Quick Summary of Solar Flare (Solnechnaya Vspyshka)
- 🌍 Origin: Known in Russia as “Solnechnaya Vspyshka,” this is the famous Solar Flare variety originally bred by Brad Gates at Wild Boar Farms (USA). However, this thread reveals a fascinating mystery: many seeds circulating among Russian vendors turned out to be heavily crossed or genetically unstable!
- 🌿 Plant Habit: A vigorous indeterminate plant that easily reaches 1.8 to 2 meters (6 to 6.5 ft) in height. It performs excellently both outdoors in open ground and in greenhouses. It is a sneaky plant—growers note it produces lateral suckers very quickly, so stay on top of pruning (best kept to 1 or 2 stems).
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics (True Type): The true variety produces stunning red beefsteaks with prominent gold/metallic stripes. They are round to slightly oblate, weighing 200–350g (7–12 oz). They are crack-resistant and very uniform.
- 🧬 The Seed Mystery: Many growers in this thread reported severe segregation (instability). Instead of red/gold striped fruits, they grew Yellow Zebras, strange bicolors, or sour yellow tomatoes. Even seeds saved from a “perfect” fruit one year produced completely different tomatoes the next year!
- 👅 Flavor: When grown true-to-type, it has a fantastic, classic tomato flavor—a perfect balance of sweetness and acidity. The “mutant” yellow crosses reported here were mostly described as sour or bland.
Seeds were from the vendor Redko.
Indeterminate, fruits weigh 200-350g (7-12 oz). They have a normal, classic tomato flavor, they do not crack, and they are incredibly beautiful. It is a productive, unpretentious variety that sets large tomatoes even on the very top trusses.
A productive, beautiful variety. It grew outdoors in open ground. The taste is good, classic tomato. Olya shared the seedlings with me.
What a wonderful and productive variety this Solar Flare is! 👍 The fruits are bright, almost glossy, with delicate golden streaks… I grew it in the greenhouse; the plant was tall, and I pruned it to 2 stems. The fruits were large, very uniform in size, averaging 250g (9 oz).
I am very grateful to our Lena for the seeds! 🌹
This variety is handsome! And tasty! And productive! It grew in a greenhouse, reached 1.8m (6 ft), and set fruit very well despite the extreme heat.
I really liked it! Productive, tasty, mid-season—the first fruits turned red on July 27. For me, it had the perfect balance of sweetness and acidity, a true tomato flavor. The tomatoes are very beautiful, uniform, and round.
But it wasn’t without some drama! Out of the two plants I grew, one was exactly as described above, but the other one was completely different! It was yellow, tasted sour, and the fruits were large but lumpy and misshapen. Seeds were from Angelina.
I grew Solar Flare this year in the greenhouse. The bush was 1.80m (6 ft) tall. It turned out to be mid-season and very productive. But get this: I had TWO different types of fruit on a single plant! The large, irregularly shaped ones weighing over 300g (10.5 oz) were very tasty, while the smaller ones with the beautiful and correct striped coloring were much worse in taste. What’s crazy is that one branch would have fruits of one shape, and the very next branch would have the other.
Natasha said:
Out of the two plants I grew, one was exactly as described above, but the other one was completely different! It was yellow, tasted sour, and the fruits were large but lumpy and misshapen.
Natasha, out of my Solar Flare seeds this year, I also had one bush exactly like yours—I identified it as Big Yellow Zebra. My second bush was a yellow, round bicolor, which was very tasty and more sweet than sour. But I didn’t get a single true Solar Flare! Seeds were from Lena Danko.
It seems that this variety is unstable and is segregating. Also, another grower from Gatchina grew seeds from the vendor Popenko, and instead of Solar Flare, she also got a Big Yellow Zebra.
My Solar Flare also turned out to be a Yellow Zebra. But my seeds were from Kulik.
My Solar Flare seeds, just like Svetlana’s, were from A.I. Kulik. But she got a Yellow Zebra, whereas half of my bush was a bicolor, and the other half was a tasteless true-colored Solar Flare. The genetics of this variety are truly unstable.
Svetlana said:
My Solar Flare also turned out to be a Yellow Zebra.
Your tomatoes actually look a lot like Pork Chop (another Brad Gates variety).
My seeds were from Popenko. The first year, my Solar Flare grew tasty, beautiful, productive, and fuss-free; it looked exactly like the picture. This year, I planted from my own saved seeds. All three bushes turned out completely different: one was red with stripes (as it should be), another was some kind of striped bicolor, and the third was solid yellow!
Only the “true” Solar Flare was tasty; the others lacked any flavor. I definitely didn’t mix up my labels—I grew very few varieties this year, and I didn’t plant any bicolors or large yellows at all. The variety is just genetically unstable. I won’t be planting it again, as I want predictable results.
I bought Solar Flare seeds from Ilya Korolev. Things went wrong right from the start—they wouldn’t germinate. I sowed more, still nothing. Finally, I dumped the entire packet of seeds into the soil… And, as you might guess, they ALL sprouted at almost the exact same time! Because time was lost, the seedlings were tiny and fragile by the time they needed to be moved to their final planting spot outdoors.
I only had one dedicated spot planned for Solar Flare, so I had to shove the remaining seedlings wherever I had leftover space. They ended up in partial shade in a bed with different soil prep.
As a result, these little “dwarfs” managed to catch up and even outgrow their older peers! They all shot up to nearly 2 meters (6.5 ft) tall, mocking me with their stealthy sucker growth. Some grew into 2 stems, though I managed to force a couple into a single stem. In total, I got 6 massive plants, all grown outdoors in open ground.
This variety started setting and plumping up fruit almost suddenly, in a massive wave. Every day I was amazed to find more plump, striped beauties. They took a long time to ripen, but then, all at once, they put on their red and gold-striped “pants.” The fruits turned out to be super delicious, even though my hand regretted having to slice up such a miracle of nature. There were a lot of tomatoes, and by the time they ripened, we were already stuffed with other tasty varieties (I grew 67 varieties in total in the summer of 2021). But this flavor definitely added to our treasury of culinary delights.
