GrowerC86
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Will seeds from unripe tomato grow?

I had a patio tomato plant that got sickly and died. Before this happened it did produce one tomato that got about an inch wide but far from being fully grown. I picked it off before discarding the plant. It has some seeds in it but will seeds in a tomato this young actually grow or do they have to come from a ripe tomato? I already sliced a piece of the tomato and planted it in a plastic cup of Black Kow compost, but if it isn't going to do anything I'll use the compost for something else. Thanks!

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applestar
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It doesn't sound like the fruit was mature enough to have viable seeds from your description.

Green tiny hard fruit will take another month or more to grow to full size and ripen. One inch fruit on a patio tomato might have grown to two inch saladettes size unless it was a cherry tomato?

Test of maturity would have been to keep the whole fruit in room temperature but not too hot, well ventilated location to see if it changed color and became ripe. Green mature fruits will sometimes ripen, visually color break and blushed fruits are definitely capable of ripening and maturing the seeds.

Peter1142
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If it got sickly and died, probably not a good idea to save seeds anyway.

GrowerC86
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applestar wrote:It doesn't sound like the fruit was mature enough to have viable seeds from your description.

Green tiny hard fruit will take another month or more to grow to full size and ripen. One inch fruit on a patio tomato might have grown to two inch saladettes size unless it was a cherry tomato?

Test of maturity would have been to keep the whole fruit in room temperature but not too hot, well ventilated location to see if it changed color and became ripe. Green mature fruits will sometimes ripen, visually color break and blushed fruits are definitely capable of ripening and maturing the seeds.
It wasn't a cherry tomato. It was the patio kind that grow about the size of a celebrity I think. I actually set the picked tomato in my room for about a week before planting a slice of it. It didn't change size or color. It didn't look sickly like the plant though. It was very small, less than half the size the fruit actually grows on this particular patio. It did have a lot of seeds. I just don't know when the seeds in the tomatoes are actually mature enough to plant.

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applestar
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OK, in addition to the above, one other test is float-or-sink. You first remove the gel from the seeds by fermenting or by scrubbing with mild cleanser like Bon ami or Oxyclean against a wire tea strainer, then see if the seeds will float or sink.

Ones that sink are generally viable.

You need to remove the gel because the gel and gel sac can cause the seeds to float and cause false negative results.



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