Anti-Heirloom Seed Saving

A few years ago I grew a bunch of what should have been crappy tomatoes. A volunteer plant (Ray refers to them as feral) had sprung up in just the right spot to tether to a stake I already had up, so I let it go. I assumed it was a variety I had grown the previous year, but these plants stayed low and bushy, and pretty soon they were weighed down with an absurdly heavy load of what looked like beefsteaks, ready to ripen. And that was all for a while... for a very long while. They just stayed like that, green and huge. 

It was thus clear to me that I had something else on my hands. They were obviously determinate, and I hadn't planted anything determinate ever. I figure a seed or two made it through the compost from kitchen scraps, and I was growing some of the infamous "Florida Greens," tomatoes bred to ship green and indestructible, so that they'd turn just pink or orange enough to sell at the supermarket, perhaps under a cloud of ethylene gas. I waited though, and soon they began to ripen. I was expecting the worst - these are the tomatoes you buy because you are desperate for tomatoes, and then you bite into the styrofoamy-blandness and despise yourself for breaking down and buying an out-of-season tomato. 

But I didn't despise myself. They weren't half bad. They weren't going to win any state fair contests, but they were solidly in the home grown tomato realm of yumminess. 

Generally I think little of seed saving. I'll do it when it is super easy: for example when I just have to leave the bolted mustard or lettuce a few more weeks and shake them into a bag, but I'm quite content to pay someone else to go through any more trouble than that. 

The Barbara Kingsolvers of the world might disagree with me. For those hungry for the Romantic glow of an imagined agricultural paradise before the original sins of industrialization, saving seeds feels like something your ancestors used to do (until, of course, they could get their hands on seed catalogs). Their apocalyptic world view also values the self sufficiency: this is how you preserve heirloom tomatoes, the only ones worth saving, and when this whole industrial machine fails, as it is sure to do, only the seed savers will have sliced heirloom tomatoes on their grass-fed hamburgers.

Thus for me there was something soothingly heretical about taking a supermarket beefsteak, slicing it open, and squeezing out the seeds to ferment. 

We'll start these this weekend with M, along with another hybrid I saved from last year. They might not be perfectly stable cultivars (a hazard of saving hybrids that I'll fully admit), but they will still be delicious.