📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Zolotoy Petushok (Golden Rooster)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian commercial heirloom released by the “Russian Ogorod” (RO) seed company. The name translates to “Golden Rooster” or “Golden Cockerel”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: An extremely vigorous, tall indeterminate. The internodes are quite long, making the plant stretch rapidly. Easily reaches 6.5 feet (2 m) outdoors and will quickly overtake a greenhouse. The foliage is elegant and wispy, but the stems are strong.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Elongated, light yellow plum/icicle tomatoes with a pointed blossom end. They are lighter in color than similar varieties like “Golden Fish”. Warning: They do not hold up well to whole-fruit canning and tend to split/crack in the jars.
- 👅 Flavor: Pleasant, classic tomato flavor with noticeable sweetness. Best eaten fresh.
Seeds are from RO (Russian Ogorod). The expiration date on the packet was 1999 (back then RO had a lot of interesting stuff, and you didn’t have to worry about seed mix-ups). About 10 of them germinated, and I kept 4 bushes for myself.
Talk about an absolute monster of an indeterminate! Outdoors in the dirt, it would have easily hit 6.5 feet (2 m) if I had a stake that tall. Imagine the chaos it would cause in a greenhouse… The bushes are pretty elegant, but you definitely can’t call them wimpy. The internodes are on the longer side. Mid-season. Average yield. The taste of the fruits is decent, you can even taste some sweetness. It’s absolutely no good for canning though – it cracks and splits in the jars.
My Golden Rooster is from Alena Lux’s seed line. Here is what the tomatoes hanging on the vine look like right now.
Quote from Lyubushka: My Golden Rooster is from Alena Lux’s seed line.
So where is the final review/verdict on this variety?
Girls, I’m curious about your opinion. Do you suspect this one is related to Golden Fish (Zolotaya Rybka)? 😉 I think they might be the exact same thing… I grew the Fish in 2011, it was the very first to ripen. And the taste was decent. 👍
Quote from tomatinka: Girls, I’m curious about your opinion. Do you suspect this one is related to Golden Fish? 😉 I think they might be the exact same thing…
Oh man… you girls are like criminal investigators in the tomato world lol. You’ll dig up every single family tie from underground 😂
Quote from tomatinka: Girls, I’m curious about your opinion. Do you suspect this one is related to Golden Fish?
Golden Fish has a slightly different shape. At least compared to what grew for Lyubushka. 🙌
Verun, I grew Golden Fish a long time ago, but it seems to me there is definitely a difference. I don’t remember the exact taste difference, but Golden Rooster is definitively lighter in color. I can’t recall the exact bush habit of the Fish, but I think it didn’t stretch and vine out as much.
Golden Rooster in my greenhouse was a heavy yielder, got up to 6.5 feet (2 m) tall, mid-season ripening. The fruits were sweet.
In the very first post, Galina notes that the expiration date on her seed packet was 1999—meaning those seeds were sitting around for roughly 14 to 15 years before she sowed them!
While seed companies usually put a 2-3 year expiration date on packets for legal and germination-rate reasons, tomato seeds are incredibly resilient. If stored in a cool, dark, and dry place (like a glass jar in the fridge or a cool basement), tomato seeds can easily maintain strong germination rates for 10 to 15 years!
