On the previous episode of In Pursuit of Infinite Tomatoes the equation for infinite tomatoes was introduced [(Year Round Tomato Supply) + (Annual Replication of Favourite Tomatoes) = Infinite Tomatoes], strategies to have a year-round supply of local, BPA-free tomatoes were presented (including freezing, drying and canning), and a case was made how preserving your own food can help build community. Now for the exciting conclusion.

I love trying all kinds of tomatoes. Red, green, yellow, orange, pink, white, purple, black – large, medium, small, cherry, paste – etc. And I often find ones that I particularly like for their shape, colour, texture, and of course, flavour. And over the past few years I’ve started saving the seeds of some of my favourites to plant the following spring. It means that I don’t have to pay the high price for seeds, I get a wide diversity and the seedling I grow are shared with friends and colleagues.

Saving tomato seeds is actually quite easy. The hardest part is making sure that you’ve picked the right tomato. It is better to choose an heirloom variety of tomato. The tomatoes you find in the grocery store or the plants you get at garden centres are usually hybrids. They were specifically cross bred for one good year and won’t give you a good result in years that follow (which isn’t very good for the infinite tomato). Heirlooms however have had their seeds saved for generations and tomatoes usually self pollinate so you’ll often get what you expect.

  1. Get a jar and squeeze the seeds and tomato juice into it.
  2. Top the jar with a cloth/paper towel and secure it with an elastic band. This will help prevent fruit flies.
  3. Eat the remaining tomato.
  4. Let the jar sit for a day or two until it develops a scum on the top. Fresh tomatoes have a growth inhibitor so seeds won’t germinate too early so this fermentation process is needed so the seed can germinate.
  5. Rinse the seeds by topping the jar up with fresh water and slowly pouring most of it out. The scum will float to the top and the seeds will sink to the bottom. Repeat until the seeds are clean in the bottom of the jar.
  6. Spread the seeds out to dry on a cloth, paper towel or paper for a couple of days, spreading them out so they aren’t touching each other.
  7. Store the seeds in an envelope in a cool and dry place until February, when it is time to start planting!

Starting to save and plant seeds is up there with the most important things that have happened in human history. For about 99% percent of the 2 million years or so that we’ve been around we were hunters and gatherers living in small mobile groups. Agriculture, both in sowing seeds and animal husbandry, marked one of our biggest transitions, between 12,000 and 5000 BC. We started to settle in one place and cities emerged, we started specializing and diversifying our skills, and powerful religious or political elites rose and fell (for more detail see the first few chapters of Clive Ponting’s “A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations.”) It marked an important beginning for communities as we now know them.

Fast forward 7000 years and our population has grown from between 2 and 20 million people in 8,000 BC to over 6 billion now. Up until quite recently, farmers and gardeners saving their own seeds was still common practice. But now, mega corporations like Monsanto are changing this by requiring farmers to buy new seed from them every year and making saving their seeds illegal. Through breeding and genetic modifications, seeds are becoming intellectual property – like Roundup Ready corn – that are patented and sold. The diversity that varried across regions and cultures is disappearing. The simple act of growers saving their own seeds, which has sustained us for millenniums, is no longer practiced in most conventional agriculture.

In Canada we have an amazing organization called Seeds of Diversity. Their mission is to conserve, document and use “public-domain non-hybrid plants of Canadian significance.” They grow, propagate and distribute 1900 varieties of vegetables, fruit, grains, flowers and herbs. Basically they are a gene bank. A few years ago I gave them seeds that my family has been growing for generations – the Prince Albert potato and “Burns Beans” (one of the secret ingredients I used in the Weddingmania rehearsal dinner chilli cook-off). They even have the Canadian Tomato Project. By late winter and early spring they host a series of over 75 events all over the country called “Seedy Saturday” (or “Seedy Sunday”), where heirloom seeds are sold and exchanged. (The one in Toronto also has lots to do for non-gardeners like hands on workshops, great networking with food security groups, and delicious food.)

Grassroots communities like Seeds of Diverity and events like Seedy Saturdays not only make my ongoing pursuit of infinite tomatoes significantly more exiciting, but they are making sure that an important part of our heritage is preserved and our food system will continue to have genetic diversity available to help us adapt to future changes in our climate.

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