Germinating non-fermented seed

[KathyDC]

I've received some tomato seeds in a trade that clearly were not fermented. I know that fermentation is preferable but not necessary, but I'm wondering if I need to do anything special to plant them out? Do I need to be fussy about germination with them?

Thanks in advance!

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by KathyDC

I've received some tomato seeds in a trade that clearly were not fermented. I know that fermentation is preferable but not necessary, but I'm wondering if I need to do anything special to plant them out? Do I need to be fussy about germination with them?

Thanks in advance!

Kathy, on a few occasions I've had to take the seeds out of a tomato and sow the seeds ASAP with no treatment at all and germination was almost always 100%.

I wouldn't normally do that but a few times I had no choice. Some folks still believe that the germination inhibitor in the gel surrounding the seeds will not allow forr good germination, but that's wrong. That inhibitor is there as part of the life cycle of the tomato and just prevents seed germination when conditions are not favorable for germination.

Carolyn

[gggeek]

I started dabbling in seed saving this year. I had my first batch of speckled roma seeds that I did not ferment. I just washed em off and dried them. Germination was almost 100% and came up before the seeds I had purchased from a professional nursery last year.

[amideutch]

Tom Wagner does not ferment seeds but rather uses TSP (Trisodium Phosphate) to clean his seeds prior to drying. I ferment and use TSP when saving seeds. Ami

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by amideutch

Tom Wagner does not ferment seeds but rather uses TSP (Trisodium Phosphate) to clean his seeds prior to drying. I ferment and use TSP when saving seeds. Ami

Ami, Tom uses the TSP b/c most of the time he's saving seeds from a single fruit as part of the lines he's working with. And there's no way he's going to set up any other method for just one fruit.

I don't suggest TSP b'c it's so caustic, especially when there are young kids and pets around.

I think it's best to use a more natural method and that would be fermentation, for me, and not even the oxidative methods such as oxiclean, Comet, etc., for which there is no documentation as to how effective they are, while there is for fermentation.

Perhaps TSP does remove all the pathogens from the outer surface, I don't know, but what I do know is that it's only the surface pathogens that can be removed, mainly fungal, and not all of them either. No method other than a hot water treatment can inactivate the bacterial pathogens that are in the endosperm of the seed.

TSP is used to treat tomato seeds by some firms that produce seeds for retail distribution b'c it's known to inactivate TMV. However, TMV is no longer a major problem here in the US, the only place it's transmitted now is manually, in large scale plant growing, and even then rarely

TSP treated seeds are more rounded and darker in color..

Carolyn

[dice]

I have a little bag of crumbled Moravsky Div fruit with seeds in it.
They dried out sitting on a shelf indoors in a Cool Whip bowl while
waiting for space on the fermenting shelf to open up.

I planted a few of them the next spring. 100% germination at around
70F indoors, with no particular delay relative to other seeds that
were started at the same time.