📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Bergamot
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian/CIS variety circulated by heirloom seed collectors like Tamara Yashchenko and Lidia Ganzen.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, but relatively manageable in height (around 1.2–1.5m / 4–5 ft in open ground). It features sparse/wispy foliage. The first fruit truss sets quite high (usually after the 11th leaf).
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Controversial! While official catalogs describe it as a striped, dark-pink, cone-shaped tomato, multiple growers report getting massive, solid pink, oblate (flat-round) beefsteaks reaching up to 400g (14 oz).
- 👅 Flavor: A good, classic tomato flavor with a noticeable acidic tang. Not intensely sweet, despite what some seed packets claim.
- ⏳ Maturity: Mid to mid-late season. It is known for a concentrated ripening period, meaning it produces in heavy flushes rather than trickling in one by one.
Mid-sized plant. The fruits are supposed to be pink and cone-shaped, up to 400g (14 oz). However, mine turned out to be mostly oblate (flat-round). The taste is good.
Could you share a bit more detail? Plant height, yield, days to maturity, is it determinate or indeterminate?
Here is the description of this variety from collector Tamara Yashchenko’s catalog: “BERGAMOT. Mid-sized plant. Fruits are dark pink with stripes, cone-shaped, up to 400g. Very sweet!”
So I’d really love to hear more real-world details about Bergamot too! 😳
The seedling emerged on Feb 24, 2014. The first truss set high—after the 11th leaf. It probably skipped the 9th leaf node (maybe due to stress/blossom drop). Subsequent trusses formed every 3 leaves.
The plant has sparse foliage. Height was around 120 cm (4 ft). The color and weight matched the description perfectly, but the shape definitely did not. They are tasty, but honestly, not very sweet!
(First photo was taken on July 23, the second on July 6.)
I grew it in 2018 from seeds sourced from Lidia Ganzen. Mine were also oblate, very large pink beefsteaks.
The flavor is a classic tomato taste with a nice acidic tang; they are indeed not overly sweet. Very productive.
The plant itself is an indeterminate, but outdoors in open ground, it stayed under 1.5 m (5 ft) for me. (To be fair, the tie broke, so the plant ended up sprawling on the ground for a while). As for maturity, it’s somewhere between mid-season and mid-late (I sowed seeds March 21-22, and it started ripening in the first week of August). However, it has a very concentrated ripening period—the tomatoes ripen uniformly, coming in batches of several fruits at once.
