📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Zolotaya Andromeda F1 (Golden Andromeda)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian commercial F1 hybrid. The original breeder and patent holder is A.A. Mashtakov, though the seeds are mass-marketed by multiple seed companies like Semko and Siberian Garden (Sibsad).
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Determinate (bush). Very versatile and compact. It stays around 2.3 to 2.6 feet (70-80 cm) when grown outdoors, and pushes to about 3.3 to 4 feet (1-1.2 m) in a greenhouse.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Medium-sized, bright orange, and perfectly round. Known for having incredibly thick skin and dense, firm flesh, which gives this variety an unbelievably long shelf life.
- 👅 Flavor: The flavor is heavily debated. Some growers find the thick skin and firm flesh too tough and bland for fresh eating, while others find it perfectly sweet. However, everyone agrees it is an absolute workhorse for canning, processing, and juicing.
A super heavy-yielding hybrid. It’s very versatile and does great both out in the dirt and in the greenhouse. Outdoors it stays around 2.3 to 2.6 feet (70-80 cm) tall, but in the greenhouse, it pushes to about 3.3 to 4 feet (1-1.2 m). The fruits are medium-sized, perfectly uniform, gorgeous, and bright orange.
Honestly though, I’m not a fan of the taste. The skin is thick and the flesh is pretty tough. However, it’s absolutely fantastic for canning and processing (like making lecho, juices, etc). It also stores incredibly well—it had the best shelf life out of all the tomatoes I grew.
Edited January 29, 2015 by Drosera
I totally agree with everything you wrote. I only grew mine outdoors, and it thrived out there. My seeds were from Semko.
I actually really liked the sweet flavor. My seeds were from Siberian Garden (Sibsad).
Is it actually an early-season variety like they claim on the packet?
Well, considering I planted it out in the open garden without any cover (transplanted mid-to-late June) and a good chunk of the fruit was already ripening by mid-August, yeah, you can definitely call it early. The regular red Andromeda F1 ripens later, but its fruits are also bigger.
Sweet wrote:
Is it actually an early-season variety like they claim on the packet?
Yeah, I would definitely classify it as early-season. My seeds were from Semko, but there are a ton of different companies repackaging Golden Andromeda right now, so I can’t vouch for how early the seeds from those other brands might be.
Meri, I actually mentioned this in another thread, but Golden Andromeda wasn’t bred by Semko. The patent holder is A.A. Mashtakov. So it really doesn’t matter which company’s packet you buy, unless for some reason you just trust Semko’s seed-packing quality control more than the other guys.
Meri mentions using this tomato to make “lecho.” Lecho is a massively popular Eastern European winter preserve made by stewing tomatoes, sweet bell peppers, onions, and garlic. For recipes like this, growers actually prefer tomatoes with dense, tough flesh and low water content because they cook down into a rich, thick sauce rather than turning into watery mush. While Zolotaya Andromeda’s thick skin might be annoying in a fresh salad, it’s exactly what makes it a bulletproof processing and storage tomato!
.jpg.1d2bb23b0d5ed08580f7eac0d390c0e5.jpg)
