[gardeners] tomato seed experiment
B. Davis (gardeners@globalgarden.com)
Mon, 28 Dec 1998 12:51:28 -0500
This was my first year gardening in Texas and the heat was terrific
this year. I grew 3 varieties of tomatoes, two indeterminate, an
heirloom and a beefsteak, plus a determinate which peels without
scalding and whose seeds I'd bought several years ago from Stokes
(they are no longer available).
The longer season indeterminate tomatoes produced exactly two
fruit since they didn't bear in the heat and didn't have time to recover
and produce after it cooled off.
The shorter season indeterminate plants produced well over 150 fruit
both before the heat of summer and after it cooled in the fall.
These were hybrids, but I decided to save seed anyway. I posted
about the seed I planted last Friday because several of them were
sprouting in the fruit which I had picked green and ripened on the
kitchen counter. I just looked at the small pot and three of them are
through the soil surface already.
I dried the remainder of that batch and will plant later, but don't know
if they'll grow because it's possible that they were sprouting, too, and
I couldn't tell.
My third batch of seeds from that tomato variety were dried earlier
but they, too, might not grow because I'd frozen a few cartons of
whole, skinned tomatoes from the spring production. When I used
them during the summer, I saved some of those seeds. It'll be
interesting to see if the ex-frozen seed will grow when planted later.
Barbara Davis zone 7/8 southwest of Fort Worth, TX