Growing Tomatoes Made Easy: Use Rotting Tomato Slices For “Seed Starters”

So one of your tomatoes went soggy or moldy before you could eat it? Bummer.

But wait! Don’t throw it away!

What if I told you it’s ridiculously easy to GROW a whole BUNCH of tomato plants from just a few slices of that squishy thing?

This great article gives you the skinny on how to use up those rotting tomatoes in the best possible way!

Basically, just cut up your overripe tomato into quarter-inch thick slices.

Place about four of the rounds on top of a 3-5 gallon planter filled with potting soil or compost.

Cover them with a thin layer of more compost/potting soil, water, and wait.

You should see dozens of tomato seedlings popping up within a week or two!

From there, you can gently pull them up and re-pot them farther apart, into small 4-inch planters.

Wait ’til they have a hairy stem and a few proper tomato leaves (not the first set of seed-leaves), and then they’ll be ready to thrive in your garden.

Wait, so why does this work?

The thing is, some seeds (like tomatoes) actually germinate better when they are allowed to ferment inside the fruit they came from.

So, a tomato that’s overripe, rotting, and even moldy, is actually putting its seeds through nature’s ideal germination process.

You can follow this process for saving tomato seeds, as outlined in this article, or you can simply let a rotting tomato do most of the work for you!

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This is a great way to supplement your garden budget, as well as reducing food waste in a practical way.

For best results, use organic heirloom seeds. Otherwise, the tomatoes you’ll grow with this method may not taste or look the same as their mother-plant.

We did this with a gigantic heirloom yellow tomato last year, and its progeny tasted even better than the original! Why make growing food any harder than it has to be?