📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Pink Brandywine
- 🌍 Origin: The undisputed king of American heirlooms. Legendary Amish origins, with the Sudduth’s Strain being widely considered the original, purest, and best-tasting lineage.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, vigorous vines. It has classic, robust Potato Leaf (PL) foliage. Typically performs much better and more reliably in greenhouses/hoophouses in cooler climates.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, oblate beefsteaks. The color is often described by growers as a stunning “pearlescent pink.” Warning: They are prone to cracking and splitting if overwatered or exposed to heavy rains just before harvest.
- 👅 Flavor: The gold standard. Meaty, juicy, perfectly balanced sweet-and-sour flavor with that distinct, complex, slightly spicy/earthy Brandywine aftertaste.
- ⏳ Maturity & Yield: Mid to mid-late season. Unlike some finicky Brandywine strains, Russian growers report surprisingly good yields and excellent heat tolerance during fruit set.
Indeterminate, medium-vigor bush, quite leafy, with Potato Leaf (PL) foliage. Maturity is mid-season leaning towards mid-late.
The fruits are round/oblate, smooth, and a beautiful pearlescent-pink color. Very meaty and juicy. The flavor is a great sweet-and-sour balance with that signature spicy/earthy aftertaste characteristic of Brandywines. Highly aromatic.
It sets fruit quite well in the heat, is resistant to diseases (the crud), and the yield for me was slightly above average.
My Pink Brandywine grew in the hoophouse. Reached over 2 meters (6.5 ft) in height. Had Potato Leaf (PL) foliage, and the yield was genuinely good.
The fruits are incredibly meaty, delicious, with a very pleasant acidic tang to balance the sweetness. However, they are definitely prone to cracking if you overwater them.
Mine also grew in the greenhouse. Unfortunately, in early August, the plant was snapped in half by hurricane-force winds.
Potato leaves, a very thick/powerful main stem. I pruned it to 2 leaders. Before it broke, it managed to swell up 7 trusses, with each truss holding 5-7 tomatoes of varying sizes (from large ones around 350-400g / 12-14 oz down to smaller 100g / 3.5 oz ones).
The color is exactly as described—a beautiful pearlescent pink. Even when they are unripe, they have this light green color with a distinct pearl sheen to them. Surprisingly, it was one of my earliest to ripen, and very tasty.
I noticed an interesting quirk: while the fruits are small, they are heavily ribbed, but as they size up and swell, they push out and become much smoother and nicely shaped.
I grew Pink Brandywine this year, specifically the Sudduth’s strain. Loved it. Delicious, juicy, and produced a good yield.
It handled the abnormal heatwave of 2017 incredibly well during its fruit-setting period. Grown in my polycarbonate greenhouse.
