📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Golden Pineapple (Zolotoy Ananas)
- 🌍 Origin: A renowned American heirloom variety that has become wildly popular among Russian growers under the translated name “Zolotoy Ananas”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall). An extremely vigorous grower that easily hits 6.5-8 feet (2-2.5 m) in a greenhouse. Requires sturdy trellising and can easily support 2 or 3 main stems. Usually matures mid-to-late season.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, oblate (flat-round) bicolor beefsteaks. The skin is yellow-orange marbled with raspberry-red streaks. The interior flesh is a beautiful yellow-pink swirl. Fruits commonly weigh 7-17 oz (200-500 g), though some growers report absolute monsters. Very few seeds.
- 👅 Flavor: Absolutely top-tier. Exceptional sweetness with a rich, fruity profile that many compare to a nectarine or peach. The flesh is dense, juicy, and “melts in your mouth”.
Description: Tall bush up to 6.5 feet (2 m), flat fruits, slicer type, up to 2.2 lbs (1 kg). The fruit color is orange with blurry pink-raspberry swirls, and the flesh is yellow-pink with outstanding flavor. Very juicy. Seeds were from V. Monakhova.
My bush actually didn’t get taller than 5 feet (1.5 m). The fruits really are incredibly tasty, honestly, I’d say they were the absolute best-tasting tomatoes of this entire season. The very first ones had a stunning flavor that literally reminded me of a nectarine. Later on, a little bit of standard tomato flavor started coming through, but just a tiny bit. None of my fruits reached 2.2 lbs (1 kg), the weight was mostly in the 7-10.5 oz (200-300 g) range. Yield was average.
Growing in the greenhouse, it has already passed 8 feet (2.5 m). I had to lower the vines in August because it hit the roof. The bush is very vigorous, easily supports 2-3 stems, and the fruits are large (and got even larger towards autumn). Excellent yield, very disease resistant.
The fruits are oblate, yellow-orange with raspberry-red streaks. Meaty, very few seeds, perfectly balanced flavor, and weighing 10.5-17.6 oz (300-500 g) or more. The flesh is incredibly sweet, it just melts in your mouth. This was my first year growing it.
Girls! When did this variety ripen for you: early, mid, or late? You guys are in the south, but I’m up in the northwest. 🙂
It lagged behind my other bicolors in ripening (like Burracker’s Favorite, Grandma Viney’s Yellow and Pink, and Mary Robinson). For us, it turned out to be mid-season, starting at the end of July, and it pumped out a great harvest of sweet, dense tomatoes for 2 full months. Even the ones sitting indoors to ripen stayed incredibly firm—you had to cut them like an apple, they were so stubborn. Burracker’s and Grandma Viney kept fruiting for a whole month longer than Golden Pineapple, though.
The photo is of the bush outdoors in the dirt on Sept 19, 2016. Seeds were from Nadine. The tomatoes are already smaller here than they were in the middle of summer.
My Golden Pineapple was pretty late in the greenhouse. I would classify it as a mid-late variety. The fruits were delicious, juicy and meaty, very sweet. Very few seeds inside.
My seedlings for this one (seeds from the forum) have pretty thin leaves.
For those who have grown this guy, tell me, what kind of leaves did your seedlings have?
Or maybe I got a seed mix-up…
Here is my Golden Pineapple. The fruits are large, meaty, with very few seeds. Delicious and sweet 😋
Our family usually doesn’t really like the taste of bicolor tomatoes, but we were absolutely blown away by Golden Pineapple. The yield was also great, even during this disgusting weather season we had.
In Svetlana’s post, she mentions that her plant hit the greenhouse roof by August, so she had to “lower the vines”. This is a reference to the popular greenhouse technique known as “Lower and Lean” (or Drop and Lean). Once a vigorous indeterminate like Golden Pineapple reaches the top of its support trellis, the grower unties it, drops the bare lower stem to the ground, and leans the plant at an angle. This gives the growing tip several more feet of vertical space to continue producing fruit right up until the first frost!
