📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Royal Mantle (Korolevskaya Mantiya)
- 🌍 Origin: Sourced and popularized by Ukrainian breeder D. Terentiev. The Russian name translates to “Royal Mantle”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall). Strong, highly productive vines that perform exceptionally well in greenhouses but can also be grown successfully outdoors. It is known as an absolute workhorse variety.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Gorgeous, oblate, raspberry-red beefsteaks. They are massive, often averaging 10-18 oz (300-500 g), with some reaching nearly 2 lbs (800 g). Note: It has a strong genetic tendency to retain “green shoulders” (a hard, unripe cap around the stem).
- 👅 Flavor: Very meaty, juicy, and delicious. Classic sweet heirloom flavor with a thick, dense texture.
Tall vine (in the greenhouse) with moderate foliage. The tomatoes are raspberry-red, oblate, meaty, and tasty. They stay uniformly large on all the trusses, weighing in at 10-18 oz (300-500 g). Mid-season maturity, quite productive. One slight issue: it retained a small, unripe “cap” around the stem.
What a beautiful variety. My mouth is literally watering.
Maybe that unripe green cap is supposed to be the “mantle”?
Olya, I got that green cap on mine too. But like I’ve said before, I actually really like tomatoes with green shoulders. They seem much more aromatic to me.
I fell in love with this tomato just from seeing a photo of it. First I saw yours, Olya, and then I saw one in Natasha Yaroslavna’s album, and I was just obsessing over it. My seeds are from Terentiev in Ukraine. This was easily my record holder for yield (by weight) this year. It was an absolute avalanche of huge tomatoes, weighing at least 1.1 lbs (500 g) each on the bottom two trusses, and I even had two that hit 1.7 lbs (800 g). On the upper trusses they were a bit smaller, around 12-14 oz (350-400 g), but there were so many of them. I got at least 22 lbs (10 kg) off this single vine, easily.
Some of the fruits were a bit misshapen from megablooms and not very uniform, mostly because my plant got a little too vegetative and pushed too much nitrogen early on. IT COMPLETELY CONQUERED ME!!!!
I definitely didn’t get the massive yield that Galya did, but I really liked Mantle – it was productive and tasty. And, what’s very important to me, it’s highly disease resistant. 🙂
Royal Mantle was a very heavy yielder in the greenhouse, reaching about 5 feet (1.5 m) tall. The fruits definitely had that green cap at the stem, very tasty, sweet.
Royal Mantle is a longtime, absolute favorite variety in my collection! It is so reliable, year after year it delights me with its ability to pack on full trusses of rather large tomatoes, and of course, with its delicious, raspberry-red fruits. I’ve been growing it for a very long time from seeds originally sent by Ukrainian breeder D. Terentiev.
This variety is a true workhorse! And I completely agree with Galya-64, it’s my undefeated champion for yields when grown in a greenhouse. The fruits are meaty, uniform in shape, with thick, juicy flesh.
I grew Royal Mantle this year. Seeds were from Lana_s_Kavkaza (2015 stock). Beautiful fruits with absolutely NO green shoulders. The smallest fruit weighed 6.2 oz (178 g). The second and third fruits were 6.5 oz (185 g) and 6.6 oz (187 g). I didn’t bother weighing the rest. It dropped a lot of blossoms during the heatwave. Grown in a 20-foot (6 m) greenhouse without extra ventilation windows.
Royal Mantle and Golova Negra (Negro’s Head).
Here is my Mantle from this year. Seeds were from Tumanov (Terentiev) from Ukraine.
The earliest, tastiest, most abundant, large, and fully ripens.
natko: “Here is my Mantle from this year. Seeds were from Tumanov (Terentiev) from Ukraine.”
Wait, who are the seeds from? Tumanov or Terentiev? Royal Mantle was my most productive variety in 2020. In 2021, I accidentally snapped the growing tip off and it still managed to pump out a great crop. Even though I planted it out in the dirt and topped it. Excellent variety, an absolute favorite 👍
Galiy: “Wait, who are the seeds from? Tumanov or Terentiev?”
Two birds, one stone)). Tumanov’s online store sells Terentiev’s seeds.
Could someone tell me, does this variety have dense flesh?
Several growers in this thread mention this variety has a persistent “unripe cap” ; In American heirloom terminology, this trait is known as Green Shoulders. It is very common in older heirloom varieties and usually indicates a highly aromatic, old-fashioned tomato flavor. User Nelya makes a clever pun here, suggesting that the green shoulders draped over the top of the tomato look exactly like a “Royal Mantle” (a king’s cape)!
