“If I were to cheat on my husband, it would only be with Marmalade Temptation,” quips Alytus resident Sandra Šimkevičė, describing her favourite tomato variety. This year, her modest garden plot near the southern Lithuanian town is home to 140 thriving tomato varieties, a subject she discusses with great passion with LRT.lt.
Sandra’s connection to tomatoes wasn’t always so strong. As a child, she once suffered food poisoning from ketchup and avoided it for years. It wasn’t until her twenties that she began eating them again – developing a clear preference for homegrown flavours over store-bought ones. Her first attempts at cultivating tomatoes began while living abroad.
Upon returning to Lithuania, she and her husband set up a small greenhouse on his grandmother’s land, eventually acquiring their garden.
For over a decade, Sandra has faced the same dilemma each year: deciding which varieties to plant, since she collects far more seeds than her plot can accommodate.
“I used to plant hybrid tomatoes, but then I realised that hybrid and heirloom tomatoes are like two separate worlds. The hybrid varieties were all the same red colour, and they all tasted the same. Now I only grow heirlooms – well, I did plant one hybrid variety since my neighbour praised it so much she insisted that I do,” Sandra explains.
A seed bank at home
“I clearly remember that the first tomatoes I grew were the classics familiar to most Lithuanians – Betalux and Black Cherry. The first ones I ever ordered, though, were Black Galaxy from Canada and Ildi from England. Now I often trade with fellow collectors and sometimes receive brand-new varieties directly from breeders. Some people collect stamps – I collect tomatoes,” Sandra enthusiastically shares.
She estimates she has grown around 600 tomato varieties so far, but says there are twice as many more left to try, with new ones appearing all the time. The more she has, the more she wants.
“My home is a real seed bank. Just last year, I planted a tomato with seeds from 2015, and it grew perfectly well. Anyone who is serious about this hobby usually prepares and ferments the seeds carefully,” Sandra says.
She grows tomatoes in her greenhouse, outside, and in plant pots, often planting the same variety in different places. She finds that some varieties thrive better in the greenhouse, while others do better outdoors.
Flavours of pumpkin, lemonade, and summer
Asked to pick favourites from such an abundance of varieties, she hesitates, “You might have your favourites, but then you taste a new variety, and it changes your mind. This year, I was completely captivated by Marmalade Temptation – I’ve never tasted anything so delicious in my life. They aren’t very pretty – greenish-pink and heart-shaped, but the flavour is pure megic; it’s like eating a fruit salad.”
She also really praises the Ginger Comet variety, which she describes as having a unique, refreshing, and summer-like flavour.
Blindfolded, she notes, you would never guess that a puréed Ochre Veil is a tomato, because the aftertaste is more reminiscent of a pumpkin.
“Another novelty this year is the cherry tomato Zebra Lemonade, which tastes like Sprite, even my daughter agreed,’ Sandra shares.
“The plants produce fewer fruits on the vine compared to other cherry varieties, which grow in long braids or clusters of dozens. At first, I had my doubts, but I’ll be planting them again next year. I over-ripened the first ones, as their colour is so interesting – a light, lemony yellow with stripes and almost translucent skin – so they cracked in the sun, and tasted like honey.”
The Tomato Chrysanthemum stands out in its striking appearance – all ruffled and curled, it looks so beautiful that “it's a shame to pick it or cut it.”
“Another benchmark for beauty is Baton de Fertilite,” Sandra added. “The tomatoes look as if painted with an artist’s brush. They’re very unusual, with a strange, elongated shape and a small tip. The skin is bumpy, almost as if it were marked by cellulite.”
Sandra can’t go a year without growing black tomatoes. This season, she ordered a new variety from German breeder Reinhard Kraft, the Kleiner Anthon, released for sale just this year. They are elongated with pointed tips, and the fruit is very black on the sunlit side, while the other side is striped as if painted with fiery flames.
Another black variety Sandra grows in pots is Crow's Eye. “Their pictures online caught a lot of attention – people wrote that they must be fake, created by AI - that such colours couldn’t exist in nature,” she said.
“But they are excellent, incredibly prolific potted tomatoes. They grew outdoors all season and didn’t crack like many others during this year’s heavy rains. The only tricky part is knowing when they’re ripe: you have to lift a leaf near the stem and check if it’s still green or has turned red.”
Similar reactions online were sparked by the determinate variety Smailik – at about 80 cm tall and almost leafless, the plant is loaded with fruit. One commenter wrote, “I don't want to see such nonsense.”
This year, Sandra is also cultivating the dwarf variety Blue Wax. Their skin shines as if covered in wax, but they haven’t fully ripened yet, so she hasn't had a chance to taste them.
Weight and yield records
Every year, Sandra plants some fuzzy tomato varieties. Their leaves are not green but greyish and covered with fine hairs, while the fruits themselves are also covered in a downy fuzz, their skin resembling velvet. This year, she finds the fuzzy Primary Colours Angora variety growing in her greenhouse especially beautiful, and its fruits are very tasty.
She also grows carrot-leaf, potato-leaf, and columnar tomatoes every year. The latter has a long stem densely covered in fruit. According to Sandra, these tomatoes are great for people with limited space, as they can be planted as close as 30 cm apart.
She has grown not only black tomatoes but also a wide variety of other colours, including white, yellow, pink, blue, purple, and even multi-coloured ones.
Sandra is also fond of giant tomatoes. The largest she has grown so far was a Giant Monster fruit, weighing in at 1,180g. However, this record may soon be surpassed by this year’s Big Yellow Simpson, though they have yet to ripen, its fruits are already the size of two fists.
“The biggest and smallest tomatoes can differ in weight by hundreds of times,” the grower explains. “For example, the Cherry Cascade cherry tomatoes are tiny, weighing just two grams each, but I grow them every year, as they produce in abundance. We eat them like candy – they’re very sweet and crispy.”
A single, productive multiflora bush – that is, one bearing a great many flowers – can yield over 100 tomatoes. Sandra’s Barry’s Crazy Cherry variety once yielded 124 fruits, while her record-holder was a Kozula 14 (Megagron) tomato, which ripened 143 fruits.
Some of her bushes will continue to produce well into the season. For example, one year, her Cinnamon Pear variety produced tomatoes up until November.
Translated to English by Smiltė Titovaitė.
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