Verkiny (Vera’s) Tomato: Grower Reviews

I got this variety from a very good tomato-growing friend. She, in turn, got it from her neighbor named Vera. Vera doesn’t know the real name, it’s just their family heirloom… so it came to me under the name “Verkiny” (Vera’s).

It is a very high-yielding variety. The tomatoes are delicious, with a perfect balance of meatiness and juice. It’s a tall indeterminate, a very hard-working plant. The tomatoes are oval-round, sometimes slightly elongated at the blossom end (blunt tip), not flattened.

Maybe eventually we can figure out what its real name is? But for now, it’s just “Vera’s”. Here are photos from this year and last year:

What a beauty! 👍🍅

salix said:
Oh boy, at this rate our catalog is going to be filled with “Mary’s”, “Katie’s”, “Sophie’s”… Shouldn’t this be in the ‘Identify this Variety’ thread instead of the main catalog?

We actually have quite a few highly popular varieties on the forum that go by placeholder names. Identifying their true original names is nearly impossible, and the placeholder names have already stuck. Personally, I have no problem with having “Ninulia’s Large Pink” or “Slava’s Kazakh Yellow” in the catalog.

Sure, we shouldn’t add every random “Mary’s” or “Sophie’s” to the database, but we can make exceptions for the most popular ones. People ask about them constantly, so it’s easier to just have an entry for them to look up! 🙂

It’s simple, we should just put these popular placeholder names in quotation marks in the catalog. Then everyone will know it’s not an official commercial name. It’s the same situation with the “June” tomato—there’s Sveta’s version, and then there are commercial versions, and they are completely different plants.

Plena said:
we should just put these popular placeholder names in quotation marks…

If we do that, the quotation mark will mess up the alphabetical sorting in the database, making it hard to find. Let’s just leave it as is. 🤐 And regarding duplicate names—so what? We have several completely different tomatoes all called “Pink Flamingo,” and they share the same discussion thread.

I personally have nothing against “Vera’s” or “Ninulia’s Large Pink”—as long as the seed envelopes make it to my mailbox! 😂
Identifying a variety just by looking at a picture is basically science fiction anyway. If it were possible, we would have done it by now. A good tomato is a good tomato, the name isn’t that important.

I ended up growing one plant of this variety by accident. My verdict: a very worthy tomato. For my personal taste, it lacks a bit of acidity; I find these types slightly bland (similar to *Black Krim*, for example). But if you prefer your tomatoes on the pure sweet side, you’ll probably love this one.

It’s an indeterminate, and it turned out to be late-season for me—the main harvest is ripening right now. At first, I thought they were going to be plum tomatoes because the early fruits had pointy blossom ends. Later, the pointy tips disappeared, and the fruits took on the shape of thick barrels. Some were almost cube-shaped.

Anyway, thank you Semechka for the seeds! 👍

Thank you so much Svetlana for this variety! I grew 1 plant in my polycarbonate greenhouse. The lower trusses set heavy clusters of beautiful, slightly pointy, large tomatoes with great flavor. During a severe heatwave, it dropped some blossoms, but the ones that held on grew into absolute giants—weighing 1.5 lbs (700 grams) each! The shape became much rounder. By late summer, the flavor was just out of this world!

My “Vera’s” were oblate (flat-round), very large, and heavy yielders. The plant was incredibly powerful, sturdy, and grew all the way to the greenhouse ceiling. I got the seeds from someone on the forum, I think from Ninulia.

mamik said:
The plant was incredibly powerful, sturdy…

The real “Vera’s” doesn’t have a powerful bush. It has very wispy, frail-looking foliage.

Beautiful fruits, mine have roughly the same shape. The bush itself is quite frail and wispy, but it pumps out great tomatoes. I’m adding it to my permanent favorites list!

“Verkiny” was one of my top favorites of the 2022 season, both in taste and yield. It was one of the first to start ripening, and it kept feeding us delicious tomatoes all the way until autumn. It sets fruit all the way to the top of the trellis. The tomatoes are fairly large, red, delicious hearts. An excellent variety, I’ll definitely be growing it again in 2023.

I planted them two-to-a-hole and pruned each to 2 stems. In hindsight, it’s better to plant them one per hole.

In 2026, I planted 2 bushes completely outdoors. The first trusses ripened in early August. A cold summer and constant rain took their toll, and the fruits started to crack, but the plants themselves stayed healthy and sturdy, though not overly bushy. They grew to about 4.5 ft (1.4m) tall. Very few suckers, and didn’t demand extra potassium.

I was originally going to process them into tomato juice, but after one taste test, I changed my mind—they were so delicious we just ate them all fresh! By late August, they set another round of fruit at the top of the canopy, just slightly smaller.

Pink and red heart-shaped tomatoes usually struggle in our region. No matter how you feed them, they almost always get hit by Blossom End Rot (BER). But with “Vera’s,” I didn’t see a single diseased or deformed fruit.

Very delicious! Thank you so much, Irina! ♥️