Quick Summary of Green Lantern Lights
📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Green Lantern Lights
- 🌍 Origin: A beautiful Green-When-Ripe (GWR) variety. The Russian name translates literally to “Green Lights of Lanterns”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, but usually doesn’t grow overly tall. Outdoors it often stays around 3.2 ft (1 m) tall, while in a greenhouse it can reach 5-5.5 ft (1.5-1.7 m). It has broad, sprawling, dark green foliage.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Oblate (flat-round) tomatoes that ripen to an olive-green base with prominent, bright green and orange stripes. Fruit weight usually ranges from 3.5 to 7 oz (100-200 g), but greenhouse-grown specimens can reach over 1 lb (500 g).
- 👅 Flavor: Sweet, refreshing, and very pleasant. The flesh is emerald green, very juicy, and holds its shape well without turning to mush.
I couldn’t find a dedicated thread for Green Lantern Lights in this section. Defying all my pessimistic expectations, I ended up loving everything about this variety. It’s productive, low-maintenance, disease-resistant, beautiful, and most importantly, tasty.
The bushes out in the open ground were quite powerful, reaching about 3.2 ft (1 meter) tall with beautiful, broad, sprawling regular leaves that had a dark green, almost emerald hue. The fruits are round/oblate, and as they ripen they take on an olive tint covered with sharply defined, bright green and orange stripes. When you slice it open, the flesh is emerald green, very juicy, and has a lot of seeds. The taste is sweet, refreshing, and very pleasant. The fruits weighed around 3.5 – 7 oz (100-200 g). It acted as a mid-season variety for me. The yield was above average, I’d even call it high.
My photos aren’t the best quality, I took them on an old cell phone with a crappy camera. I’d be happy if you guys could share your high-quality photos of this one.
Sharing my photos of this variety, though mine aren’t great quality either)). I planted it last year, and it turned out to be too late for my climate. That’s why the photos were taken under artificial lighting when it got dark early in the evenings. I wasn’t a huge fan of the taste.
I grew it both outdoors and in the greenhouse. Outdoors, the fruits were small and the yield was very low. But in the greenhouse, the variety is an absolute stunner 👍. The taste is good, leaning towards the sweet side. My largest fruits reached up to 1.1 lbs (500 g).
In my greenhouse, the variety turned out to be very productive and grew to 5 – 5.5 ft (1.5-1.7 m) tall. The fruits are beautiful, striped, and have an excellent sweet taste. They are very juicy, but they can crack if you let them get overripe.
I grew Green Lantern Lights this year. Outdoors, it only reached about 3.2 ft (1 m) tall. The taste was more sweet than tart. It didn’t shine in terms of yield – it set two clusters, then skipped a few, then set a few more. I ended up getting about 4.4 lbs (2 kg) off it total. I’ll probably try planting it one more time, it’s a very pretty tomato with a good flavor profile.
cat2008 wrote:
But in the greenhouse, the variety is an absolute stunner 👍 The taste is good, leaning towards the sweet side.
Ksyu, thank you so much for sending me this variety! I was honestly a bit skeptical about it because the pictures I found online didn’t inspire me, which is why I only planted it for the first time this year. It is strictly a greenhouse variety for me, not early at all, but incredibly beautiful and productive.
It took me a long time to figure out the taste because I just couldn’t tell when it was actually fully ripe)). Finally, I had a proper tasting, and I must say, the tomato is very worthy. Plus, it doesn’t turn to mush, the skin is quite firm on the outside. That’s a very important trait for me.
I grew it for the first time last year. It looked exactly like the photos you guys posted earlier, perfectly oblate (flat-round). This year, I planted it from my own saved seeds, and something completely different grew out.
At the end of this thread, Vera mentions that she saved seeds from a perfectly formed Green Lantern Lights fruit one year, only to have a completely different shape grow out the following season. This is a classic example of an accidental cross-pollination (often done by bees!). While tomatoes are generally self-pollinating, if you are growing many varieties close together (especially in an open garden with lots of pollinators), crosses can and do happen. If you plan to save pure heirloom seeds, it’s always best to isolate a blossom truss with a mesh organza bag before the flowers open!
