📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Grushka Polosataya (Striped Pear)
- 🌍 Origin: A very popular Russian commercial variety. The name translates directly to “Striped Pear”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Determinate (bush). It stays relatively short, reaching about 2.3-2.6 ft (70-80 cm) tall, but it has a very sprawling, bushy growth habit. Growers highly recommend giving it plenty of horizontal space and letting it grow completely unpruned (do not remove suckers) for maximum yields.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Small, festive pear-shaped tomatoes. They are red with distinct yellow/golden stripes, typically weighing around 1-1.8 oz (30-50 g).
- 👅 Usage: While it has a nice sugary flavor for fresh eating, its slightly firmer texture makes it the ultimate processing tomato. It holds its shape perfectly for whole-canning, pickling, and sun-drying.
- ☀️ Climate Tolerance: Extremely reliable. It sets fruit beautifully even during cold, wet, and rainy summers.
The variety really impressed me. Despite this current cold and rainy summer, it turned out to be a heavy yielder and very sugary. The plant is short, sprawling, and extremely productive. The fruits are pear-shaped, striped, sugary-sweet, and tasty.
I really like Grushka Polosataya too! I planted it back in 2016. It’s very beautiful, not large, maybe a little too firm for fresh eating, but it goes into canning jars beautifully. There are very few beautiful and early-season determinates out there like this.
Grushka Polosataya. One of the highest-yielding determinates in my collection 👋 It produced beautiful, strong, and vigorous seedlings. I grew 2 plants in the greenhouse and didn’t prune the suckers at all. The height was about 2.3-2.6 ft (70-80 cm), these bushes need to be given plenty of space. It reliably set fruit on all trusses, the harvest was very decent, although a portion of it was ruined by cutworms. The fruits are festive, beautiful red striped pears weighing about 1-1.8 oz (30-50 g). An excellent option for canning jars 👍 (including the smaller-sized jars), sun-drying, and any kind of processing. The fresh taste is also quite decent, with medium firmness.
Edited September 27, 2020 by Svetikk
