re=related

Agreed.

Another thing about those big commerical seed houses. The Hybrid seeds often work for one generation. The seeds in their fruit end up being sterile.

Heirlooms pretty much reproduce generation after generation, which is how they get to be heirlooms.

Sterile hybrids result when two very dissimilar species are crossed, such as a horse and a donkey making a mule. But tomato hybrids are crossed from two or more tomatoes with specific characteristics. The first generation seeds grown from hybrids can show the hybrid characteristics, but by the second generation, the genes are too mixed up and the tomatoes go off in unpredictable directions. The open-pollinated heirlooms grow true every generation.

Very useful video (though I did chuckle a little as he read the instructions on the preserving sachet )

FWIW I've dried tomato seeds before, but not fermented them. For seed containers, I've taken to using very small paper envelopes, which seem to work fine and do seem to avoid risk of slightly damp seeds rotting.

regards

Ian

Hybrids generally don't breed true--if they did, they'd be individual varieties in their own right. We once planted seeds from a hybrid beefsteak tomato. The resulting tomato plants produced fruit that was all over the map--everywhere from cherry-sized to very large. This is precisely why seed companies prefer hybrids--other companies can't duplicate them, and consumers can't get the same results by planting the next generation seeds.

-Paul W.

Amen.

Heirloom varieties will generally breed true, but if you have several heirloom varieties planted in close proximity to each other, you do run the risk of some hybridization taking place as the bees do their cross-pollination thing. So if you want to save the seeds from your crop each year, only keep seeds from plants that are farthest away from other varieties, the (my) theory being that the pollen last collected by the bee is the most likely to adhere to the next stamen the bee visits.