📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Grightmire’s Pride
- 🌍 Origin: A famous heirloom originally from Yugoslavia. It was introduced to the North American heirloom tomato community by Fred Grightmire of Ohio, USA.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall), reaching up to 6.5 ft (2 m) in a greenhouse. It exhibits the classic oxheart “wispy” or weeping foliage (drooping leaves that hug the stem), which can sometimes make the plant look thirsty even when it’s perfectly healthy.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Beautiful, slightly ribbed pink oxhearts. Typical weight is around 7-9 oz (200-250 g), though they can get larger under ideal conditions. The flesh is incredibly dense, meaty, and contains very few seeds.
- 👅 Flavor: Universally praised as a top-tier, 5/5 tasting tomato. It has a rich, sweet, and juicy profile.
- 📈 Growing Traits: An early-to-mid season ripener. It performs well both in open ground and high tunnels, though it can drop blossoms during extreme temperature swings.
I loved this variety primarily for its beautiful fruit shape, a perfect slightly ribbed heart. The taste is a solid 5/5. It’s hard to judge the yield this year because of the “summer winter” we had; several tiers of blossom clusters dropped completely, but that happened across the board, not just with this variety. The trusses that did set fruit were good, so it seems to be a productive variety overall. The listed weight was 14 oz (400 g), mine were 7-9 oz (200-250 g), and the listed height was 5 ft (1.5 m).
Edited July 14, 2015 by Drosera
Sash, where did you grow it, in a greenhouse or out in the open ground? Beautiful slice 👍
It grew in a greenhouse, but even there it was impossible to keep up with the weather. You open the doors, and at night in July it drops to 41°F (5°C). You close them, the sun comes out during the day and boom, it’s 122°F (50°C) in there. So unless you practically live next to your greenhouse, there were major problems this season. Beautiful cross-section, but the whole fruit itself is even prettier, it just has such perfect features.
Thanks, Sash! Yeah, you can tell the tomato is uniform, neat, looks like a perfectly bred aristocrat 👍
I’m starting to get the hang of spotting truly tasty tomatoes just by looking at their cross-section 🤐 I have a couple of others with a similar flesh color, and they also have very few seeds, super tasty.
This year I planted Grightmire’s Pride from Natasha NatNik (original seeds from V. Redko) and Grightmire’s Pride from Sasha (seeds from A. Kulik). I thought they were the exact same variety, but they turned out differently. The ones from Kulik produced smaller fruits, denser, with a very high-quality appearance, extremely tasty and sweet. A wonderful variety, it’s definitely going on my grow list again. The ones from V. Redko threw larger fruits, but the taste was just average. Both were grown in open ground.
Grightmire’s Pride (A. Kulik line):
Grightmire’s Pride (V. Redko line, didn’t get a cross-section photo):
Excellent variety. In the hoop house, it reached up to 6.5 ft (2 m) tall. The fruits are heart-shaped, very tasty, sweet. Heavy yielder. The leaves hug the stem (classic wispy foliage).
It was the first one to ripen for me out in the open ground. We ate one little tomato yesterday. Turned out to be super tasty. Juicy, sweet.
Very impressed! The heart isn’t huge, but incredibly tasty. So far, it’s the best tasting one this season. 5+!
I grew it in 2020 in the greenhouse. It was mid-early, productive, and very tasty. Tall plant, about 6.5 ft (2 m). Fruits are large, pink, heart-shaped.
ElenaN’s observation about getting two very different results from two different seed vendors is a classic challenge in the heirloom tomato world. Because open-pollinated tomatoes can sometimes cross-pollinate via bees, or simply mutate slightly over decades of being saved by different growers in different climates, distinct “strains” or “lines” of the same variety emerge.
It appears the Kulik strain stayed truer to the dense, sweet, and meaty oxheart profile that Fred Grightmire originally introduced!
