How to Save Tomato Seeds Without Fermenting

Do you want to save your own tomato seeds? There are a few ways to do it, and the easiest method takes just seconds. Despite what you may have heard, you can absolutely save tomato seeds without fermenting. So get a knife, a paper towel, and your tomatoes ready, and let me show you how.

There are a few things to know before you begin, but overall, the process is simple. You honestly cannot go wrong. Tomato seeds are hardy little things and can simply be scraped out of fruit and dried on paper. Then, next year, you can plant them, paper and all, to grow even more of your favorite fruit.

When you buy tomato seeds, they’re usually loose in a packet. There are some great choices of tomato seeds that you can get this way, and it’s fun to shop around. If you want to save tomato seeds to be loose like this, you need to ferment them. Doing this removes the gel around each seed so that when you dry them out, they are dry and loose. That’s an important factor if you’re a business, but if you’re saving seeds for home use, it’s not necessary. Seeds do not need to be loose in a packet to be viable. That makes saving them using the quick and easy paper-towel method so much better.

Save Tomato Seeds Without Fermenting

The easiest way to save tomato seeds is to scrape them out on paper towels and let them dry. It takes just a few seconds, and at the end, you’ll have tons of seeds dried up on the paper. I’ve been doing this for years, and it helps avoid going through a days-long process of filtering, drying, and storing. Then, when it comes to planting time, you cut or tear a little of the paper off with seeds and plant the whole thing. You’ll be delighted when all the little sprouts come up after a week or two!

If you wanted to, you could even get fancy and save tomato seeds on pretty paper or inside greeting cards to send to friends. They could plant the card, seeds and all, and get a lovely harvest that way! Sharing seeds is also a time-honored way to keep tomato varieties going.

Heirloom Tomato Seeds

Though saving tomato seeds on paper towels is easy, there’s one big thing to know. Most tomatoes you buy in the supermarket are hybrid varieties – often called F1 hybrids. This doesn’t mean that they’re GMO, but rather that plant breeders have taken two parent plants of different types and bred them together. This cross-breeding can sometimes produce stable hybrid plants (the children of the original two types) that produce better and bigger crops or better disease resistance.

However, the seeds grown from these hybrid plants don’t always grow true to type. What you’ll get will still be a tomato, but the plant and fruit it produces could be much different from what you were expecting. That’s why we don’t save seeds from hybrid plants and why it pays to check. It would be a real bummer to save seeds, sow them, spend all that time caring for the plants, and then get tomatoes that don’t taste great. Instead, we save seeds from heirloom tomatoes, which are open-pollinated varieties that grow true to type.

Heirloom tomatoes are varieties that have been passed down for years and years—sometimes as an actual ‘heirloom’ within families! Seed companies and plant breeders acquire the most popular varieties and sell heirloom types as well. This helps keep old varieties going and is an important way to protect them for the future. You can save seeds from almost all heirloom tomatoes and know that they will grow into plants that produce the same tomatoes as the original.

Do Tomato Flowers Cross-Pollinate?

One thing I worried about when I first started saving tomato seeds was cross-pollination. I watched as bees flit from flower to flower, potentially taking pollen from one flower to another on a different plant, and was concerned. In my cool climate, I grow five to six types of tomatoes every year, jostled together side by side in my polytunnel. The bees were definitely spreading pollen around the plants!

Cross-pollination doesn’t affect how the fruit of the current plant forms – it affects the fruit of the next generation, and I was worried that I’d save seeds that were a hybrid of sorts. If you’re worried about that, too, rest assured that this is generally not an issue. Tomatoes do not cross-pollinate with one another that easily.

Tomato flowers are self-fertile and usually pollinate themselves. That means that before that bee lands on the flower, it’s probably already fertilized! In all the years I’ve grown tomatoes, I’ve only ever come across one tomato variety that could be cross-pollinated by insects. It’s really unusual which makes the chances of the heirloom tomato in your hand being a candidate for seed saving very high! If you’re in doubt, I share more about what to look for in tomato flowers and possible cross-pollination in my tomato seed-saving video.

Save Tomato Seeds on a Paper Towel

The easiest way to save tomato seeds begins with choosing a ripe and delicious tomato. It could be homegrown or it could be from the farmer’s market. If you do get one from the farmer’s market, ask the seller which variety it is so that you can check it’s not a hybrid. Next, gather together your equipment: a sharp knife, a spoon, and a roll of paper towels. You can use other paper, but paper towels are robust and absorbent and work the best for me. I tend to use a single sheet but I’ll put more sheets underneath to absorb excess moisture. Paper plates work great, too!

It’s best to label the paper towel with the variety and date before it gets wet, so do that first. Then, cut the tomato in half and scrape the tomato seeds out and over the paper. Spread them out and squish the pulp as best as you can. This creates space for the eventual seedlings to grow and helps speed up the drying time. It can take several days to a week for the paper and seeds to completely dry out and at the end, the seeds will be stuck to the paper. You can then store it in an envelope or ziplock bag. If kept in a cool and dry place, the seeds can have a good germination rate for up to fifteen years.

Growing Tomato Seeds Saved on Paper Towels

When it comes time to sow your tomato seeds, use a pair of scissors and cut a square off the paper. Then, plant the whole piece of paper in potting mix, covering it just lightly. Keep it moist, and the seedlings will emerge within one to two weeks. The paper will eventually degrade, but if there’s some left when it comes time to transplant, it will tear away easily. Transplant the tomato seedlings into individual pots or modules when two true leaves have appeared. Then grow them on in a greenhouse or under grow lights until conditions are right to plant them into their final growing place. You may need to replant them into larger pots during this time if they outgrow the ones they’re in.

The time you start sowing seeds depends on your region and where you’ll be growing the plants. Tomatoes need a long growing season and only start to produce in the third month after planting. If you have a long growing season, you can get LOADS of tomatoes and plant early. I have a short growing season and very moderate summer temperatures, though. That means that I start my tomato seeds off undercover in late February to March and plant them out once nighttime temperatures are above 45°F (7°C). That’s generally late April to early May for me, but it changes from year to year. Your conditions may be completely different, so understanding more about temperature and light levels will make growing tomatoes much easier for you.

Saving Tomato Seeds by Fermenting

Now that you know the easy way to save tomato seeds, let’s look at how the fermentation process works. It takes a little more time, but it’s not really all that difficult, either. And again, if you prefer having loose tomato seeds, this is the way that you want to do it. The basic premise is that you put tomato seed pulp into water, let it sit at room temperature, and let natural bacteria and microbes rot away the gel around each seed.

An old jam jar with a sealable lid works best for this, and you can use a Sharpie to write the variety on the lid. That’s especially helpful if you’re saving more than one type of tomato seed at a time and don’t want to forget which is in which jar! Scrape the seeds from your best ripe tomato into a jar, fill it with a little water, and loosely seal it. The liquid will begin fermenting and molding over on its own, which looks a bit icky but is what you want. At the end of about three days, you then strain, rinse, and dry the seeds and put them into long-term storage. Here are more instructions for how to save tomato seeds using the fermentation method.

This is the way that seed companies clean and save tomato seeds, and it’s a good method. It removes the gelatinous covering around the seed and makes the seeds easy to sort into little sachets to sell. It works great, but saving tomato seeds on paper towels is still the best method for the home grower.

Propagating F1 Hybrid Tomatoes

Using the fermentation method, paper towel method, or even washing soda method is great for saving seeds from heirloom tomatoes. What if you’d like to grow an F1 hybrid tomato from year to year? Fortunately, there is a method, but you may be surprised to know that it does not involve seeds. What you do is propagate new tomato plants from cuttings. You can do it at any time in the growing year but if done in the autumn, you can overwinter the young plants indoors and then plant them outside the following spring. Here are some other great ideas that will help you with growing and using homegrown tomatoes:

• Green Tomato Chutney Recipe
• Grow Tomatoes in a DIY Self-Watering Planter
• Green Tomato Relish Recipe
• Tips on Growing Tomatoes in Your House