📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): German Pink Strawberry
- 🌍 Origin: A classic German heirloom that became highly popular among Eastern European collectors under the translated name “Zemlyanika Nemetskaya Rozovaya”. It is often confused or cross-listed with the famous heart-shaped “German Red Strawberry,” but this pink variant is distinct for its rounder shape and Potato Leaf genetics.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall). An extremely vigorous but physically narrow plant with wispy foliage. Because it doesn’t take up much lateral space, it can easily get shaded out by more aggressive neighboring plants.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Round, beautiful strawberry-pink tomatoes. While catalog descriptions claim they can reach up to 14 oz (400 g), growers often see smaller late-season fruits around 4.6 oz (130 g).
- 👅 Flavor: Very tasty and sweet when ripened fully on the vine. However, the flavor drops off significantly if picked green and counter-ripened indoors.
This is an indeterminate, mid-season, tall variety. In my greenhouse, it reached a height of 7.2 feet (2.2 m). The plant habit is quite narrow and wispy. Not knowing this, I planted it right next to a massive, aggressive variety, so I didn’t get a single tomato on the first two lower trusses because it got shaded out.
But once I finally pulled that aggressive neighbor out of the greenhouse, the Strawberry exploded and started setting fruit on every single stem and sucker I left on it. It ended up being one of the very last plants I pulled from the greenhouse at the end of the season.
The foliage type is Potato Leaf . BUT. Several other forum members grew this exact variety, and just like me, they saw a 1:4 ratio of potato leaf plants in their seedlings (one PL plant for every three Regular Leaf plants). I specifically kept and planted the seedling with the potato leaf. Now it’s a mystery: either this variety is genetically unstable and throws different leaf types, or the seed vendor messed up and gave us mixed seed.
The fruits are round and a beautiful pinkish-strawberry color. Mine, coming from the late-season trusses, weren’t huge, maxing out around 4.6 oz (130 g) (though the commercial description claims they can hit 14 oz / 400 g). They are very tasty. However, the flavor drops off noticeably if you pick them early and counter-ripen them indoors. Overall, they are high-quality tomatoes with a decent shelf life. I will definitely be growing this one again next year.
In this post, Elena notes a bizarre 1:4 ratio of Potato Leaf (PL) to Regular Leaf (RL) seedlings from her seed packet. This is actually a textbook example of heirloom tomato genetics at work! The Potato Leaf trait is recessive, while the Regular Leaf trait is dominant.If a bee accidentally crossed a PL mother plant with pollen from an RL plant in the vendor’s field, the resulting F1 seeds would all grow up to be Regular Leaf (since RL dominates). If those seeds were then saved, the F2 generation would segregate exactly along Mendelian lines: typically 3 RL plants for every 1 PL plant (a 75%/25% split). Elena’s observation perfectly confirms that the seed vendor had a cross-pollination issue in their field! By intentionally saving the one PL seedling, she isolated and preserved the original genetics of the variety.
