📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Barmaley
- 🌍 Origin: Variety from the Siberian Garden (Sib-Sad) seed company. It is named after “Barmaley”, a famous pirate villain from classic Russian children’s fairy tales.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: A reliable mid-season variety that performs well both in greenhouses and outdoors in open ground.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Beautiful pinkish-raspberry slicers. Major Note: It has a strong reputation for splitting and cracking upon ripening, especially if subjected to rain or inconsistent watering. However, in certain climates or growing conditions, the skin remains intact.
- 👅 Flavor: The flavor is exceptional and highly rated by growers. It features very juicy flesh with a perfect sweet and tart balance. Some say it tastes exactly like high-quality home-canned tomatoes straight off the vine, needing absolutely no salt.
This is a variety from Sib-Sad, we’ve been growing it for 2 years now. This year, out of the 88 varieties I planted, it was the only one that suffered from splitting/cracking as it ripened.
But we absolutely loved the flavor—we gave it a solid 5 out of 5 for both years we grew it. The flesh has a great sweet and tart balance, very juicy. Honestly, eating it fresh gives you the sensation of eating a perfectly executed jar of tomatoes canned in their own juice—you don’t even need to sprinkle salt on it.
In the photos, Barmaley is the one in the middle, between Gloria (top) and Yantar (bottom). The color is a deep pink-raspberry.
I grew “Barmaley” 5 or more years ago. I remember it specifically because of how badly it cracked and split on the vine. The taste wasn’t bad at all, but I never bothered planting it again.
Grew mine outdoors in open ground. Didn’t have any cracking/splitting issues at all.
