📌 Quick Summary: Kartofelnyi Malinovyi (Potato Raspberry)
- 🌍 Origin: A commercial heirloom variety distributed by Siberian Garden (SibSad). The name perfectly describes it: it has “potato” style leaves and produces “raspberry” pink fruit.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall). Reaches about 5.2 feet (1.6 m) in height. Features highly distinctive Potato Leaf (PL) foliage that lacks the jagged serrations of regular tomato leaves. It has an open, airy “transparent” canopy.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Medium to large, round or oblate (flattened) raspberry-pink beefsteaks. The fruits average around 10.5 oz (300 g) but can get larger. The skin is quite thin, making them prone to cracking in wet weather.
- 👅 Flavor & Use: Very juicy, tender, and sweet. A fantastic early-season fresh eating and salad tomato. Warning: Too much nitrogen or overly rich soil will cause it to put on excessive foliage (fattening up) at the expense of fruit production!
An early-ripening, indeterminate variety from SibSad. The seeds were sent to me by Marina from Kirov. The fruits are round and oblate, medium in size, trusses set very well. It was the very first one to ripen, and it gave off its harvest all at once. Tasty.
This is my Kartofelnyi Malinovyi, also from Marina in Kirov. It’s a variety with potato-type foliage. The fruits are tasty, with a nice sweetness to them.
Tanyusha, I’m honestly not sure if this variety is identical to my “Crimean” which also has a potato leaf. Those are also deep pink, almost all identical in size on the truss, with fairly dense flesh, and sweet. This year, because of the massive amount of rain, they met their demise pretty quickly, but they did manage to ripen in the garden bed – I grew them in open ground. We really need to compare them side by side. I sent you some of those seeds.
Girls, it obviously liked your gardens way better. Tanya, Lena, you guys are magicians, you grew such absolute beauties. 😄 …..
But it’s growing for me too, and it truly proved itself as an early, or at least mid-early variety, even though the packet lists it as a mid-season tomato. Mine grew to about 5.2 feet (160 cm) tall. It set fruit on every single sucker because I didn’t prune it at all. The fruits might have been a bit smaller because of that, but some were still pushing 10.5 oz (300 g).
Here is the primary source, so to speak…
More than likely not, Ninochka! The SibSad variety has a very “transparent,” open plant canopy, and exposed fruits in Crimea wouldn’t survive the blazing heat. It’s a mid-early salad variety. The fruits have very tender flesh and thin skin, and for us, they were prone to cracking. Both the flesh and the juice are sweet. It’s multi-locular (lots of seed cavities) and has a ton of seeds.
Someone once gave me seeds for “Sweet Raspberry” claiming it was from Japan, but it turned out to be an exact twin of this variety.
I grew the one from SibSad outdoors in open ground during a very cold summer – maybe that’s why the taste was just completely ordinary, even though Favorite Holiday growing right next to it was sweet. Other than that, it was a heavy yielder and wasn’t fussy. I won’t be repeating it though.
I started seedlings from the SibSad seeds, and my leaves look like a regular tree, meaning they aren’t jagged/serrated, just completely plain 😲 😲 😲 What does this mean? Was the entire packet mislabeled?
Could be the whole packet, could be not. SibSad loves to throw surprises at us 🤫
I started seedlings from the SibSad seeds, and my leaves look like a regular tree, meaning they aren’t jagged/serrated, just completely plain 😲 😲 😲 What does this mean? Was the entire packet mislabeled?
But why would it be mislabeled? The variety is literally supposed to have a potato leaf, and that’s exactly what you got. Potato leaves aren’t jagged/serrated, they look exactly like tree leaves 😉 Here are some photos of Ninulia’s potato leaf seedlings:
Is that what yours look like?
I planted this variety in 2019 in a semi-greenhouse (just a windbreak wall and a roof). Sturdy bushes with potato leaves. Seeds were from an expired SibSad packet. A tasty, large, and reliable variety. This year I planted it completely outdoors in the spot where my watermelons grew last season. In that rich soil, the plant totally fattened up (too much nitrogen), and the harvest was tiny. So I can assume that poorer soil is actually better for it.
I grew the one from SibSad outdoors in open ground during a very cold summer – maybe that’s why the taste was just completely ordinary, even though Favorite Holiday growing right next to it was sweet. Other than that, it was a heavy yielder and wasn’t fussy. I won’t be repeating it though.
Hello! Exact same situation here.
In this thread, you can see a newer grower panic when her tomato seedlings sprouted with leaves that looked “like a regular tree” instead of the standard, jagged tomato foliage. Standard tomato leaves are classified as “Regular Leaf” (RL). However, a small percentage of heirloom tomatoes carry a recessive genetic mutation called “Potato Leaf” (PL), where the leaves are broad, smooth, and lack jagged serrations—looking almost identical to a potato plant (or a small tree)! The variety Kartofelnyi Malinovyi literally translates to “Potato Raspberry”, warning the grower right in the name!
