📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Detskaya Sladost (Children’s Sweetness)
- 🌍 Origin: Сommercial variety from the “Gavrish” seed company. The name translates to “Children’s Sweetness”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Determinate, compact bush growing about 20-24 inches (50-60 cm) tall. Suitable for open ground or container growing.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Bright red, firm, egg-shaped/oval tomatoes weighing 3.5-4.2 oz (100-120 g).
- 👅 Flavor & Use: Despite the name, growers report that it is not particularly sweet. It has a standard, slightly acidic old-fashioned tomato flavor. Because of its firmness, it is best used as a canning or processing tomato.
- 💪 Standout Features: Highly resistant to Fusarium, Verticillium wilt, and Blossom End Rot (BER). Produces a concentrated harvest (all ripens at once).
Description from the seed packet: Super-early (80-85 days from emergence to harvest), low-growing variety for open ground and temporary film tunnels. Suitable for direct sowing in regions with favorable climates. The plant is determinate, 20-24 inches (50-60 cm) tall. Fruits are egg-shaped, smooth, bright red, firm, and weigh 3.5-4.2 oz (100-120 g). Ideal for whole-fruit canning and processing into tomato products, also good for fresh salads. The variety is resistant to Fusarium, Verticillium wilt, and Blossom End Rot.
Photo by Inna.
The originator is Gavrish. The reviews online seem to be pretty good. If I can find the seeds, I’ll try it in 2015.
I grew it last year. That’s my photo you found up there. It didn’t really stand out to me. The flavor was just a totally standard tomato taste, slightly acidic. Was it productive? Yes. I grew it outdoors in open ground, and it ended up acting like a mid-late season variety for me. But to be fair, everything ripens late for me in open ground.
Beautiful fruits. And that’s about it, really… For me, it wasn’t early at all, more like a mid-season variety. Yield was fine, about the same as everything else, nothing particularly good or bad to say about it. It was one of the few varieties I grew that showed a strong tendency to “fatten up” (vegetative overload / bull-heading)*. If you like the shape of the fruit, I won’t talk you out of it – it’s a perfectly normal, reliable workhorse variety, but I dropped it from my list in favor of better ones.
I tested this variety both in open ground and in a container pot. It succeeded by being incredibly low-maintenance: it didn’t sprawl, didn’t require suckering, and despite the plant’s short height, it produced large red balls, which looked very pretty. Fruit set was excellent, and the harvest was concentrated – everything ripened in one big flush. Very convenient if you need to harvest for canning/processing. The tomatoes are firm and can store for a while. The taste is a totally standard tomato flavor, no frills, nothing you’d remember it for.
Then why did they give it such a name? “Sweetness.” That’s a rhetorical question 🤭
👨🌾 Editor’s Cultural Glossary & Grow Tips:
Marketing vs Reality: Olya perfectly sums up the frustration of buying commercial seeds. Russian companies like Gavrish often slap highly marketable, romantic names on their seed packets. A tomato named “Children’s Sweetness” implies a sugar-sweet, candy-like snacking tomato for kids. In reality, as the forum members discovered, it is a firm, slightly acidic, concentrated-yield processing tomato meant for canning!
