📌 Quick Summary: Karamelka (Little Caramel)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian commercial dwarf/patio variety bred specifically for container and balcony gardening. The name translates to “Little Caramel” (a hard candy).
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Determinate (bush). Generally stays very short, sprawling, and compact. It requires no pruning or suckering. However, some growers warn that if planted in the rich soil of a greenhouse instead of a container, it can grow out of control and act almost like an indeterminate.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Tiny, perfectly round pink cherry tomatoes weighing up to 0.7 oz (20 g). The skin is strong and crack-resistant.
- 👅 Flavor & Use: Intended as a sweet “snacking” tomato to keep in a pot right outside the door. Reviews are mixed—some find it perfectly juicy and sweet, while others find the flavor mediocre compared to premium cherry varieties.
Description from the packet: An early-ripening determinate variety for balcony/windowsill cultivation and open ground. Plants have highly rated flavor qualities. The fruits are flawlessly uniform, smooth, pink, cherry-sized, weighing up to 0.7 oz (20 g), juicy, and tasty.
It absolutely matches the description. The tomatoes are very tasty and do not crack. I grew it in a 1.3-gallon (5-liter) bucket inside the greenhouse. The bush is sprawling and does not need any tying or support.
In the second photo:
Pink – Karamelka
Yellow – Gold Nugget
Black – Ikra Chernaya (Black Caviar)
We loved both the beauty of the bush and the tomatoes themselves. Planted it in a 2.6-gallon (10-liter) pot. I put some bark at the bottom of the pot (for airflow) since we were cutting firewood at the sawmill in the spring anyway. It produced fruit for 2.5 months. We left every single sucker on it; the later suckers were shorter than the main stems, so the cherries were tucked right inside the canopy. The sprawling nature of the bush and the tiny leaves allowed all the cherries to get plenty of sun.
The bush sat out in the yard, and the cherries were happily snacked on by everyone who ran or walked past it. The bush didn’t catch a single disease and sat out there right up until late September with its final, dwindling cherries. In September, it was beaten in the flavor department by the Rose Quartz Multiflora sitting right next to it. Seeds were from Tomatinka.
July 10th, the beauty of multicolored little balls.
I grew it in 2020, and I’m not planning to grow it again, it didn’t impress me at all. In the greenhouse, it acted almost like an indet. There were an absolute ton of trusses and suckers everywhere, but the trusses were very sparse, no more than 6-8 little fruits per cluster. The flavor was extremely mediocre. Medovaya Kaplya (Honey Drop) is infinitely tastier and way more productive. My chief 3-year-old taste tester refused to eat them :))
User Nadindina notes that her Karamelka went totally out of control, throwing suckers everywhere and growing like an indeterminate tall vine. This is a very common issue when planting “Balcony” or container-specific dwarf varieties directly into the rich, deeply fertilized soil of a greenhouse bed. Balcony tomatoes are bred with genetics intended for high-stress, low-volume soil environments (pots). When you put them in unlimited soil with high nitrogen, they will often “fatten up,” producing massive amounts of vegetative growth and stretching vertically while skimping on actual fruit production!
