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Camp Joy Tomatoes

© Bob Ewing

The last tomatoes cling to the vine. The Summer weather has lingered. To date we have been 129 days without frost. This is 28 days beyond our normal 100 day limit. In an average year, far too many of the Camp Joy cherry tomatoes fail to ripen on the vine.

I pick them and bring them inside to ripen in rolled up newspaper or brown paper bags. This works but there is something lacking in the flavour. Not so this year, not only was the yield exceptional, but over 90 per cent of the tomatoes have ripened or begun to do so. If the sun and warmth hold out, I will have my best crop ever.

The Camp Joy is a heritage plant. Heritage plants because they are also open-pollinated will always bred true to the parent. A heritage plant may be a variety of green bush bean that you originally received from your grandparent's garden, where it had grown for over thirty years, and which you have never been able to find in any seed catalogue.

Each year, I save a few seeds for next year's planting. This year I have enough tomatoes to save extra so that I can share them in the Spring at our new Seedy Saturday event.

To save tomato seeds takes a bit more work than beans or peas, for example, but it is worth the time. First you need to select the best and certainly the most disease free tomatoes from your garden. Wait until they are slightly overripe before picking. I select the first tomatoes to ripen as early ripening is a desirable when you have a short growing season.

Now cut them in half and squeeze the seeds out of the skin into a container, a quart canning jar will work well for this. You will notice that each seed has an outside coating or shell; this is what prevents the seed from sprouting inside of the tomato. In order for the seeds to sprout for you next year, you will need to get rid of the coating. This is done by fermenting your seeds. The fermenting will also kill many seed-borne bacterial diseases.

To start fermenting your seeds, add the same amount of water that you have seeds in your container. Now place your container some place out of the way, this is going to smell unpleasant, for three days.

When you check on your seeds in three days you will see that there is a layer of mold on the top of the jar. Add some more water and scrape off the mold layer. Now stir the seeds to separate the viable seeds, (or the seeds that are capable of growing) and these are the seeds that you will want to save. They will be the ones that sink to the bottom of your jar.