📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Jersey Giant
- 🌍 Origin: A rare heritage paste tomato originally from New Jersey, USA. It is highly valued among global collectors for its massive, meaty fruits.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate. A sprawling, late-season, and very vigorous plant. Produces reliably with no skipped trusses.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Huge, elongated red paste/plum tomatoes shaped somewhat like a pouch (thicker at the blossom end) with green shoulders. They can easily reach up to 6 inches (15 cm) in length!
- 👅 Flavor & Use: This is strictly a processing tomato. The flesh is incredibly dense, dry, and not overly sweet. It is considered a top-tier choice for making thick paste, stuffing, or sun-drying.
My seeds were from Dukhov* (Ukraine).
External plant description: A late-season, sprawling, and very sturdy plant.
Fruit set: Excellent, no skipped blossoms/trusses, and even the very last top trusses manage to ripen.
Height: Grown outdoors in open ground. It was 4.6 feet (1.4 m) tall by August 23rd, and reached about 5 feet (1.5 m) by September 6th.
Trusses: 3 to 4 fruits per cluster.
Overall yield: Average.
Fruit: An elongated red plum, shaped kind of like a pouch (thicker at the bottom), with green shoulders. They get to be about 6 inches (15 cm) long.
Density of ripe fruit: Extremely high.
Flavor: Ordinary old-fashioned tomato flavor, very dry, incredibly dense. I would rate the sweetness a 3 out of 5.
First impression: This is the absolute perfect tomato for sun-drying and for making stuffed tomatoes. The main drawback is that this variety is completely unsuitable for fresh eating (slicing).
My Ratings (out of 5):
Seedling vigor: 4.5
Plant habit: 4.5
Fruit quality: 4
Overall variety rating: 4
Edited September 18, 2015 by Drosera
The “Dry” Tomato Advantage: When Alena says this tomato is “dry and unsuitable for fresh eating,” to a home-canner, that is actually the highest compliment possible! Varieties with low water content and dense, dry flesh save hours of boiling time when making tomato paste or sauce, and they dehydrate beautifully in a food dehydrator without rotting.
