📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): German Johnson
- 🌍 Origin: A legendary American heirloom hailing from Virginia and North Carolina. It is incredibly famous in the US for being one of the four parent varieties used by Radiator Charlie to breed the legendary Mortgage Lifter tomato!
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall), vigorous vine with classic Potato Leaf (PL) foliage. It is known to be a very heavy yielder if fed well.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, oblate (flattened-round) pinkish-raspberry beefsteaks. They are exceptionally meaty and juicy. Note that the first truss is prone to throwing “megablooms” which can result in catfaced (deformed) fruits.
- 👅 Flavor: The gold standard of heirloom flavor. It offers a rich, complex, perfectly balanced sweet-and-acidic profile that makes it a top-tier sandwich tomato.
Indet, turned out about 5.2 ft (1.6 m) tall for me, potato leaf. Fruits are oblate, bright raspberry color, tasty, juicy.
The weight ended up being 5.3-8.8 oz (150-250 g), but the first truss was completely overloaded with fruit – 14 tomatoes in one cluster.. 😕 It seemed to me that the variety has great potential, I just underfed it… and I probably should have thinned the truss so the fruits would grow larger… Huge thanks to Natasha-Rusalka for the seeds! 🌺
I really loved this tomato. Potato leaf, the tomatoes are large, pink, and heavy yielders. They are setting fruit non-stop so far. I just realized that you really need to pinch off those megablooms (fused blossoms). Alen Andreeva! Huge thanks to you for it and pass my thanks to Lena 🌺🌺🌺
Galina shares a fantastic tip for growing giant Potato Leaf heirlooms like German Johnson: you have to pinch off the “megablooms”! A megabloom is a large, ugly, often double or triple-fused flower that frequently appears in the very center of the first blossom truss on large beefsteak varieties. If you leave it on the plant, it will pollinate and grow into a massive, but highly deformed, scarred, and convoluted tomato (a condition known as catfacing). This mutant fruit steals all the plant’s energy, causing the rest of the normal tomatoes on that truss to stay small. If you pinch that ugly flower off early, the plant redirects its energy into growing 3 or 4 perfectly shaped, large tomatoes instead!
