📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Damskie Palchiki (Ladies’ Fingers)
- 🌍 Origin: A legendary old commercial and home garden variety. The name directly translates to “Ladies’ Fingers”, perfectly describing its shape.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Determinate to semi-determinate. Very compact outdoors, but can grow taller if staked in a greenhouse. Known for being incredibly reliable and low-maintenance.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Red, elongated plum/paste tomatoes. They weigh around 2.5 oz (70 g). The flesh is very firm, dense, and has 2-3 locules with very few seeds.
- 🍅 Culinary Use: The ultimate processing tomato. Highly prized for whole-canning, pickling, making thick tomato paste, and homemade ketchup.
- ⏳ Maturity: Early season (95-100 days). Because it ripens its crop so early and uniformly, it usually escapes late blight completely!
Description from the seed packet: Early variety (95-100 days from emergence to fruiting). Designed for growing in the open ground and hoop houses. The plant has medium foliage, reaching 20-24 inches (50-60 cm) tall outdoors. Pruning isn’t necessary unless your goal is to get an even earlier harvest. In a greenhouse, the plant height can reach 40-47 inches (100-120 cm).
The fruits are pear-shaped/elongated, weighing around 2.5 oz (70 g), red, with 2-3 seed cavities and very few seeds, aromatic. Yield is up to 5.5 lbs (2.5 kg) per bush. Planting spacing is 16×20 inches (40×50 cm). Thanks to its earliness and concentrated uniform ripening, it easily avoids late blight. Best suited for making ketchups, tomato paste, and whole-canning.
Photo credit: Nadija
Good variety. I grew it in the open field. At first, it acts like a slow starter, but then it kicks into high gear and starts setting fruit like crazy. There are lots of tomatoes, and they turn out absolutely delicious canned in their own juice. It looks a bit like the Caspar variety, but it is much meatier.
I had an interesting experience. From one batch of seeds, my outdoor plants grew up to 4-5 feet (1.3-1.5 m) tall. The fruits were dense, tasty, and great for pickling. But from another batch of seeds, the plants were super short, practically without leaves—the ground was just red with a carpet of tomatoes! The fruits themselves looked very similar.
I didn’t manage to save seeds from the short ones, but something really interesting happened with the tall ones. I kept saving seeds from the absolute best and largest fruits every year. Eventually, all the tomatoes got bigger. It got to the point where they were too big to fit comfortably into my canning jars! I had to work backwards with my seed saving – not keeping the smallest ones, obviously, but intentionally selecting seeds from fruits that were smaller than average.
I don’t know if the photo will load properly. I am extremely happy with Damskie Palchiki. They performed beautifully across all parameters: taste, shelf life, and they are just so pretty 👏
I grew it under a temporary low tunnel. Every single blossom sets a fruit, regardless of whether it’s hot or cool weather.
The bush type is similar to Buyan or Rio Grande. The fruits are on the drier and firmer side. This variety is best suited for pickling, or preserving whole in marinade or juice.
The name of this variety really doesn’t leave room for deviation from the standard. Any other fruit shape should just be called an off-type (cross). All the seed companies show elongated little tomatoes on the packet, just like in the first post of this thread (great photos, by the way).
But recently, Myazina released a “Raspberry Ladies’ Fingers”, and the packet shows a fat plum shape. What do “fingers” have to do with that??? Also, if we look in Tatiana’s TOMATObase, the tomatoes shown are completely disconnected from the name of this variety. They are listed as oval shape, and the photos show chubby, oval tomatoes. I’d give Tatiana a piece of advice (unsolicited, I know) to just remove the photo of that variety, because in her case, it’s clearly an off-type. Or maybe label it “Ladies’ Fingers: Picasso Edition.” You know, like the famous paintings of his last wife with those incredibly unnatural, fat fingers.
- Seed Saving & Phenotypic Selection: Victoria’s post above is a fantastic real-world example of selective breeding in the home garden! By repeatedly saving seeds from only the largest fruits, she unintentionally bred her Damskie Palchiki line to produce tomatoes that were too large to fit through the mouth of a standard Mason jar! This is why it’s crucial to select seeds from tomatoes that represent the true, ideal standard of the variety you want, rather than just the biggest ones.
- Rio Grande & Buyan: These are classic, rugged determinate paste tomatoes known for setting huge yields in bad weather, which gives you an exact idea of how Damskie Palchiki behaves in the garden!
