Quick Summary of Slivovaya Kaplya (Plum Drop)
- 🌍 Origin: This thread reveals a classic seed industry scandal! The commercial seed company Russkiy Ogorod (Russian Garden) sells this variety as an expensive “F1 Hybrid” called Slivovaya Kaplya (Plum Drop). However, clever growers have figured out that it is actually just the American open-pollinated variety Indigo Kumquat repackaged under a new name!
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate and crazily vigorous. In a greenhouse, it grows very tall and aggressively, setting massive amounts of fruit. Outdoors, it remains a bit shorter (around 1.5m / 5 ft). It handles heatwaves far better than most other anthocyanin (blue/black) varieties.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Small, pear-shaped or teardrop cherry tomatoes. They start off green and purple and ripen to a bright golden-yellow/orange with dark anthocyanin (blue-black) shoulders where the sun hits them. They look exactly like tiny eggplants!
- 👅 Flavor & Use: Very sweet, though it has that classic “mild” profile typical of yellow tomatoes. Excellent for fresh eating and snacking.
- 💪 Disease & Storage: Displays excellent resistance to Late Blight, managing to survive outdoors even in bad weather. It counter-ripens indoors perfectly without rotting, eventually drying up rather than spoiling.
A tomato worthy of its own separate thread! Not because it’s a “wow!” tomato (although it is quite good, quite good indeed), but because it has an amusing backstory that I think people should be warned about. As they say: intrigues, scandals, and investigations! 😄
If you Google “Slivovaya Kaplya” (Plum Drop), you will land on the website of Russkiy Ogorod, where this tomato is labeled as an F1 hybrid and is sold for—brace yourselves—149 rubles ($2.00) for just 5 seeds!
However, I bought it as a regular open-pollinated variety from a collector (for completely different, reasonable money), and the seeds from it grew true to type (naturally). I decided to run a reverse image search on Google instead of searching the name. And there they were—our beloved yellow-anthocyanin little pears—under their true name: Indigo Kumquat pear.
But we wouldn’t dare suspect a respected seed company of falsification, right? 😉 So I checked the State Register of Varieties. If you check the cached version of the register from August 2019… there is no Slivovaya Kaplya in there! 😄 So decide for yourselves what they are actually selling us and if it’s worth buying.
I have a personal story with this variety. In the spring, while I was happily rustling through my seed packets planning my garden, this packet fell behind some furniture and was lost. At the end of May, I was counting my planted seedlings and realized I had two empty spots in the garden! How did that happen?! I searched, did some math, and finally found the packet behind the furniture. It was the end of May, but the spots were empty and curiosity was eating at me. So I stuck the seeds in the dirt! And it actually managed to ripen a bit of fruit.
It is an indeterminate of medium height, definitely didn’t reach 1.5m (5 ft) outdoors in open ground. I pruned one bush and left the other unpruned, and I didn’t see much of a difference. The bushes were healthy. They practically didn’t suffer from the heatwave, unlike most other anthocyanin varieties this year.
As far as I can judge, it is medium-early, productive, with an extended fruiting window. When I cleared the beds in mid-September, there were a lot of freshly set trusses, but they didn’t have time to mature. A couple of cherries ripened on the vine, but the vast majority had to be counter-ripened indoors, so I won’t judge the flavor too strictly. It seemed quite sweet, but mildly bland in that typical yellow-tomato way. It ripens perfectly indoors, doesn’t rot, and actually just starts to sun-dry/shrivel nicely.
I planted this tomato in 2019. I bought it marketed as an F1 hybrid (as a “2019 New Release”). If it’s actually an open-pollinated variety, then I am very happy, as I just saved seeds from it! The tomato delighted me both with its appearance and its taste (very sweet).
I planted it both in the greenhouse and outdoors. The tomato is resistant to Late Blight, as I managed to grow it completely uncovered outside, although the outdoor yield was very modest. In the greenhouse, however, I managed to harvest about 1 kg (2.2 lbs) of fruit from it. The fruits really reminded me of tiny eggplants (see photo).
I also planted it last year in 2019.
In the greenhouse, its growth was absolutely crazy, it produced a ton of fruits and set them very well. My family loved both the taste and the color.
Here it is pictured along with some other varieties (in the bowl).
