Hundreds and Thousands Tomato - Collecting Tomato Seed

Photo taken from http://www.dobies.co.uk

I've heard so many good things about the Hundreds and Thousands tomato that I had to grow it myself. Last year I searched all over (eg. catalogs, online) for a place that sells this tomato. Sadly, I found that it just isn't available here in the U.S. It is mainly a British tomato phenomenon, but I still wanted to get my hands on the seed somehow and see for myself see what all the rave was about. A nice lady from Canada sent me a few leftover seeds she had purchased from overseas. Even though it was late by the time I received the seed I decided to plant them right away. They came up quickly and grew fast. I transplanted them into hanging baskets (that's what I heard they do over in Britain with this particular tomato). They did produce a good amount of fruit even though
it was so late in the season. I am guessing if it was warmer they would have fruited hundreds of baby cherry tomatoes like the name suggests (they certainly had enough blossoms to do so, but the blossoms didn't all pollinate because of the colder temps). By the end of the year I had one hanging basket that survived the frost, because I actually remembered to bring it inside. My plan was to collect the seeds from the remaining tomatoes. Well, that didn't exactly happen the way I planned. I sort of forgot about them, left them in our greenhouse and just let my collecting seeds idea fall to the wayside. However, last month I noticed the dead, dried tomato plants still had some tomatoes hanging from them. So, I decided what the heck, I'll collect seeds from these shriveled up tomatoes and see what happens. Here is the process I took to collect the seeds:

Here is the hanging basket with the dead tomato plants.

These are the tomatoes that I noticed were still left on the plants.

These are all the tomatoes I could find.

I squeezed their guts out into a soda bottle that had some water in it.

I vigorously shook the bottle to loosen the seeds from the flesh and membrane - or "guts" to simply put it.

You can see the seeds swirling around, that's what I was looking for.

I poured the excess water out in another cup, then dumped all the seeds on a paper plate. I spread them out and let them dry. I planted them on April 09. Can't wait to see if any of them are viable! Will keep you posted! :)

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