📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Yellow Fire
- 🌍 Origin: A beautiful striped novelty variety bred by the legendary American tomato breeder Tom Wagner (famous for creating the Green Zebra).
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall), though some growers note it can occasionally terminate its own growth early. A strong bush that performs very well both outdoors (reaching about 4-4.5 ft / 1.2-1.4 m) and in a greenhouse.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Highly attractive, elongated pepper-shaped paste tomatoes. The skin is a vibrant yellow painted with fiery red stripes. The interior flesh is also a marbled bicolor. Weight averages 5.3-7 oz (150-200 g).
- 👅 Flavor & Uses: Very meaty with almost no seeds or gel. Excellent sweet flavor. Perfect for fresh eating, slicing, or making thick, colorful sauces.
- 🛡️ Disease Resistance: Highly praised for being resilient against common foliage diseases and completely resistant to Blossom End Rot (BER) — a rare and valuable trait for an elongated paste tomato!
Yellow fire. I wanted this variety so badly for a reason; I only managed to find one viable seed and sowed it quite late. It ripened late but pleasantly surprised me with its flavor, even though it ripened during cool weather. And oh, how beautiful it is! 👍 It lacked a bit of red marbling and juiciness due to the cold, but it’s still very tasty!
Indet, grew in the greenhouse pruned to 2 main stems, showed pretty good yield for such a late sowing. The fruits are pepper-shaped in various forms, painted yellow with red stripes. They are meaty, and when sliced, they are true bicolors inside, weighing up to 5.3-7 oz (150-200 g). And, as is tradition with the tastiest varieties, it has very few seeds 🤯
My Yellow fire. Tasty, productive, few seeds. Height outdoors in the open ground was 4-4.5 ft (1.2-1.4 m). It kept fruiting right up until the autumn frosts. Not prone to disease at all; the foliage on this variety stayed completely clean until the frost hit. I didn’t see any Blossom End Rot (BER) on it either.
Edited February 10, 2021 by Vitalya
Yellow fire. Grew this gorgeous variety again. Once again, the very first fruit on the bottom truss was large and flat (oblate), while all the rest were pepper-shaped, yellow with red stripes. Meaty and delicious 👍
I also grew this incredibly beautiful variety. Seeds from @Svetikk.
Bought the seeds from Alla Kondratyeva. Planted 1 bush of this tomato variety this year. Growing it for the first time. Pruned it to 3 main stems in the greenhouse, and it has already terminated its own growth (topped out), even though it’s only June 4th! I noticed that almost all of the suckers are essentially just extra flower trusses for 2-3 tomatoes, but they are very weak. The bush is strong, the fruits will be pepper-shaped or plum-shaped.
Should I snap off the stubs I left from pruning the suckers to force new suckers (leaders) to grow? And was I right to remove those extra suckers that only contained flower trusses in the first place?
Edited June 4, 2023 by Vladimir Baranov
Productive, meaty, beautiful, can easily be pruned to two or three main stems.
- BER Resistance: Elongated, pepper-shaped, and paste tomatoes are notoriously susceptible to Blossom End Rot (a calcium deficiency causing black rot on the bottom of the fruit). Viktoria’s observation that Yellow Fire is resistant to BER is a huge selling point for anyone looking for a reliable sauce tomato!
- When an Indeterminate “Tops Out”: Vladimir encountered a frustrating issue where his indeterminate plant stopped growing vertically and ended in a flower cluster (terminating). This can happen due to genetic quirks or environmental stress. His idea to snap off the stubs (leaving a clean cut at the leaf axil) to force a dormant node to push out a new sucker (which can then become the new main leader vine) is a fantastic, advanced pruning trick to save a terminated plant!
