📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Italiansky Delikates (Italian Delicacy)
- 🌍 Origin: Sourced from Eastern European seed swaps, specifically popularized by the legendary Ukrainian private seed collector V.F. Siray. The name translates to “Italian Delicacy”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall). Grows up to 6.5 feet (2 m) outdoors. It has very short internodes, meaning the plant gets absolutely loaded and packed with tight fruit clusters.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Elongated red plums or “icicle” shapes with a blunt tip and a tiny nipple at the blossom end. They weigh about 3.5-4.2 oz (100-120 g). The skin is incredibly thick and firm, making them practically crack-proof with an amazing shelf life.
- 👅 Flavor: A classic, pleasant, straightforward tomato flavor. It’s not a complex fresh-eating slicer, but rather a top-tier workhorse for canning and preserving.
A very heavy yielding canning tomato. The shape, as you can see, is an elongated plum or maybe an icicle??? I always get confused on what the right term is. When it puts on weight and shapes up right before ripening, the base gets slightly wider, the tip is kind of blunt, and there’s a little nipple sticking out. Fruit weight is around 3.5-4.2 oz (100-120 g) on average.
Grew it out in the dirt, the bush gets up to about 6.5 feet (2 m) tall. It sets every truss continuously all the way up to the very top, and the fruit size barely drops off at all. It really stood out from all the other tomatoes I grew because of its firm, I’d even say thick, skin. From what I understand, that’s just a trait of this variety. Whether that’s good or bad is up to you. I love tomatoes like this for canning because they don’t turn to mush, and I don’t eat the skins anyway, I just peel them off 🙂 Plus, thanks to that thick skin, they have a really long shelf life. I pulled the top underripe fruits and they’ve been sitting perfectly fine for three weeks now.
Another notable thing about this variety: it has very short internodes, so the whole bush is just densely packed with fruit. Not a single one cracked. The flavor is just regular, pleasant, nothing super outstanding.
These are the very first trusses:
And these are the upper ones at the end of August:
Galyusha, what seed company was this from (I think I might have a packet)?
Galya, mine were from V.F. Siray.
