📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Queen Elizabeth (Koroleva Elizaveta)
- 🌍 Origin: A fantastic commercial Russian variety from Siberian Garden (Sibsad). Interestingly, it was later renamed/repackaged by the company as “Tsarsky Podarok” (Tsar’s Gift) to avoid trademark confusion with a famous strawberry variety of the same name.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: A gorgeous determinate, tree-type dwarf. It grows upright, sturdy, and extremely stocky with massive rugose (crinkled) foliage. It usually maxes out around 3.3 feet (1 m) tall and requires minimal staking or pruning.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, barrel-shaped, ribbed tomatoes that mature to a beautiful pearl-pink color. They can get massive, easily reaching up to 17.5 oz (500 g).
- 👅 Flavor & Use: Excellent flavor for a determinate variety. It is highly versatile—perfect for fresh eating but meaty enough for canning. If you love stout, tree-type dwarf plants with huge foliage, you absolutely need to try this one!
Queen Elizabeth (from Sibsad).
Galya (Esme) shared these seeds with me, the expiration date on the packet was 2008.
Interestingly, if you search online, any references to this variety from Sibsad completely stop in 2007. I read somewhere that the variety was actually renamed due to trademark associations with a very famous strawberry variety that has the exact same name. If I manage to find out which current variety is considered the successor/rename of Queen Elizabeth, I’ll let you know.
Info straight from the seed packet:
An interesting mid-season, large-fruited determinate variety for open ground and plastic greenhouses. The plant grows up to 3.3 feet (1 m) tall, upright, beautifully majestic, and doesn’t require staking for a very long time. The fruits are large, weighing up to 17.5 oz (500 g), rounded-barrel shaped, ribbed, and a pearl-pink color. When unripe (at the green stage), they have a whitish tint. Delicious both fresh and canned. The variety provides a consistently high yield in Siberian summer conditions.
What actually grew completely matched the description on the packet. A beautiful plant, beautiful pearl-pink large tasty fruits. I really loved this variety.
Here is the Queen that grew from the seeds I was sent.
Lana_s_Kavkaza wrote:
Here is the Queen that grew from the seeds I was sent.
Sveta, yours are exactly barrel-shaped just like the description says, while mine turned out a bit more flattened. Did you prune yours? I only pinched off the suckers up to the first flower cluster, then just let it do its thing. I still have green fruits setting on the side shoots. Growing outdoors right in the ground.
Katrinka wrote:
Sveta, yours are exactly barrel-shaped just like the description says, while mine turned out a bit more flattened.
Did you prune yours? I only pinched off the suckers up to the first flower cluster, then just let it do its thing. I still have green fruits setting on the side shoots. Growing outdoors right in the ground.
I pruned it up to the first flower cluster at the beginning, but not at all after that. It’s sitting in a corner of the greenhouse, I can’t even reach it anymore, it’s not taller than 5 feet (1.5 m).
Okay, now I challenge you to find even a single difference here besides the name!!!
Here is a photo of the “Queen Elizabeth” seed packet that Galina sent me. And a photo of the “Tsarsky Podarok” (Tsar’s Gift) seed packet I found online. The photos and the text on the back are a 1-to-1 exact match. SO: Tsar’s Gift and Queen Elizabeth are the exact same variety!
Ladies, I can totally confirm, they are absolute twins. Only mine turned out a bit more ribbed. But the fruits vary so much that on a single plant you can find ones that look exactly like the packet photo, big barrel shapes, and flattened-round ones, but they are all ribbed. At first, they are whitish, and then yes, they turn pearl-pink.
It’s a tree-type (rugose) dwarf. In my polycarbonate greenhouse, it shot up to 5.5 feet (170 cm). Turns out, this variety really loved the baking heat of the polycarbonate, because this is the first time in 4 years it actually made me happy – it absolutely refused to produce any fruit for me in my regular plastic-film hoop house.
Marin, it actually did wonderfully for me outdoors right in the ground last year. 😋
Verochka, you have a magic green thumb! Absolutely nothing grows for me outdoors in open ground, it’s just a waste of space. I mean, sure, I might pull a couple of tomatoes off them, but why even bother with the hassle.
The whole reason I kept torturing Tsar’s Gift year after year is because I loved that it was a stout little tree-type plant. The first year it gave me 3 beautifully large fruits, so I thought, “This one has potential, I just need to figure out what it wants, because the fruits are too pretty to give up on.”
The next year it gave me 6 fruits. Well, I finally built a polycarbonate greenhouse for it, and it really showed what it could do! Except I don’t prune my tree-type plants, so it set fruit all over the side shoots. It does have one flaw – the flower blossoms drop off very easily, but since the flower clusters are so massive and complex, enough buds always stay on to give a good harvest.
To be honest, I didn’t expect a literal cypress tree to grow inside the greenhouse. I planted them closely together as usual, and it just expanded in every direction – wide and tall. I didn’t realize until it was too late that I should have been pruning off the lower leaves much earlier, so it turned into an absolute jungle. But hey, there were tomatoes hiding inside that jungle…
I got this variety from two different sources: the first was from V.F. Syray, and Irochka (Sha_iri) blessed me with the second batch. They turned out to be different varieties, but both are fantastic.
Syray’s plant was about 3.3 feet (1 m) tall, productive, with fruits weighing around 7-9 oz (200-250 g), and the color was a pinkish-red. It’s actually hard to pin down – it’s not quite red anymore, but not fully pink either.
Ira’s version was a true determinate, tree-type dwarf, very stocky, also productive, with fruits of roughly the same weight, but definitely pink. Both are great.
Here is the first one:
And here is the second one:
An excellent variety. The seedlings are absolutely beautiful, I really liked the flavor, the leaves are massive, and the color is the bomb! 🙂
In 2017, I finally got around to planting this variety from seeds I was sent from the Ukrainian forum (it is a highly respected variety over there). It turned out like this – very tasty and highly productive.
The foliage on this plant truly is majestic. Here it is sitting next to the rest of my seedlings. Sown on March 15, 2019.
It started flowering while still in the seedling cup. I just planted it out in the greenhouse yesterday.
Here is what the blooms look like today.
Queen Elizabeth turned out to be the earliest-ripening variety out of all my large-fruited tomatoes this year. The plant in the greenhouse wasn’t very tall. A heavy yielder. The fruits are definitely closer to red than pink. Seeds were from Lana_s_Kavkaza (from 2015).
