📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Banan Pestryi (Speckled Banana)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian commercial variety from the “Poisk” seed company, part of their special “Vkusnoteka” (Flavor Library) line. The name translates to “Speckled Banana” or “Variegated Banana”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, tall, and vigorous. It is a late-season producer that will keep setting fruit right up until the autumn frosts. Does well both outdoors and in the greenhouse.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Elongated, striped red-and-yellow paste tomatoes. Most fruits feature a distinct “beak” or nipple at the blossom end. Note on Genetics: Growers report some instability with this commercial seed—you might encounter off-types with wild shape variations or even yellow fruits. Like many elongated paste varieties, it is susceptible to Blossom End Rot (BER). Great shelf life.
- 👅 Flavor & Utility: Highly debated! Many growers find the flesh incredibly dense and “dry”, making it a mediocre fresh slicer but an absolute top-tier processing tomato (perfect for sauce, canning, or dicing and freezing). Others report getting sweeter, meatier fruits.
Got mine from the Poisk seed company (their Vkusnoteka line). Gorgeous tomatoes, but the flesh is on the dry side. I’d rate them a 4 out of 5. Average yield. Indet.
Beautiful little beaked tomatoes. Is it an indet? Does it get really tall?
Rusalka: Beautiful little beaked tomatoes. Is it an indet? Does it get really tall?
Yeah, tall indet. Mine was also from Poisk. Grew it outdoors in open ground, pruned to 2 stems. Yield was solid, but only one tomato actually looked like a banana shape 😂. Firm, beautiful. Honestly don’t remember the taste—by that time of the season I was completely tomato’d out 🙈. But it’s definitely not a fresh slicer variety—most likely intended for processing and freezing in chunks 🙂
My daughter said they actually held their flavor in the fridge all the way until November.
She gave me strict orders to grow them again. Mine were all long with that little pointed beak on the end.
Nessi, I must have gotten crossed seeds (an off-type), because mine turned out so incredibly dry… Even though it was from the exact same “Vkusnoteka” line.
Nessi: Got mine from the Poisk seed company (their Vkusnoteka line). Gorgeous tomatoes, but the flesh is on the dry side. I’d rate them a 4 out of 5. Average yield. Indet.
I also grew three plants of Speckled Banana from the Poisk Vkusnoteka line. Two outdoors and one in the greenhouse. Grew fine in both spots, yield was average. But there were definitely some genetic surprises: one plant threw yellow striped tomatoes (the stripes faded a bit when fully ripe). Shapes were all over the place… but almost all of them had the “nipple” at the blossom end.
It’s definitely not an early variety, but it kept fruiting right up until the frost. In one of the photos, you can see 3 of them lying on the bottom right, red and yellow ones… you can clearly see the shapes are inconsistent.
Flavor-wise, they seemed pretty “meh” to me… especially if you have other, tastier varieties around 😂
My Speckled Banana wasn’t dry at all. Yield was average (but definitely not low), and the tomatoes were meaty and sweet. You can clearly see in the cross-section photo that it isn’t dry. The ones on the scale in my photo aren’t even the biggest ones, they are actually kinda small.
The only thing I can complain about is that it caught Blossom End Rot (BER).
