Quick Summary of Sicilian Pepper (Sitsiliyskiy Perchik)
- 🌍 Origin: A commercial Russian variety introduced by the Gavrish seed company. The name translates to “Sicilian Pepper”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall), reaching around 200 cm (6.5 ft). It can be grown both in greenhouses and outdoors (open ground) with proper staking.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Elongated, pepper-shaped red tomatoes. They are large for a paste type, averaging about 150g (5.3 oz). The flesh is very dense, meaty, and juicy.
- ⚠️ Seed Instability: Growers note that the genetics from Gavrish can be somewhat unstable. Some report germination issues, while others have observed shape segregation (producing both standard plum shapes and pear-shaped fruits from the same seed batch).
- 👅 Culinary Use: While great for fresh salads and canning, the dense, meaty texture makes this variety an absolute top-tier choice for making sun-dried tomatoes and freezing.
🍅 Have you grown this variety? Scroll down to add your review and photos in the comments below!
Real Grower Reviews & Photos
Description from the seed packet:
Mid-late (115-120 days from germination to ripening) indeterminate variety for growing in open ground (staked) and under temporary film shelters. The plant has an even fruit load (4 per truss), height 200 cm (6.5 ft). The fruit is pepper-shaped, juicy, with dense flesh, intensely red, tasty, large (150 g / 5.3 oz). Recommended for canning and making salads, but especially for freezing and making sun-dried tomatoes.
(Photo author: Inna)
Colleagues, has anyone grown this pepper? What are your impressions? I will try it this year. I really liked the color on the packet 😃. Gavrish describes the fruit color as “intensely red”.
The color is just standard red. The tomato is not bad. It didn’t get sick, it was early and produced right up until the frosts. Unlimited growth (indeterminate). Very productive.
It didn’t germinate for me at all… The seeds were from Gavrish.
I got this variety from a friend. She gave me one tomato for seeds, I don’t remember what year. Hers was from Gavrish.
I saved seeds from it. And this year, 2017, I decided to plant it.
I am growing 2 bushes of Sicilian Pepper. One in the greenhouse, and the other in open ground.
They are not very tall bushes, they act like semi-determinates, mostly because the plants got badly frostbitten during a freeze and I had to let them grow out from the suckers (side shoots).
They turned out looking completely different from each other!
On the first one, the fruits are plum-shaped, but on the upper trusses, the fruits are not even; they have a slight thickening at the stem, like a pear-plum.
On the second one, the fruits are distinctly pear-shaped (it looks like the Kombat variety, which I planned to plant next year).
So these are the two very different peppers I got from seeds taken from a single fruit.
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