Properly Isolate Heirloom Tomatoes for Seed Saving

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Posted by @CommonCents on
There are many strategies for isolating heirloom varieties if you plan to save seeds for the future. Some people use distance alone. Others use bagging or other barriers to isolate a branch or whole plant to gather seeds. I use a different method. I clone the plant from a cutting, isolate the clone indoors in a sunny window, and grow the clone to produce seeds to save for future years.

There was a discussion here on NGA about Growing heirloom tomatoes & saving seeds. There were a lot of good ideas there. I used to follow some of those practices, but a few years back I discovered another method for isolating heirlooms and harvesting seeds to save for future years.

I grow several varieties of heirloom tomatoes that are my favorites, and I save seeds and replant my heirloom and open-pollinated varieties from my own saved seeds. To make sure I get "pure" seeds, without cross pollination from other varieties in my garden, I do something completely different. Late in the season, I select the plant I want to get seeds from, and I take one or two sucker cuttings and root those in a medium-sized planter pot (12" or so usually). I grow a small clone of the plant indoors, in a sunny south-facing window. I let that clone plant grow, blossom and fruit, and I gather the seeds from that clone that was grown indoors.

Sometimes I have a couple of different varieties growing in different rooms. Other years, I'll do one variety in mid summer, and another later on at the end of the season.

I typically gather seeds from only one or two varieties each year, and I have a good seed supply for 2 to 4 years after that.

There are a few advantages to this, besides the obvious better isolation and reduced risk of unwanted cross-pollination from other varieties. The plants I have in my garden are for growing tomatoes (or peppers, or whatever the plants are). My care and cultivation of those plants is to maximize the characteristics of the fruit. For larger slicing tomatoes, for example, I might prune off most of the branches (the suckers), and pinch off blossoms for only one tomato per cluster, to promote larger tomatoes. For cherry tomatoes and Roma tomatoes, I might let all the branches grow and all the blossoms develop.

For my seed clones, the main purpose is to get seeds to save. On those plants indoors, I generally pinch off (almost) all of the suckers, and I only need a few clusters of blossoms to develop into fruit with seeds. I usually allow all the blossoms to develop, rather than pinching any blossoms off.

One other tip: I find that my seeds remain viable for several years, so I don't even try to get seeds from every variety every year. I rotate, replenishing my oldest seed stock each year, gathering seeds from just a few varieties. I find that I get good germination even at 3 or 4 years old from my own tomato seeds. My goal now is to replenish my seed stock every three years. I'm actually keeping some of the older seeds to see how long they remain viable. I've only been saving my own seeds for about 5 years now, and even my 5-year-old seeds are germinating more than ninety percent this year.

Here's a tomato picture offered to please the Gods of Garden.org in hopes that my idea can be posted:

 
Comments and Discussion
Thread Title Last Reply Replies
Great info by GigiAdeniumPlumeria Jun 5, 2016 7:10 AM 0
Interesting! by Weedwhacker Jun 4, 2016 6:49 AM 6

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