Growers’ Notes and Photos (USDA Zone 5 Experience)
Seeds are from this packet.
The seed company’s description: Mid-season (110-115 days from sprouting), tall variety for plastic and glass greenhouses. Indeterminate vine, reaching 6.5 ft (2 m) tall. Large 3.5-5 oz (100-140 g) bright orange pear-shaped fruits, hanging in spectacular, long, branched clusters of 12-15. Perfect for salads and canning. Sugary flesh, very sweet, with high carotene content. Yields up to 20 lbs (9 kg) per vine.
Grew this outdoors right in the dirt, completely ignoring the vendor’s greenhouse instructions. Here’s what I got:
Got some wildly different shapes on the exact same vine. The elongated fruits fit the fit the packet specs, but the round-pear ones got way bigger:
Absolutely loved the flavor – sweet with just a tiny hint of tang. Here they are sliced:
Saved seeds separately from the elongated ones and the round-pear ones. 🙂
Edited July 27, 2015 by Tineke
Just picked up these Gavrish seeds too. Has really nobody else grown them? Absolute beauties. Sound delicious from the description.
Never saw those 12-15 fruits per truss they promised, more like 4 to 6. Not a single one was actually lamp-shaped either. Yield was just average. They were great for canning and dehydrating, but my seed packet was a total mixed bag of off-types. Got one vine throwing small reds, another small yellows, and the rest looked like this:
Full Summary: Plant, Yield, Taste and Usages
- 🌿 Plant: Indeterminate and tall, reaching up to 6.5 ft (2 m). Can be grown successfully outdoors right in the dirt, despite the commercial packet suggesting greenhouse-only cultivation.
- 🍅 Fruit: Supposed to be 3.5-5 oz (100-140 g) bright orange, pear-shaped tomatoes. However, growers report a lot of shape variation (some elongated, some round-pear) on the same vine, and a high rate of completely wrong off-type seeds from the vendor.
- 📈 Yield: The commercial packet claims up to 20 lbs (9 kg) per vine in massive clusters of 12-15, but real-world growers experienced average yields with only 4-6 fruits per truss.
- 👅 Taste & Use: Sugary flesh that is sweet with a slight tang. Excellent for fresh eating, canning, and making dehydrated (sun-dried) tomatoes.
