Advanced Seed Saving

[fortyonenorth]

This question is directed at Craig, Carolyn and others who are saving seed on more than a casual basis. When you seed tomatoes, do you save each fruit separately or do you just save them in batches? I'm thinking about inadvertent crosses. If one fruit out of, say, ten is crossed and then they're all saved together, the whole batch is compromised, right?

[Heritage]

41N,

I do them in batches, but I keep the bagged fruit separate from the unbagged.
I think fermenting single tomatoes would be more work than just bagging them all.
Also, every transfer of seed during the seed-saving process is a chance to mix-up seed, so saving tomatoes individually would increase the chance of error. I worry more about human error (dropped seeds, mislabeling, etc) than what the bees do.

Steve

[carolyn137]

I must have done thousands of fermentations over the years and since I was always growing many hundreds of plants and varieties each season for several decades, there was no way I could bag blossoms.

Saving many fruits off one plant is best, even better many fruits off two plants of the same, variety, etc.

So yes, I processed them in batches. That way if there is a fruit or two that has been cross pollinated you dilute out the crossed seeds. I've distriubted many hundreds of seeds from batches of a variety done in the same season and an offtype can appear after I send out 10 seeds or seeds to hundreds of folks via my SSE listings and seed offers. Just a statistical porbability as I see it.

But I know what my crossing rate is and feel comfortable with it.

Craig and I once tried to list how many varieties we'd introduced in the SSE YEarbooks over the years and it was many hundreds for each of us and of those I know of less than 10 that had crossed seeds.

If I have a very very rare variety and have just one fruit I will ferment just that one fruit.

Well I remember the summer of 2004 which was the last summer I did large growouts since I fell in Dec of 2004 and my brother had to help me harvest fruits and bring them back home from Charlie's field b/c my bad hips mobility was BAD at that time. I had half bushel baskets of AGG, Wes, NAR, Red Penna, Chapman and many more and so several fermentations of just one half bushel had to be set up. I sure was busy that Fall considering that there were about 150 varieties being grown at that time.