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If you want to collect seeds from tomatoes, first you need to correctly select the mother plant from which you will later collect the fruits. We will tell you how to do it and how to further process the seeds.
Details
A tomato bush must meet three requirements:
- be developed, with a powerful, properly formed stem and healthy leaves;
- without signs of diseases or traces of damage by pests;
- with fruits on the two lower stems.
How to collect the right seeds
Carefully cut the fruit into two or four parts. It's no secret that a tomato inside consists of fleshy partitions and a jelly-like mass with seeds between them. We squeeze this substance, and even better, clean it with a spoon into a separate jar. We will no longer need the skin with partitions, and we send the liquid with the seeds for fermentation.
For high-quality fermentation, the jar of seeds must be filled with fruit liquid. Most often, it is quite enough after harvesting. Some varieties of tomatoes produce very fleshy, dense fruits with thick skin and partitions with almost no liquid. In this case, you can add quite a bit of boiled water to the jar with seeds and mix thoroughly to a pulp.
The container with seeds should be covered with a cloth, napkin or gauze and put in a warm place (22-24 degrees). Usually two days are enough, sometimes this process ends even earlier. As a result, the liquid becomes lighter, and the live seeds sink to the bottom of the jar.
Now you need to wash the seeds. First, we drain the upper part with the film, garbage, empty seeds. Add clean water to the jar, mix and let the seeds settle to the bottom again. Then we take a strainer or a piece of gauze and filter all the contents through them. With their help, the seeds are thoroughly washed with clean running water.
To protect the seeds before drying, they need to be disinfected. It is easiest to use a weak solution of potassium permanganate for these purposes. Simply place the seeds washed in water for 15 minutes. After that, we take them out and send them to dry.
