Growers’ Notes and Photos (USDA Zones 3-6 Experience)
Indeterminate mid-season cherry variety with wispy foliage. The fruits are oval, elongated, yellow with faint stripes. Very good flavor with a nice sweetness. Gorgeous and unusual at every stage of ripening:
Edited February 14, 2016 by Drosera
Seeds from Popenko. He lists it in his catalog as Zolotye Geitsa. Beautiful, set fruit really well, zero blossom drop. But the flavor was kind of weak – no tang, no real sweetness. Maybe that’s because it was stuck in a shady spot in the greenhouse 🤷♀️
Strangely enough, mine didn’t turn out to be cherries at all. 🤷♀️
They looked like Golden Gates, but I want to give them another run this year. It’s highly likely this is a variety with unstable, segregating traits. 😳 The ones I grew as ‘Zolotye Geitsa’ turned fully yellow when ripe. But the ones I had labeled as ‘Zolotye Vorota’ turned yellow inside but stayed green and striped on the outside. Before they started ripening, they were exact carbon copies of each other. 😳
Guess I need to investigate.
Got mine from Popenko too, they ran about 2.8-3.5 oz (80-100 g). Yellow striped on the outside, yellow flesh inside. Gorgeous!
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Strangely enough, mine didn’t turn out to be cherries at all. 🤷♀️
They looked like Golden Gates, but I want to give them another run this year. It’s highly likely this is a variety with unstable, segregating traits. 😳 The ones I grew as ‘Zolotye Geitsa’ turned fully yellow when ripe. But the ones I had labeled as ‘Zolotye Vorota’ turned yellow inside but stayed green and striped on the outside. Before they started ripening, they were exact carbon copies of each other. 😳
Guess I need to investigate.
‘Zolotye Vorota’ and ‘Zolotye Geitsa’ are the exact same variety with different translations.
The breeder is Brad Gates.
https://tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/Golden_Gates
It makes more sense to call it ‘Gates’ Golden’ (Zolotye Geitsa) rather than translating his last name literally into the word for ‘gates’.
Full Summary: Plant, Yield, Taste and Instability
- 🌿 Plant: Indeterminate, mid-season vines characterized by delicate, wispy foliage.
- 📈 Yield: Anela noted excellent fruit set with no blossom drop, even in shaded greenhouse conditions.
- 👅 Taste: Reviews are mixed. ElenaN found them very sweet and flavorful, while Anela found them bland and lacking tang (though she suspects growing them in the shade was the culprit).
- 📦 Storage: Beautiful elongated yellow fruits with stripes. There appears to be some genetic instability: ElenaN grew them as small cherries, whereas Eva77 and tomatinka got much larger plum-sized fruits weighing 2.8-3.5 oz (80-100 g). Tomatinka also noted variations in final skin color between different seed batches.
- 🌎 Who Reviewed It: Four growers shared their hands-on experiences, gardening in Zones 3 and 4.
The confusion in this thread stems from a pun by the breeder, Brad Gates (of Wild Boar Farms). He named the tomato “Golden Gates.” When the seeds reached Russia, some vendors translated it literally to mean golden doors/arches (Zolotye Vorota), while others transliterated his last name to mean “Gates’ Golden” (Zolotye Geitsa). This led some growers to mistakenly believe they had purchased two entirely different varieties.
