📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Denezhnyi Meshok (Money Bag)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian commercial variety. The name translates directly to “Money Bag,” hinting at its supposed high yield and profitability.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Officially listed as indeterminate, growing up to 6 feet (1.8 m) tall. However, forum members frequently report getting off-type seeds that grow into squat, determinate bushes.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Small to medium red round fruits, officially weighing 2.8-3.5 oz (80-100 g). They are marketed as a versatile, all-purpose tomato.
- ⚠️ Grower Warnings: This variety is notorious on the forum for severe seed mix-ups from major commercial vendors, poor crack resistance, and later-than-advertised ripening times.
Description from the seed packet: An early-season, high-yielding variety; 100-115 days from emergence to fruit ripening. Suitable for open ground and hoop houses. Plant height is around 71 inches (180 cm). The main stem forms about 7 trusses, with up to 15 fruits per truss. Fruits are red, weighing 2.8-3.5 oz (80-100 g). The variety ripens very early and produces its crop all at once, allowing you to harvest everything before late blight becomes a widespread issue. Great all-purpose tomato.
Photos by Marinichka.
Today is July 21st. All my other tomatoes are already turning red, but Money Bag is just sitting there with green fruits, even though I started it slightly earlier than the other varieties. The seedlings emerged around March 15-18, and it’s still not ripe. It’s growing in a greenhouse.
Mine are also still green and don’t seem to be planning to turn red anytime soon (I have 3 plants). The packet definitely claimed it was an early-season variety.
They finally started turning red…
As a final update, my conclusion is: I will never grow “Money Bag” again. More than half of the fruits cracked, even though all my other tomato varieties were perfectly fine. The taste is totally ordinary, nothing special at all. The tomatoes aren’t large, but they are pretty (well, the ones that didn’t crack). The plant grew just over 3.3 feet (1 m) tall in the greenhouse.
I grew it this year. My seeds were from Aelita*. There was exactly one plus: 100% germination and very stocky, healthy-looking seedlings 😂.
And that was it. Some grew in a polycarbonate greenhouse, others in a film hoop house. The ones in the hoop house at least gave me some sort of harvest.
My conclusion is that this was a total off-type seed mix-up. I looked up reviews online later, and people were saying the exact same thing about these specific Aelita seeds.
The bush was squat, like a low little “ball”, with very few fruits. The flavor was like a generic, cheap winter tomato from Pyaterochka*. It looked absolutely nothing like the picture on the packet. Bottom line: do not buy these seeds from Aelita. They clearly bought some random cheap bulk seed, packed it, and are selling it as Money Bag.
Quote from Julia M:
They finally started turning red…
I grew it this year outdoors in open ground, mulched with dried grass clippings. For me, it acted as a mid-season indeterminate. Fruits were red, round, weighing about 1.4 oz (40 g), and the last truss looked almost like cherry tomatoes. Flavor was sweet and sour. They started cracking heavily in late August, right after a typhoon hit us (gale-force winds with torrential rain). The skins also occasionally split during canning. Overall, I have a decent impression of this variety, but it is extremely sensitive to overwatering or heavy rains.
*Aelita Seeds: Aelita is one of the largest mass-market seed packing companies in Russia. While they offer affordable seeds, they are somewhat notorious among serious heirloom growers for quality control issues. Getting an “off-type” (wrong seed) from their packets is a common frustration shared on Russian gardening forums.
*Pyaterochka: Irina compares the taste to a tomato from “Pyaterochka”. This is a massive chain of budget discount supermarkets in Russia. In gardening slang, saying a homegrown tomato “tastes like it came from Pyaterochka” is the ultimate insult – meaning it tastes like a hard, watery, flavorless commercial winter tomato.
