Tomato Seed Saving Experiment

This will be an ongoing experiment. I bought some Kumato tomatoes from the store and decided to try to save some seeds. According to research I've done online, this is a terrible idea because this is a hybrid tomato produced by Syngenta. They only sell it to commercial farmers. Since its a hybrid, I guess, the seeds are not guaranteed to grow true to their parent. This means it could take multiple years and multiple generations to isolate a strain of tomato that tastes good. Well, I decided to throw caution into the wind and get busy experimenting.

Saving tomato seeds seems pretty straight forward actually.  The first step is to cut your best tomato in half (you want to carry on the properties of your best tomatoes, so you save the best) and scoop out the seeds. Place the seeds in an open container out of sunlight for a few days. This allows the seeds to get covered in mold and is called fermentation. Return to the seeds and scrape the top layer of mold off. Then rinse the seeds until clean with water. The next step is to dry the seeds. Accomplish this by letting them sit out on a paper plate for several days. Once sufficiently dried, place them in a container for storage until the next tomato growing season.

Please enjoy the following step by step photo documentation:

Tomato, halved

Innards removed and placed in container

Seeds, chillin'

Seeds covered in Saran Wrap with air holes, placed in the basement

Update Número Uno

So I definitely forgot about this for a number of days. Here are the moldy tomato seed pics:

Gross

Then I rinsed them with cold water in the faucet. Thankfully I own a perfect tomato seed strainer somehow:

Then I dried them on paper towels and transferred them to a clean paper towel.

Final update:

After a few days, once the seeds were sufficiently dried out, I moved them to ziplock bags for storage.