Sometimes, we gardeners make things a tad more complicated and difficult than we need to.
We set ourselves impossible tasks: perfectly-mown lawns, ideally with stripes; hedges beautifully clipped; there must be no weeds, or nibbled leaves, or misshapen carrots.
But life ain’t like that: and as I have written before on this pages, it’s downright damaging to the environment if you try and make it so.
I have long since given up any pretence to doing things ‘properly’, or in some way they’re ‘meant’ to be done, unless I can see a very good reason to do so. I am incorrigibly lazy: I take short cuts. I don’t care that my garden looks scruffy if I can see a point in letting it be.
This summer, for instance, I let cabbage white butterflies get to my kale as I couldn’t really be bothered to go to the trouble of keeping them off. Predictably, the caterpillars ate the plants down to the stalks. They looked awful for a while. Then autumn came. Now the caterpillars have eaten their fill and gone somewhere to pupate for next year’s butterflies, and the kale are resprouting, with enthusiasm. I get my winter harvest; the butterflies get fed. Everyone’s a winner (apart from the perfectionist brigade, I suppose).
Anyway, the point is that it’s always worth finding the path less troublesome if you can. And so it is with saving tomato seed. If you look up the instructions for saving tomato seed in books, websites and occasionally on the telly, they will almost universally launch into a long-winded and complicated sequence involving soaking the seeds in a jar of water for a few days, then sieving them and washing off the gelatinous outer covering till you have clean seeds. Only then, they say, can you set them out to dry before storing them.
What tosh.
There is a scrap of sound theory behind all this palaver: that jelly-like coating around the seeds – the bit that makes tomatoes juicy – also contains a germination inhibitor designed to prevent the seeds from sprouting inside the fruit. So if you were to sow tomato seeds straight away, still coated in fresh jelly, they wouldn’t come up. Washing the seed, so the reasoning goes, is the best way to remove the gel.
Except there’s a much, much easier way to do exactly the same thing, no fermenting, sieving or washing required.
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