Now that winter is rearing its icy head, I am not one of those people who wax nostalgic about fireplaces and heating their homes with open fireplaces or wood/coal burning stoves or furnaces.

Even though a couple or three recent reader emails have suggested that there are all sorts of things that have nothing to do with gardening and might serve to curb the exercise in redundancy they claim this column has become, more than half a dozen other readers have asked that I rerun one of the old columns on saving tomato seeds.

Over the last four decades, I’ve found myself updating the seed saver column at least a dozen times at some point between mid-August and late October. I’m reasonably sure that I’ve explained my method for saving tomato seeds in each of the last 4 consecutive years. There’s no telling how many times I’ve written it up since 1983, the year that the late Molly Helton taught me how to do it.

However, until last year, I had believed that the best reason to save tomato seeds by fermenting them, as opposed to simply drying them on a paper towel, was to keep the seeds cleaner and easier to store and handle come planting.

Good friend and fellow tomato fan, Berea pharmacist, Josepth Chowning, after the column ran last August, told me that the fermentation process infused the seeds with good bacteria that improves germination and may inoculate the seeds against several seed borne plant diseases. I know for sure that I have rarely, if ever, lost plants I grew from seed to blight, powdery mildew, fungi, and a host of other plant diseases, whereas I lose a significant number of greenhouse or store bought plants to one disease or another. Anyway, back by popular demand, here’s how to do it.

Fill a quart jar about 2/3 full of tap water. Push the seeds out of a slice or several slices of tomato with a fork or teaspoon handle into the jar of water. Stick your fingers and whatever handle you’re using down into the water to rinse off any seed that may have stuck to them. Pay no mind to the bits of tomato flesh or peel that fell into the water with the seeds.

After you have as many seeds as you think you’ll need — one tomato will usually have over a hundred seeds — fill the jar nearly full, screw a lid onto it and shake it vigorously for a few seconds. Sit the jar in a window sill or someplace warm and let it sit for four or five days. Your seed will sink to the bottom of the jar but the flesh and peels, etc. will rot and rise to the top of the jar.

Once the flesh and peels have rotted and molded, shake the devil out of the jar and let it sit for a few minutes until the seeds have settled to the bottom yet again. Any seeds that are not viable will also float. Pour off the floating residue, then rinse the seed again by pouring in fresh water, shaking the jar and letting them settle and then pouring off the water. Repeat the rinse a couple of times until you only have clear water and all your seeds are at the bottom. Then you can pour off 99 percent of the water without losing any seeds.

I use a tablespoon to dip the seeds out of the jar and put them in an aluminum pie tin. I actually use the tins that come with the little fifty cent pies I’m hooked on from the Walmart Bakery aisle.

Pay no attention to what little water might get into the pan when you scoop the seeds into it. It will evaporate within a few hours if you sit the pan on top of your refrigerator. At least it does on mine.

Let the seeds dry for about a week or 10 days then use your thumb or finger to loosen them from the tin, store them in a zip-lock baggie, make sure you label it and stash them in your freezer. Come next spring you will have easy- to-individually-handle, very clean, fuzzy little tomato seeds from which you can count on nearly 100 percent germination.

Do make sure that the fruit from which you are saving seeds is not a hybrid variety. If you save seeds from a hybrid tomato they will come up but the fruit won’t look anything like the original. You probably will not be pleased with the result unless you are crazy about very sour Tommy-toes.

In other words, do not try this with a store bought tomato. Even if you find one that actually tastes like a tomato, chances are very high that it’s offspring will be villains.

Tune in here next week and we hope to be able to offer you a way to affordably purchase a collection of tomato seeds that I am currently in the process of fermenting.

Reach longtime Enterprise columnist Ike Adams at ikeadams@aol.com or on Facebook or 249 Charlie Brown Road, Paint Lick, KY 40461.