📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Zolotnik
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian micro-dwarf variety. The name “Zolotnik” refers to an old measure of weight (often used for gold) and comes from the famous proverb “Small is the zolotnik, but expensive” (meaning: good things come in small packages).
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Micro-dwarf/Determinate. Incredibly compact, staying around 12 inches (30 cm) tall. It starts off upright and then sprawls out slightly as the heavy trusses weigh down the suckers. Perfect for ultra-tight spacing (5-6 plants per square meter) or container growing.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Bright, glowing golden-yellow cherry/salad tomatoes. Despite the tiny plant size, the fruits are relatively decent-sized for a micro-dwarf.
- 👅 Flavor: Rated 5/5 for its category. A great balance of sweet and sour.
- ⏳ Maturity: Ultra-early. It often outpaces varieties started indoors under lights, even when the seeds are directly sown into the garden dirt.
This little bush is only about 12 inches (30 cm) tall. I direct-sowed it right into the garden bed, and it was the very first to start setting fruit and ripening. It completely outpaced the seedlings I had started indoors. I think it perfectly justifies the proverb “Small is the zolotnik, but expensive” (good things come in small packages).
The glowing yellow tomatoes absolutely covered the little bush. Any suckers that I didn’t manage to prune off by the end of summer immediately started setting fruit too. When the main bush finished fruiting and started to dry up, a new harvest started ripening on the basal suckers shooting up from the roots, which were only about 6 inches (15 cm) tall.
Unfortunately, I somehow forgot to take a picture of the ripe ones… The bush is shorter than Yantarnyi, but the tomatoes are bigger.
Such a tiny little bush. It’s very compact at first, and then it sprawls out a bit as the suckers get heavy. I’d definitely group it with the ultra-early varieties, right alongside Iyunskiy (June), Turboreaktivny, and Utenok (Duckling). You can plant all of them very tightly together, 5-6 plants per square meter (approx 10 sq ft).
It fruited for us from mid-June all the way to mid-September. It’s still sitting under the row cover, but it has stopped flowering. The tomatoes soak up the sun until they turn a glowing golden color. Delicious, sweet-and-sour flavor, 5 out of 5 stars.
Seeds were from Tomatinka.
Yes Lenochka, it is incredibly early. For me, this one and Antoshka are the absolute earliest out of all the yellow/orange varieties.
In the first post, Vera mentions she “direct-sowed it right into the garden bed.“ While almost all heirloom tomatoes in cold climates must be started indoors 6-8 weeks before the last frost, there is a specific category of Russian ultra-earlies (like Zolotnik, Turboreaktivny, and Iyunskiy) that have been selectively bred over generations to germinate and fruit rapidly in cold soil. For growers in short-season zones, these are fantastic backup varieties in case your indoor seedlings fail!
