Are you ready to gain skills to grow high-quality organic tomato seed for your own farm or to sell under a seed contract? Or maybe you want to brush up on your existing skills ahead of the tomato-growing season? OSA and our Tomato Organic Management and Improvement Project (TOMI) partners are offering two new resources to walk growers through the process through a new Tomato Seed Production Guide available for free download and a virtual training webinar.
Tomato Seed Production Guide
OSA and our Tomato Organic Management and Improvement Project (TOMI) partners have released a new guide to help growers produce organic tomato seed. The Tomato Seed Production Guide includes a background on the history of tomatoes, the various types and fruit colors, as well as the. tomato lifecycle and biology. Readers will find details about growing tomato seed, including climatic requirements, maintaining genetics and population size, isolation requirements, and criteria for selecting desired traits. Once ready for harvest, the guide walks growers through harvest techniques, cleaning methods, and how to store seed to keep it viable. Finally, this guide serves as a go-to resource for learning about important seedborne diseases of tomato seed crops, including bacterial, fungal, and viral diseases, and methods for treating them.
Growing Organic Tomato Seed: A Virtual How-To Training
To accompany the new guide, TOMI partners hosted a virtual training on producing high-quality organic tomato seed for your own farm or to sell! TOMI partners Laurie McKenzie and Jared Zystro from OSA, and Plant Pathologist Dan Egel from Purdue University, led a 60-minute virtual training on the how-to’s of organic tomato seed production, including tomato biology, climatic requirements, genetic maintenance, disease management, and how to harvest clean and store tomato seed.
