Tania's Garden - Part 2: Growing cherry tomatoes

Post date: Dec 5, 2014 10:27:08 AM

Tania has been growing cherry tomatoes in her garden. Mama put cherry tomatoes in a salad and Tania loved them. She asked mama if they could grow them. The first step was to get the seeds. Extracting seeds from a cherry tomato to make it suitable to plant is an interesting procedure. Let us see how Tania and mama did it.

Mama took two cherry tomatoes and cut them in half. Tania used a spoon to scoop out the seeds in to a plastic cup.

As you can see form the picture above, the seeds are covered by a red, juicy, gelatinous goo that prevents them from sprouting inside the tomato. For the seeds to sprout the gelatinous goo covering needs to be removed. To do this Tania added a half cup of water to the tomato seeds.

Then she covered the top of the cup with a clear plastic sheet and secured it with a rubber band.

Next she made a small hole with a pencil in the plastic covering and left it by a window sill for 5 days to ferment.

After 5 days the seeds had sunk to the bottom. A thin white layer formed at the top. Tania poured out the water and the white stuff and some of the goo. Only the seeds, separate from the goo, remained. She rinsed the seeds about 10 times to make sure all the goo and the white stuff were properly cleaned out. Then she put the seeds on a Styrofoam plate to dry. She made sure all the seeds were well separated from each other.

The next day when the seeds were all dry Tania planted them in a pot full of mud that she had got with Tanisha from under the swing in the garden near her house. She made 3, 1 cm deep holes with a pencil and put 4 tomato seeds in each hole.

Now 2 months later this is what the tomato plants look like.

Tania also planted some cucumber seeds a week before the tomato seeds and here is what the cucumber plant looks like:

Look! It already bears pretty little yellow flowers. So hopefully Tania will soon have some juicy, home grown cucumbers to eat.