📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Ikra Chernaya (Black Caviar)
- 🌍 Origin: Dark cherry tomato variety originating from Ukraine. The Russian name translates to “Black Caviar”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indet. An absolute monster of a plant. It is incredibly vigorous, tall, and highly disease resistant. It sets massive, sprawling trusses and keeps producing straight through to October.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Dark brownish-purple cherries with a pinkish undertone. They are larger than standard cherries, typically weighing around 0.7 oz (20 g). They are very juicy but have thinner skin, so they aren’t the best candidates for canning whole.
- 👅 Flavor: Sweet, harmonious, and very juicy. The flavor gets significantly better and sweeter as the season progresses.
I got the seeds as a gift from Ukraine. Indet, cherry, early season, and a good yielder. The fruits aren’t super tiny (which is nice), and the taste is good, balanced, and juicy. I’m not sure they’ll hold up for canning though, they aren’t quite firm enough. The color is pretty standard for a dark tomato, with a pinkish tint.
It just keeps on impressing me. The taller it gets, the more it produces. Here’s the plant from yesterday’s photoshoot:
Wow… look at those plants 👍
🙂 What beauties!
A truss of Black Caviar. My seeds also came from Ukraine.
On average, one “caviar egg” weighs around 0.7 oz (20 g).
I’m curious, how can you tell when they’re fully ripe?
Got my seeds from Galya (Esme) 🌺🌺🌺 Grew it outdoors in the dirt. By the end of the summer, it turned into an absolute giant. Completely disease-free.
The trusses are huge and loaded with tons of little maters. They are extremely juicy. My only issue was that they started baking in the sun (maybe because of the dark color 😲) and a few of them split (but really not many). I had to throw some shade cover over them, but otherwise, maintenance was minimal. The main harvest came towards the end of the season. The very first truss was just a simple one with 8 tomatoes on it, but the final truss was just massive 😲
Here is how my Caviar turned out outdoors in the dirt…
Black Caviar is a real monster, you really ought to grow it outside. At first, the taste was a bit bland, but then the flavor improved so much that the kids were gladly gobbling them up. Got my seeds from @tannychonsik 🤠
It’s October. Caviar is still blooming and fruiting.
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