📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Boar’s Hoof
- 🌍 Origin: A rare dark cocktail variety from the USA (Brad Gates; Wild Boar Farms).
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall). A vigorous, highly productive vine. It is widely praised for its incredible disease resistance—specifically its ability to completely shrug off Leaf Mold (Cladosporium) in humid greenhouse conditions.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Dark mahogany/crimson-black fruits with a unique shape that falls somewhere between a pear and a plum, often with slightly ribbed shoulders. They are small, cocktail-sized tomatoes weighing around 1.8 to 2 oz (50-60 g).
- 👅 Flavor & Use: Very sweet with sugary, tender flesh. Excellent for fresh snacking, salads, or tossing whole into canning jars. Boasts a surprisingly good shelf life for a dark tomato.
Boar’s Hoof (USA). Indeterminate. The fruits are an intermediate pear-plum shape, ribbed at the stem, dark pink-black, tasty, weighing up to 2 oz (60 g). A rare variety!
Elena, what are your thoughts on this variety? 🙂 I really loved how it looks in the photos) I’m debating whether to order it from Popenko or not.
For some reason, my Boar doesn’t have any ribbing at the stem. Is this not Boar’s Hoof? Did the variety segregate? I have two plants, wide potato leaves, and identical fruits on both.
Sveta, the Hoof doesn’t have super strong ribbing, but the shape is still slightly more of a pear than a plum. I grew one plant this year from Polina’s seeds. I mixed up the plants at first, but we figured it out together. I really liked the variety – truly delicious tomatoes, just like Lena said. And the color is so vibrant and unusual for black tomatoes – kind of a crimson-black. The fruits aren’t huge – around 1.8 oz (50 g), the trusses are totally packed. It grew for a really long time and didn’t get hit by leaf mold at all, it was one of the most resilient and longest-producing plants in my greenhouse. In the photo, it’s the bright one right in the middle of the Black Truffles.
The Boar’s Hoof variety turned out to be a heavy yielder in the greenhouse, tall (6 feet / 1.8 m), mid-season. The fruits are medium-sized, beautiful, pear-shaped, red-burgundy in color, tender, with sugary flesh.
Very productive and beautiful variety, I loved it 👍 Seeds were from Polina (Borchanochka) 😘 😘 😘
Absolutely loved this variety. Heavy yielder, tasty both fresh and in jars. Very beautiful, uniform fruits. Great shelf life and ripens up well indoors on the counter. The plant is incredibly vigorous, completely disease-free, and totally loaded with stunningly beautiful fruits. I will definitely be repeating it.
Seeds were from Ilya (Korolevskiy Sad online store). The tomato perfectly matches the photos and descriptions he (Ilya) posted above.
Boar’s Hoof. @Lutik70 shared the seeds with me 🎩 . It made my top 10 list for 2024. The whole plant is just dripping with delicious cocktail tomatoes.
In this thread, Svetlana (Lana_s_Kavkaza) mentions that her Boar’s Hoof plant had wide potato leaves and no ribbing. This is actually a very common occurrence with varieties bred by Brad Gates (Wild Boar Farms), where this tomato originates from. His striped and dark lines are notorious for showing genetic instability years after release, resulting in occasional segregations where a random seed will produce a potato leaf (PL) plant instead of the standard regular leaf (RL).
