📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Green Giant
- 🌍 Origin: A legendary green-when-ripe heirloom variety bred by Reinhard Kraft of Neunkirchen, Germany, from a stray potato-leaf plant he found. It has become a gold standard for green tomatoes worldwide.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall), featuring vigorous, large Potato Leaf (PL) foliage. Known to be highly productive, though a few growers note the leaves can be prone to foliar diseases in damp conditions.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, green beefsteaks that typically weigh 10.5 oz (300 g) and up. The skin stays mostly green, but the fruits become soft to the touch when ripe. Prone to minor cracking.
- 👅 Flavor: Universally praised. It has a uniquely sweet, fruity flavor profile that growers frequently compare to kiwi or sweet melon. A true gourmet slicing tomato.
This is something else 😋.. A variety for gourmets. Very good germination. All 5 seeds I sowed popped up together. Grew the bushes in a plastic greenhouse, pruned to two stems. The bush is vigorous with large potato leaves. Yield is impressive, I weighed it and got 18.7 lbs (8.5 kg) per plant.
Fruits are large, 2-3 per truss, with a truss every 2-3 leaves. Not a single fruit was under 10.5 oz (300 g). Extremely juicy, with a fruity kiwi-like flavor (or at least it seems that way to me). The texture is also tender like a kiwi. The skin isn’t particularly thin. Unfortunately, it is prone to cracking, though not severely or deeply. But for that taste, I forgive it everything, and it definitely keeps an honorable spot in my collection.
I barely managed to save a tomato for seeds from my husband 😡, he pretended he didn’t see the “save for seed” tag and was just about to wolf it down 😂.
My seeds were from Svetlana, thanks to her! 🙂 Well, she already wrote everything about it, and I completely agree with her.
It has another distinct trait: it doesn’t change color, it doesn’t turn olive or yellow on the bottom. It just gets soft to the touch.
I also really love this tomato, so far it’s the tastiest of all the green-fruited ones 😋
tomatinka wrote:
It has another distinct trait: it doesn’t change color, it doesn’t turn olive or yellow on the bottom. It just gets soft to the touch.
Vera, look at mine, this is when it’s overripe. Maybe I got a mixed-up seed (off-type)?
Natasha, I’ll reply here too, my opinion is that yours is an off-type (mixed seed). 😕
I just started looking up what my tomato might actually be, and found a photo of a Green Giant that looks very much like mine. I can’t say for sure about the leaf type, I think it was potato leaf. Maybe there are different strains of Green Giant out there?
Mine definitely had potato leaves. But they didn’t change color at all, and neither did Emerald Pear (Izumrudnaya Grusha). All my other green varieties had varying degrees of an olive-yellow blush to them. 😕
Maybe yours cross-pollinated with some red/pink neighbor last year and showed a blush this generation 😂
tomatinka wrote:
Mine definitely had potato leaves. But they didn’t change color at all, and neither did Emerald Pear…
The “Boloto” (Swamp) variety is exactly the same way.
Tomatanya wrote:
Maybe yours cross-pollinated with some red/pink neighbor last year and showed a blush this generation 😂
If that were true, the fruit would have turned completely solid red or pink.
Just writing this to clarify, in case someone reads this and actually thinks that’s how genetics work.
Natasha, was your Giant productive?
I got about 15 tomatoes off it.
Mine grew with potato leaves. Very productive and tasty variety. Got to about 5.5 ft (1.7 m) in the greenhouse. The only downside is that the leaves are prone to diseases, but it doesn’t affect the yield. Loved it.
Definitely a candidate for replanting. 🙂
I completely missed the window and mine got overripe.. 😂 and the whole truss at once.. 😕 But still – not a bad variety.. Thanks for the seeds Svetlana! 🌺
This is how it looks so far, but there are even bigger ones ripening on the bush.
An old green-fruited tomato variety originating from Germany, with potato-type leaves. Tall. Showed good yield in the hoop house. I didn’t get any gigantic fruits, but it made up for it with a very sweet taste.
How does it compare to Malakhitovaya Shkatulka (Malachite Box)?
In terms of taste, yield, and ripening time?
The conversation here about “did it cross-pollinate to get that pink blush?” is a classic tomato grower debate! Drosera correctly points out that if an F1 cross-pollination happened between a green variety and a red variety, the resulting tomato in the very next generation would be entirely red (since the red gene is dominant). It would not be a green tomato with pink stripes.So why did Natalya’s Green Giant have pink streaks? Many green-when-ripe tomatoes (like Captain Lucky or Grub’s Mystery Green) naturally develop an amber/pink blush on the blossom end when fully ripe. However, the true Green Giant (Reinhard Kraft’s original strain) is famous for staying almost completely green, with growers having to test it by “the squeeze test” rather than sight. Natalya likely received an off-type seed (a mutation or a later-generation cross) rather than the true pure strain!
