📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Texas Star
- 🌍 Origin: A massive, highly regarded American heirloom bicolor tomato that has become a huge favorite among Russian and Eastern European collectors.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall/vine). Regular leaf. A vigorous plant that can easily reach up to 6.5 feet (2 m) tall.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large oblate (flat-round) ribbed beefsteaks. The skin is a gorgeous yellow with a pink blush. Slicing it open reveals a beautiful red starburst pattern in the center. Fruits can get massive, maxing out around 2.6 lbs (1.2 kg).
- 👅 Flavor: Classic bicolor profile. Sweet, juicy, and fruity with a perfectly balanced acidity. A fantastic fresh-eating salad tomato.
I got my seeds from Alexey Kulik. Here is the description from his catalog: A mid-season indeterminate variety. The bush height is up to 6.5 feet (2.0 m) and fruit weight can reach up to 2.6 lbs (1.2 kg). The fruits are oblate, yellow-pink, and have such high flavor qualities that it’s almost a pity to eat them. A very rare variety. An absolute crowd favorite this season.
Under my growing conditions in 2014, the fruits turned out a bit bland in taste, but they were large and had a beautiful, ribbed shape. Regular leaf type.
What a beauty! Lena, how was the yield on this one?
Hey Irina, the yield was just slightly above average. I grew it outdoors in the open ground.
Well, if it does above average in the dirt outdoors, it must be an absolute monster in a greenhouse. I just love appetizing tomatoes like this.
Here is my breakdown of the plant:
- Bush description: A late-season variety with a moderately spreading habit.
- Fruit set: It suffered from blossom drop for a very long time. In the end, it only set a single truss.
- Height: Grown in open ground. By September 10th, it was 4.2 feet (1.3 m) tall, and only that one single truss was ripening.
- Truss: 4 fruits.
- Overall yield: Low.
- The fruit: Bright orange, oblate with barely noticeable red blushing on the outside, but it has a bright red starburst inside. Very beautiful. The density of the ripe fruit is low (pretty soft).
- Taste: Sweet with a well-balanced acidity. Very juicy. I’d rate the sweetness a solid 4 out of 5.
- First impression: A delicious slicing and salad tomato. My ratings: seedlings got a 3, the bush got a 4 minus, the fruit got a 4+, and my overall rating for the variety is a 4+.
Here is my Texas Star. Taste-wise, it is the absolute best tasting bicolor in my garden this year.
You can clearly see why the word “Star” is in the name when you look at it sliced open. Texas Star is my absolute discovery of the season.
This one really surprised me. First of all, my fruits grew pear-shaped and blocky-ribbed. Secondly, it unexpectedly took the lead by a huge margin. It pushed out 11 trusses and didn’t drop a single blossom. And it just keeps flowering. It is a bit late for our climate, but I just walk by and admire it. It is literally the only variety this year that hasn’t dropped a single truss; all my other plants suffered from blossom drop. None of the fruits have colored up yet, though.
I grew it back in 2018. I really liked it. It’s a heavy yielder and tastes delicious.
In this thread, you’ll notice Alena describing the interior as having a “red tie.” In the US, heirloom growers usually refer to this as a starburst or a marbled core.Also, Mama Anfisa mentions her fruits growing blocky and pear-shaped. Texas Star is genetically a standard oblate (flat-round) beefsteak. When a beefsteak throws blocky or strange shapes, it is almost always the result of a megabloom (fused blossoms) or extreme temperature fluctuations during pollination, which is very common when growing late-season varieties in colder zones like Siberia and the Urals!
