Sorry, does 'what' really help? Saving your own seed? Fermenting? What? If it was a waste of time and energy then thousands of gardeners wouldn't have been doing it for decades, right? :)

Assuming they were open-pollinated varieties (not hybrids) and not cross-pollinated, were mature, and you liked the tomatoes then yes, it saves you money.

Fermenting? Yes, it prevents the spread of seed-borne diseases and improves the germination rates.

Done correctly there is no reason why they wouldn't germinate.

Dave

I find that my fermented seeds germinate far better then seeds that I purchase from many vendors. Of course, there are a few vendors that rock, and germination is the same as mine :-)

If you save seeds from your garden, eventually you have tomatoes or whatever that are suited well to your growing conditions.

Most home growers use either fermentation or oxidative methods, more the former than the latter, to process seeds and also b'c fermetation is a natural process.

I prefer fermentation b'c there's data to document what it can accomlish, but for the oxidative methods there's no data I know of that speaks to efficacy with that method.

Fermentation accomplishes the following:

It removes from the seed coat most, but not all, of many fungal pathogens such as the common foliage ones as well as some of the systemic ones such as Fusarium and Verticillium, to name two. And since infection is a quantitative process it means the less likely that the seeds will transmit infection when sowed.

IT removes the gel capsule from the seeds which gives nice beige, fluffy seeds as one might purchase. The gel capsule does have a germination inhibitor in it, but that's part of the larger life cycle of the tomato where fruits fall to the ground and when conditions are OK for germination, then some of those seeds germinate and are called vounteers.

It use to be said that fermentation also killed viruses, that in the older literature, but much more recent research has shown that for every bacterial and virus tomato disease that's been looked at, they've been found in the endosperm of the seed and only hot water treatment can be used to inactivate the bacterial ones. And that's a....do not try at home process. LOL

Have I ever taken seeds right out of a fruit and sowed theM? Yes, but not often, just when needed, and with no processing I got about 100% germination. BUT I garden in an area where there are few to no soilborne diseases, no viral diseases and very few bacterial foliage diseases; the two common fungal foliage diseases yes.

So yes, I do think that processing seeds by fermentation helps, and I've done a lot of it, believe you me.

Carolyn

Good point Austinnhanasmom.....that is the reason I picked those two from a dozen diff OP varieties that I grew....they seemed to like my heavy clay soil. Thanks guys