📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Bulgarska Hala
- 🌍 Origin: A magnificent heirloom from Bulgaria, highly prized by seed collectors. The name translates to “Bulgarian Hala” (in Balkan folklore, a Hala is a mythical dragon—a fitting name for such a monstrously large tomato!).
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, but widely praised for having a very tidy and manageable growth habit. It rarely turns into a jungle, usually stopping around 1.5 – 1.7m (5 – 5.5 ft) in a greenhouse, and staying around 1.2m (4 ft) outdoors.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Massive, oblate (flat-round) pink beefsteaks. Weights commonly range from 300g up to nearly 800g (10 oz to 1.7 lbs). It is famous for having “watermelon-like flesh”—meaning the inside is dense, sugary, sparkling on the cut, and very meaty with almost no seeds.
- 👅 Flavor: A classic, sweet, rich old-fashioned tomato flavor.
- ⚖️ Yield: Generally extremely high-yielding. The trusses get so heavy that they require heavy-duty support, or the vines will literally collapse under the weight of the fruit.
Seeds were from V. Redko. Mid-season, mid-height plant. Pink, oblate fruits weighing 300-700g (10 oz – 1.5 lbs). Sweet, juicy, and meaty. The flesh is “watermelon-like,” with very few seeds.
For me, it turned out to be late-season, height was about 1-1.2m (3-4 ft). The fruits are absolutely beautiful, they literally seem to glow from the inside out, but I only got 8 tomatoes in total. The flavor was just normal, classic tomato taste.
Here is my Bulgarska Hala.
Seeds from T. Yashchenko. Loved this tomato for its flavor, yield, and the overall quality of the fruit. A very worthy variety.
The flesh of these fruits is genuinely like a watermelon… and they look very unusual themselves. Huge thanks to Svetlana-Lana for the seeds! 🌺
Wait, I’m confused: is it an indeterminate? 🤔
Bulgarska Hala, 2015 season. The bush was 130-150 cm (4.2-5 ft) tall, very sturdy. I grew 2 plants, and each had about 10 fruits on it. Almost all of them were the exact same weight. Mid-late season. (Ordered seeds from Angelina). Thank you, Angelina.
Here it is again, Bolgarskaya Hala 🙂
Seeds from Redko, indeterminate tomato, huge, tasty, and productive.
A delicious tomato, but the yield turned out to be a bit worse for me this season… 🤷♀️
I’ve been growing it for two years now, and it constantly brings me joy with its flavor and harvest.
In the greenhouse, it grew to about 1.5 meters (5 ft) tall. Gave a good yield. For me, it ripened mid-late season. The fruits were delicious and sweet.
One of the absolute largest-fruited varieties for me this year. Huge, meaty, tasty fruits. A highly worthy variety!
A variety for true lovers of giant tomatoes. These are such solid, substantial tomatoes! I loved absolutely everything about this variety: the yield, the size of the tomatoes, their shape, the flavor, and the tidy growth habit of the bushes (they didn’t grow taller than 1.7m / 5.5 ft).
I’ve wanted to grow this variety for a long time and I have absolutely no regrets. Beautiful, heavy, dense, and meaty pink fruits up to 780g (1.7 lbs), with extremely good flavor. Seeds were from @LanaD 🙏
Grew it in the greenhouse to 2 stems. It’s a mid-height indeterminate, mid-season.
I also grew it this year, seeds from Kulik. Grew outdoors in open ground, reached about 1.2 meters (4 ft). Vigorous bush, I pruned it moderately (outdoors we usually grow them multi-stemmed). Very, very large fruits—literally all of them. By the end of the season, the stems were just lying on the ground because the weight of the trusses was too much. High yielding, mid-season for our climate. The taste is standard classic tomato. This photo shows one of the last ones I picked, the earlier ones were even bigger, around 600-700g (1.3-1.5 lbs).
An excellent variety. It was highly productive, and the fruits were sweet and meaty.
