 Welcome to the Tomato Seed Savers Club. At this plot here, we have over 136 varieties of tomatoes that we are saving. One thing about the tomato, the male and the female parts are within the blossoms, so the bees and the pollinators do not cross pollinate, where like with many of the crops like squash or cucumbers, the bee will fly from one flower to the next flower and cross pollinate. We have 10 varieties, and each of the varieties is 24 inches apart, and there's 48 inches between each variety, so we have 10 rows of 10, and then if we look down this row, basically all of the stakes are 24 inches apart, and on these we might have like four or five in a row, or we might have up to ten in a row. So each of our varieties is picked when it has four to eight tomatoes on the vine, so Dan marks each of the stakes that have like six to eight tomatoes on. On Tuesdays and then on Thursdays, we gather up those tomatoes, and usually we have like Dan and Randy will be doing the picking to make sure that all of the tomatoes match the variety, and so if there's all of a sudden there's big tomatoes and there's a little one in there, then what we would do is we will put like a red tape around it, and the red tape basically means that it's not one of our chosen, and then volunteers can pick these and take these home. And then what we do is, so this is a good example, so today Tomato Gathers will put the piece of tape on the box, and then they will pick these tomatoes. So this one here, this is Olina Ukrainian, and definitely one of my favorite tomatoes. So this, you can see that these tomatoes grow up to like a pound, pound and a half each. Many of the seed savers save the flesh, so we have a seed saver that basically dehydrates, so all she does is slices the tomato, takes the seeds out and takes the slices home to put them on her dehydrator. We have a couple juicers. The juicers basically will slice the tomato in half, take it home and run it through the processor, and normally with the juicer you can leave the skins on, because that's where the bulk of the nutrition is. And then those people that basically are canning or freezing, they will take those halves home and then they will skin them at home to take the skin off. So basically our seed savers are in here, they're collecting each of the varieties, and now Ginny, she dehydrates the tomato, so basically what she's doing is just the tomato slices, Joan is extracting the seeds, and you can notice as we had talked about the tag definitely follows the tomato all the way through the process. So once they fill the cup up, they put it in, we use Styrofoam because Styrofoam can be reused, also if you use like a paper cup it will start leaking, and then what I do is I have a box that has partitions, and this particular box is like a wine box, basically I cut it in half so it's got the perfect partitions. The other thing with the fermentation process, the fermentation process does is a little smelly, so if you definitely want to, what we will do is put them in plastic totes and leave them in our garden so we don't have that problem. You definitely don't want to put them in your basement, because then all of a sudden you'll have little fruit flies that will also come. So we save the seeds from each of the varieties like three times. So then as Dan picks the variety he puts like an X on the steak, and once it has three Xs then he puts that red tag on the steak so we know that it's one that we can share with our volunteers. So the tomato seed basically has a gel coat that covers the seed, Mother Nature has basically designed this, so if a tomato would fall off in the fall it would not germinate until the spring. The rain, the snow would basically remove that gel coat, so what we do is we basically put it in a cup and it needs to be in the, and you can see there's like scum on the top. So basically you need to let it do the fermentation process like five to ten days, and then what we would actually do is, and you know that the seed still has that label on it, we'll take that label, we'll put it on our cup, and then what we're going to do is we're going to throw that in there, and then what we do is we'll add water, and you will notice like all of the scum floats to the top, and as we wait, you know maybe like 30 seconds all of the good seeds go to the bottom, and then what we will do is we will pour that top layer off, and you can see the seeds when they're starting to come, and then we will continue to do that process, and normally it takes probably like three or four times before the water runs clear, and part of what is floating to the top is the gel that did cover the seeds and then also maybe some of the pulp that was left in the tomatoes as you did it. You definitely, when you do it in the cup, you want to make sure that you have some tomato juice. If it's just sitting on the bottom, it'll basically dry out and it'll be hard to take off, and plus the fermentation process will not take place, and you can see the seeds are floating to the bottom, and the debris is sort of staying at the top, and you can see like it's getting clearer and clearer as each time that we do it. So then our last part of the process will be using a strainer. The key is to get them switched up a little bit so that when you pour it, everything comes out. The other thing you want to definitely check your strainer, so if there's any seeds that were left over from last time, because you definitely don't want to cross-taminate, and then what I normally do is I, and what we found is with the paper plate, it's sort of like if it's windy out, it's not going to blow away, and then just remembering that we take that tag and we move it onto the plate, and now what I will do is put this in a dry space, and then like every two to three days, basically I will move the seeds around as they dry, now when the seeds are 100% dry, what we will do is we'll then move them into like an envelope, and part of the process that tag is coming along with us, and that blue tag will be on here, and then in the winter time when I have spare time, then I'll label each one so they're easy to identify, so we have 136 varieties, and we have some of them are the NDSU varieties that Dr. Yeager started back like in 1913, also up to like Neil Holland, Dr. Bull, the other thing we're doing is we have all of the different dwarf tomatoes that we're experimenting with, and then also a lot of the historic varieties for like Shumway and some of those seed places, the other thing is like one of Jan's favorites, he's into the midget tomatoes, so we have lots of those little small tomatoes, and then also I am more into like European tomatoes, so like the German and Bulgarian and those types of tomatoes, so each one of us sort of adds a different flavor to our seed plot, so the Tomato Seed Sabers Club, so this is our third year, so this year we have 136 varieties that we will be saving, the first year we saved 100, the second year we basically we planted 50 of our best, and then 50 additional new ones, so at the end of this year we'll have 250 varieties, so basically the benefit of the Seed Sabers members is they get up to 20 different varieties that they can choose from each year for their own personal gardens, the other thing is as you saw inside, they are saving the flesh, and the other thing is with all of the tomatoes that are tagged, or the red tagged, they get to share all those too.