📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Gigant Sukhanova (Sukhanov’s Giant)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian heirloom variety favored by private collectors.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall), growing up to 6 ft (1.8 m). Note on Leaf Type: This variety currently has both Regular Leaf (RL) and Potato Leaf (PL) versions circulating among growers, meaning the strain may still be throwing off-types or experiencing cross-pollination in some seed banks.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large pinkish-red beefsteaks, often showing faint striping on the skin. They are oblate (flattened-round) and can reach massive sizes, with growers claiming potential weights up to 2.6 lbs (1.2 kg).
- 👅 Flavor: The flesh is “sugary” (dense and slightly granular/sparkling inside), meaty, and very sweet. Highly praised by growers for its fantastic flavor profile.
- ⏳ Maturity: Early to mid-season. It is noted for being a very stable, reliable heavy yielder even in suboptimal conditions.
Description: Bush up to 6 ft (1.8m), sturdy, fruits are pink-red with light stripes, high-oblate shape, up to 2.6 lbs (1.2kg), sugary texture, meaty, sweet. An early season variety, heavy yielder, resistant, and stable.
I grew it in open ground, in poor lighting conditions and cramped spacing. It reached a height of 4.2 ft (1.3 meters). Even with such a bad planting spot, the variety showed good yield. The fruits were up to 10.5 oz (300 g), the taste was ordinary, with a little bit of tang.
Wow, what a beauty 👍!
👍 Elena, whose seeds were they?
Beauties! 🌺 I ordered them from V. Redko, waiting on them now.
Katyush! The seeds were from Vera Monakhova.
(I will bring a bunch to give to Svetikk at the Moscow meetup)
Elena, what kind of leaf does it have? I planted 2 seeds. One came up with a potato leaf, and the other one is a regular leaf 😕
It has a regular leaf. And overall it’s a super variety. It completely won me over. Yield is top-notch. It’s beautiful, but most importantly, the flavor profile is exactly what I look for. I’m planting a lot of it this year. 👍
Nadya! Regular leaf. It’s the one on the right in this photo:
Thanks Elena 🌺 I’ll tag the true one. But I’ll keep the other one too, just to see what grows 😕
Nadya Ya wrote:
Elena, what kind of leaf does it have? I planted 2 seeds. One came up with a potato leaf, and the other one is a regular leaf 😕
😫 and both of mine have potato leaves…
Mine has potato leaves.
Fell in love with this variety! Thanks to Galya-64 for the seeds 😘 One of the sweetest in 2015 😋 Regular leaf. Super heavy yielder. Large pink fruits, meaty and tasty! Will definitely be growing it again 👍
The conversation halfway down this thread about Regular Leaf (RL) versus Potato Leaf (PL) seedlings is a classic seed-saver’s dilemma!
The true Gigant Sukhanova is supposed to have a Regular Leaf (as confirmed by Mikhail and Tamara). So why did Nadezhda, Aleksandr, and Nelya get Potato Leaf seedlings? This happens when a variety is slightly unstable or when a bee accidentally cross-pollinates the mother plant with a nearby Potato Leaf variety. When you plant those seeds, the genetics segregate.
Nadezhda’s strategy is perfect: always label the “true” version, but grow out the “off-type” (mutant) in a spare corner of the garden just to see what happens. Sometimes those accidental crosses turn into incredible new varieties!
