📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Volgogradskiy 5/95
- 🌍 Origin: A legendary old-school Soviet commercial variety. Note: There are two famous “Volgogradskiy” strains. “323” is the early bush variety, while “5/95” is the vigorous, late-season strain bred for the warm, long summers of southern Russia.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Vigorous with a very thick, sturdy main stem. Because it is a late-season variety, it requires a long growing season to reach its full potential.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Classic red, firm, oblate (flat-round) tomatoes.
- 👅 Flavor & Storage: Known for a solid, perfectly balanced old-fashioned tomato flavor. Its standout feature is its shelf life: it is an excellent “keeper” tomato. It counter-ripens indoors exceptionally well without losing its flavor or turning into mush.
- ⚠️ Climate Warning: As noted by the grower in this thread (located in a cooler European zone), if your summers are short or wet, this variety might be too slow. It risks getting wiped out by Late Blight before it can produce a meaningful yield.
🍅 Grown this variety? Click here to add your own photos and review below!
Tried it in 2014, seeds were from Rossortsemovoshch. It has a thick, sturdy main stem. The tomatoes have a good, balanced flavor, definitely a solid B (4 out of 5). They are very dense, hold up for a long time when counter-ripening indoors, and they actually keep their flavor well.
For us, this variety just didn’t work out because it is so late-season. It was the absolute slowest variety to start ripening its tomatoes. It only managed to give us its first flush of fruit before Late Blight hit. We didn’t get a big yield out of it at all.
Just for comparison, Kemerovets gives us 2 full flushes of fruit by the end of the summer, and last year it even pumped out a third flush by the end of October.
