📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Gigant Kovaleva (Kovalev’s Giant)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian heirloom popularized by private seed collectors and breeders (like Logunov).
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate. Breeders claim it is a tall, cold-hardy, and highly disease-resistant plant. However, some greenhouse growers report it stays medium-tall and is still susceptible to fungal issues like Leaf Mold.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: The true strain is supposed to produce massive pink beefsteaks weighing up to 2.2 lbs (1 kg). However, due to unstable seed lines in circulation, you might get smaller fruits in the 7-10.5 oz (200-300 g) range, or even red variants instead of pink.
- 👅 Flavor: The original breeder description claims it is meaty, sweet, and has few seeds. Depending on your growing conditions and the purity of the seed, the flavor can range from sweet to just ordinary.
🍅 Grown this variety? Click here to add your own photos and review below!
Seeds from Logunov. Planted two bushes – completely identical in height, leaf shape, fruit set, and fruit shape, but different in color – one was pink, the other red ??? Had the exact same surprise last year with Pink Raisin (Rozovyi Izyumnyi).
Logunov’s description: cold-hardy, tall, mid-early, has increased resistance to Late Blight and other diseases. For me, it was one of the few that actually caught Leaf Mold by September. Fruits are pink, meaty, sweet, few seeds, weighing up to 2.2 lbs (1 kg).
My description: the variety is medium-tall, mid-late season, fruit weight is 7-10.5 oz (200-300 g), taste is ordinary.
👨🌾 Editor’s Note on Crossed Seeds from Private Collectors:
Tatyana shares a very frustrating but common experience here: she planted two seeds from the same packet of Gigant Kovaleva and got one pink tomato plant and one red tomato plant.Why does this happen? Many private heirloom seed sellers grow hundreds of tomato varieties packed tightly together in a single greenhouse. If they don’t use “blossom bags” (organza bags tied over the flower clusters before they open to prevent bees from visiting), cross-pollination inevitably happens. The buyer then plants those seeds the next year and ends up growing an accidental F1 cross! While it can be annoying when you wanted a pure heirloom, sometimes these accidental crosses create incredible, vigorous new varieties.
Tatyana shares a very frustrating but common experience here: she planted two seeds from the same packet of Gigant Kovaleva and got one pink tomato plant and one red tomato plant.Why does this happen? Many private heirloom seed sellers grow hundreds of tomato varieties packed tightly together in a single greenhouse. If they don’t use “blossom bags” (organza bags tied over the flower clusters before they open to prevent bees from visiting), cross-pollination inevitably happens. The buyer then plants those seeds the next year and ends up growing an accidental F1 cross! While it can be annoying when you wanted a pure heirloom, sometimes these accidental crosses create incredible, vigorous new varieties.
