Quick Summary of Zlatovlaska (Goldilocks)
📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Zlatovlaska (Goldilocks)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian commercial cherry variety introduced by the “Poisk” seed company. It is officially registered for both open field and greenhouse cultivation. The name translates to “Goldilocks”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate. The foliage is medium-sized, light green, and somewhat wispy (delicate). Outdoors, it may stay relatively compact (around 3 ft / 1 m). It requires staking and regular pruning for best results.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Classic round yellow cherry tomatoes, weighing about 0.5 – 0.7 oz (15-20 g). They grow on simple trusses. They look fantastic when canned whole. Note: Very prone to splitting/cracking if left on the vine too long or exposed to uneven watering.
- 👅 Flavor: The flavor heavily depends on soil nutrition. With proper feeding (especially potassium), they are very sweet. Without it, they can be somewhat bland.
Here is the description straight from the seed packet:
Seed Packet Description:
Cherry type. Suitable for open ground and unheated greenhouses. Great for fresh salads and whole-fruit canning. Early maturing. Indeterminate plant habit. Leaves are medium-sized and light green. Simple flower trusses. Jointed pedicel. The fruit is round/slightly oblate, smooth, and moderately firm. Unripe fruit is green, ripe fruit is yellow. Bi-locular (2 seed cavities). Fruit weight is 0.5 – 0.7 oz (15-20 g). Good flavor. Greenhouse yield is about 3.5 kg per square meter. Requires staking and pruning. Advantages: excellent taste and unusually beautiful fruits. Developed by Poisk Seed Company.
The description pretty much matches what actually grew. Except for the taste. For a cherry tomato, it was honestly pretty mediocre. However, it looks absolutely beautiful when canned, and the flavor is great out of the jar.
One of my plants turned out to be an off-type (wrong seed). The fruits on that one were much larger, more like a cocktail size rather than a true cherry. And they were extremely delicious. I really wonder what variety that off-type actually was. Does anyone have any guesses? 🙂 I’m definitely saving seeds from that specific plant.
Here are the two different fruits sliced open for comparison:
I grew this variety for two years. The first year, I barely fertilized it at all. Only the very first tomatoes were sweet, and the later ones completely lost their flavor. The second year, I planted two bushes and fed them every two weeks, alternating between wood ash and manure tea. That made a huge difference. The tomatoes tasted very good and stayed sweet right up until the end of the season.
The only downside is that they are very prone to cracking from moisture fluctuations or if you let them get overripe. They keep setting fruit right up until the frost, and they ripen nicely indoors on the counter. I’ll probably plant one bush again next year.
We just tried them out of the canning jars. They taste great. They did split in the jars, but the insides didn’t leak out into the brine.
Are the fruit clusters very big on this one? Do you happen to have any photos of the plant?
The clusters aren’t huge. Unfortunately, I deleted all my photos showing the fully ripe tomatoes on the vine. But I do have a few pictures with green fruits. You can still get a good idea of the cluster size.
These are the larger ones (the off-type):
And these are the smaller true cherry clusters:
I always plant 1 bush of Zlatovlaska in my greenhouse. It’s a very decorative and tasty little tomato. The only flaw is the splitting. When I want to use them for canning, I pick them when they are just light yellow. And for the fully ripe ones, I literally snip them off with scissors along with a piece of the stem. If you try to pull them by hand, they burst right in your fingers.
I grew Zlatovlaska outside in the open ground in 2026 because I ran out of space in the greenhouse. I bought the seeds in a regular packet from Auchan. Outdoors, the plant didn’t get taller than 3 ft (1 m). The foliage is quite delicate and wispy. The clusters had about 9 fruits each and didn’t really look like long trusses. The tomatoes were small, and surprisingly, they didn’t crack for me.
I honestly thought it was just a nonsense little cherry tomato, only good for pickling. But when I started packing them into jars, I tasted one. It was so sweet! By that point, it was too late to go back and pick more for fresh eating, so I just hoped some of the green ones I pulled would ripen up sweet indoors.
