How Our Grandmothers Saved Tomato and Pepper Seeds

The beginning of next year's garden, sitting in a jar on the kitchen windowsill.

There is a particular kind of gardener who cannot let August pass without setting a few seeds aside. Not because they have to, not because the seed catalogs won't arrive again in January, but because the act of saving seed from the season's best tomato or the sweetest pepper is its own satisfaction. It closes something. It says: this variety was good, and it deserves to continue.

Our grandmothers saved seed as a matter of practical necessity. Seed catalogs existed, but they cost money and required planning ahead and trusting that what arrived in the mail would perform the way the description promised. Easier, and more reliable, to save seed from whatever had done well in your own garden, under your own conditions, in your particular soil and summer. The tomato that set fruit early despite a cool June. The pepper that kept producing long after its neighbours gave up. Those were the ones worth saving.

The method they used is the same one worth using today. Simple, reliable, requiring nothing beyond what most kitchens already have. Here is how it works.

Before You Begin: Choosing the Right Fruit

Be selective about which fruit you use to save seed. It will be tempting to eat that big, juicy tomato , but that is the best candidate for seed saving. The same applies to peppers. The fruit you set aside for seed should be your finest specimen from your healthiest, most productive plant , not a perfectly acceptable tomato, but the one that made you stop and look twice when you picked it. Saving seed involves selecting seeds from the most suitable plants, harvesting them at the right time, and storing them properly until you need to sow them.

One more thing worth knowing before you begin: to avoid growing plants that revert to one of their parent varieties, choose heirloom varieties , ones that have been around since grandma's time or earlier, such as Brandywine or Amish Paste tomatoes. Open-pollinated and heirloom varieties produce offspring that reliably resemble their parents. Hybrid varieties, marked F1 on a seed packet, do not. If you grew hybrid tomatoes this summer, enjoy them , but buy fresh seed next year rather than saving from them.

Saving Tomato Seeds: The Fermentation Method

Tomato seeds are surrounded by a gel-like coating that, in nature, inhibits germination until conditions are right. This old-fashioned fermentation method has been used for generations to remove that protective coating and prepare seeds for storing. It sounds more complicated than it is. The fermentation happens on its own. Your job is mostly to wait.

What You Need

A small glass jar or cup. Water. A coffee filter or fine mesh strainer. A plate or ceramic dish for drying. A pen and paper for labelling. Nothing else is required.

Step by Step

1. Choose your tomato and scoop the seeds. Slice the tomato open and scoop the seeds and their surrounding pulp into a small jar. Add enough water to cover the seeds plus about a half inch more. If the tomato is very juicy, its own juice may be sufficient. Label the jar with the variety name right away, before you forget. This is the step most easily skipped and most often regretted.

2. Leave it to ferment. Set the jar aside at room temperature and leave it for four to five days, stirring once a day. A mold layer may develop on the surface during this time. It is not a problem. The fermentation is working as it should. What you are waiting for is for the good seeds to settle cleanly to the bottom while the pulp and any hollow or undeveloped seeds float and can be poured away.

3. Rinse and separate. After fermentation, gently pour off the mold, debris, and any seeds that float , they are hollow and will not germinate. Pour the remaining seeds into a fine strainer and rinse thoroughly under cool water. The seeds that sank are your keepers.

4. Dry them completely. Spread the rinsed seeds out loosely on a coffee filter, paper plate, or ceramic dish , any surface that will help them dry faster than paper towel, which they will stick to. Set them somewhere with good airflow, out of direct sun, and leave them for a full week to ten days. A seed that still feels the slightest bit cool or flexible is not finished drying. Patience here prevents mold in storage.

Pepper seeds need no fermentation , just a ripe fruit and a warm dry place.

Saving Pepper Seeds: The Simpler Method

Peppers are considerably more straightforward than tomatoes , no fermentation required, no waiting for mold to develop, no pouring off and rinsing. The pepper does most of the work itself, if you leave it on the plant long enough.

Allow some pepper fruits to stay on the plant until they become fully ripe and start to wrinkle slightly. The seeds are mature after the peppers have changed colour, indicating final ripeness. Harvest fruits up to two weeks past the edible stage. A pepper left to wrinkle on the vine looks past its best for the table. For seed saving, that slight wrinkling is exactly what you want to see.

Cut the peppers open, scrape the seeds out onto a plate, and let them dry in a non-humid, shaded place, testing them occasionally until they break rather than bend. A seed that bends when you try to snap it still has moisture in it. A seed that snaps cleanly is ready to store. Pepper seeds remain viable for up to three years if stored properly.

Storing What You Have Saved

A seed saved well and stored carelessly is still a seed lost. The rules for storage are simple and consistent across all vegetable seeds: completely dry, cool, dark, and away from humidity. The enemy of stored seed is moisture, which triggers premature germination attempts and leads to mold. The second enemy is temperature fluctuation, which stresses the seed over time.

A small paper envelope , labelled clearly with the variety name and the year saved , keeps seeds well for short-term storage. Paper breathes, which is an advantage over plastic bags, which can trap residual moisture and cause problems. For longer storage, slip the labelled envelopes into a glass jar with a tight lid, and tuck the jar in a cool cupboard or the back of a refrigerator away from the door where temperatures are stable.

Seed swaps are a wonderful way to connect with your community and discover new varieties. Many local libraries have started seed swap programs, and garden clubs host swaps during the off-season. You might trade a favorite tomato for a unique pepper or flower variety you have never tried before. The saved seed envelope makes an excellent gift for a fellow gardener, and starting varieties from seed shared by someone whose garden you trust is one of the more satisfying ways to begin a new season.

A labelled envelope is a small act of faith in next summer.

If you are looking to build out your heirloom seed collection this season , whether to have reliable varieties on hand for saving next year or to try something new alongside your saved seed , True Leaf Market carries one of the finest selections of heirloom, open-pollinated seeds available, and it is a very good place to start.

A note on the link above: this is an affiliate link, which means we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.

What the Saved Seed Carries Forward

There is a Brandywine tomato growing in gardens across North America right now that is descended, in an unbroken line, from seed saved by Amish farmers in Pennsylvania more than a century ago. Every person who grew it last year and set aside a few seeds from the best fruit is part of that line. The seed carries the summer it grew in, the soil it adapted to, the hands that saved it. That continuity is not sentimental. It is biological, and it is real.

Our grandmothers understood this without needing to articulate it. The seed saved this August would feed the family next August. The variety that had done well for three generations would do well for a fourth, given the same care and attention. There was a logic to it that made the work feel worthwhile , not just for this season, but for the ones that followed.

That logic still holds. A small jar on the kitchen windowsill, a coffee filter spread with seeds, a handwritten envelope tucked into a cool drawer , these are small things. But they are the same small things that have kept good varieties alive across generations of gardens. They are worth doing, and worth doing carefully.