📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Big Zac
- 🌍 Origin: Bred in the USA by Minnie Zaccaria. It is famous worldwide among competitive growers for producing record-breaking giant tomatoes.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, vigorous, and noted for producing exceptionally thick stems. It can easily exceed 2 meters (6.5 ft) in a greenhouse.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Red, oblate beefsteaks. Fruit size is highly dependent on pruning. If allowed to grow on multiple stems, it produces uniform fruits in the 400–500 g (14–18 oz) range. If aggressively pruned (e.g., to a single leader and one fruit per truss), it can produce giants weighing 1.5 to 3 kg (3.3 to 6.6 lbs).
- 👅 Flavor: Consistently rated as very sweet and meaty, retaining excellent flavor even at massive sizes.
- ⏳ Maturity: Mid-late to late season.
Seeds are from V. Redko. Here is her description:
“Tall, one of the largest-fruited tomatoes in the world. Fruits are red, dense, weighing from 1 to 3 kg (2.2 to 6.6 lbs), requires careful plant pruning and training.”
It grew in my greenhouse, and I pruned it to 2 stems. The yield was low for me; it dropped a lot of blossoms. The fruits are beautiful and uniform, the weight of the largest was 898 g (about 2 lbs).
“And I am the King! The director gave me such a role…” 👑
2015 season. It turned out to be one of the most delicious and sweetest. It didn’t grow particularly huge for me.
A sturdy indet. The fruits are oblate, bright red, dense, meaty, and tasty. Weight was 400-500 g (14-18 oz), there were no small ones. Good yield.
Big thanks to Marinochka-marinas11 for the seeds! 🌺
Big Zac Red grew in the greenhouse. Height was over 2 m (6.5 ft). It turned out to be one of the late ones. The plant is very vigorous with extremely thick stems. I pruned it to 3 stems (it just happened that way). The fruits are large, roughly the same size and weight. Good yield. 7 of them managed to ripen on the vine. I picked another 6 green. The fruits are meaty and very sweet. I will definitely repeat it. I’ll also try planting the yellow version.
I planted Big Zac in 2014 from R. Dukhov’s seeds. The variety turned out to be mid-late season, grew in open ground. The fruits are large, meaty, with an average weight of about 500 grams (1.1 lbs). Average yield. Grown outdoors.
One of the favorites in my collection. It surprises me every year with its high yield. I’ve been planting it for 5 years, and every year the weight gets bigger)) Last year it was 1,750 g (3.8 lbs), this year 2,075 g (4.5 lbs). The flavor profile for such a large tomato is excellent. I picked 9 fruits from one plant, totaling 13.4 kg (29.5 lbs). And another huge advantage of this variety: even if you pull unripe tomatoes off the plant, they ripen successfully indoors without losing their flavor. A friend brought the seeds from the USA.
