📌 Quick Summary: Kapiya Rozovaya (Pink Kapia)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian commercial heirloom heavily circulated by companies like Gavrish and popular collectors like Valery Medvedev. The name “Kapia” usually refers to a famous elongated sweet pepper, hinting at the shape of these tomatoes!
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall). The plant itself has a classic “wispy” or frail oxheart-like foliage, but it produces absolutely massive, heavy trusses. It performs well both in greenhouses and outdoors in the dirt, though it can easily reach 6.5 feet (2 m) outdoors.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, thick, pink “icicle” or pepper-shaped tomatoes. They are very meaty and substantial, frequently weighing 5.3 to 7 oz (150-200 g) each.
- 👅 Flavor & Use: A fantastic multi-purpose paste tomato. Highly rated for freezing, sun-drying, and making thick sauces. Its large size and meaty texture make it a superb option for whole-canning if you prefer large, substantial tomatoes in your jars rather than small cherries.
A vigorous indet, the fruits look a lot like Petrusha (Petrusha Gardener). They are thick, pink icicles. Good flavor. Mid-season ripening. Great for freezing, but also not bad for sun-drying at all. Great in marinades too. For those who don’t like canning tiny cherry tomatoes, this one will be absolutely perfect. 😉
I have seeds for this one too, I didn’t get a chance to plant it last year, but I’ll definitely keep this variety in mind. This shape is exactly my style 👍. Verochka, how is it when it comes to BER (Blossom End Rot)?
Olechka, never noticed any. Didn’t have a single spot of BER. 👍
Vera, I planted this Pink Kapia a long time ago, seeds were from Gavrish. The tomatoes were just as large as yours, but mine ended up being completely hollow inside, so I didn’t really like them.
Stas had some really good-looking ones. I saw the photos of his harvest and immediately ran to the store to buy some seeds for myself. 😉
I don’t know, Olya, mine didn’t seem hollow to me at all……
Mine were growing in the greenhouse, the foliage was extremely skinny and frail, but the fruit trusses were absolutely massive. It probably just does better in open ground.
My Pink Kapia is from Valery Medvedev. I plant it outdoors in open ground. This year, I harvested 2.5 buckets (about 40 lbs) from just 12 bushes. Extremely happy with this variety. It was the only variety this year that actually worked out for canning because the skin didn’t crack. All my other small tomatoes split right open in the jars. Now I’m browsing the forum trying to find some small-fruited varieties that are good for canning.
Planted the Gavrish version of Pink Kapia. The plant looks incredibly skinny and frail, but the fruits turned out pink, very meaty, and definitely not small. I grew it both in open ground and in the greenhouse, and they performed identically in both environments.
In 2020, Kapia shot up to almost 6.5 feet (2 m) tall in open ground. The tomatoes were large, 4-5 per truss, weighing 5.3 to 7 oz (150-200 g) each. We had heavy rains in June and August, so almost all of them cracked on me. The taste was just standard, so they all went into tomato puree.
User Olga mentions that her Gavrish-brand Kapia tomatoes turned out completely hollow inside. In Russian heirloom circles, hollow or “stuffer” type paste tomatoes are called pustotelye. While some heirloom varieties are genetically predisposed to being hollow (like the Yellow Stuffer), an otherwise dense paste tomato like Kapia can become hollow if the plant suffers from poor pollination, extreme heat stress during blossom set, or erratic watering while the fruit is bulking up in the greenhouse!
