PlantFiles: Tomato
Lycopersicon lycopersicum 'Opalka'

Excellent tomato for sauce or fresh sliced-so sweet! Have grown it now for the third year and strongly recommend it. It does have shoulder cracks later in the season, for this reason I start them early to have most production out of the way before September as I can them in July and August in southwestern PA.

Last season was my first trial with Opalka. I was very impressed with this variety. Even though the plant stem was thin and appeared wimpy, it grew to about 10' and the production was outstanding. It's a very meaty tomato that makes a great spaghetti sauce, or salad slicer. I did have one fruit set and have BER, but for whatever reason, it was the lone wolf. The rest were just fine.

quite susceptible to BER. jury is still out.

This is my family's favorite tomato. Friends who see them in my garden ask what they are because they are shaped like a sweet pepper. Big thick tomatoes with few seeds that make great sauce and we love them on sandwiches. My husband hates seeds so this great tasting tomato is perfect for him.

This is a funny tomato. It really does look more like a pepper than a tomato, but the flavor is outstanding.
No other tomato in my garden gets BER as often as this one, but even then the yield is pretty good. The trick of adding 1 cup hydrated lime to 1 gallon of water, and pouring this into the soil (or water reservoir on an earthbox) really helps.
Almost all of my Opalkas were fairly hollow inside. Just a funny, but very delicious tomato. I'll keep growing them. A vigorous plant with sort of frail looking foliage. Much tougher than it looks.

As others note, the fruits are huge and the plants are very productive. In my experience, however, it is more susceptible to blossom end rot than other varieties I'm growing; it also has a lot of green/yellow-shouldered fruit.

Good yields of monsterously large fruit. My largest was almost 8 inches in length. More susceptable to BER than other paste varieties I've grown, but flavor more than makes up for it.

Yet another tomato with a DG connection: This one was given to Carolyn Male by a Polish co-worker. It was brought to Amsterdam, New York around 1900.

I really loved this tomato despite a few hitches along the way. I planted two and got about 30 fruits, and while they ripened nicely, the largest prize I got was about 5"l x 2"w, most of them about an inch smaller. There was also some black spot on the fruits, though it wasn't enough to ruin them. They were good performers, earlier than most of the other tomatoes.

Knowing that they were primarily used for cooking, I saved some for this and made some terrific spaghetti sauce that got rave reviews, but they're very tasty fresh, too. I'm going to be growing it again in the near future and pitting it against some other heirloom plum varieties.

I had a good harvest here in Northeastern Ontario, Canada. An unusual fruit, large and productive. Will grow again in 2004.

It is early in the season so no fruit yet. Just wanted to say how well this seed germinated. 100% germination very quickly. Planted opalka, diva cucumber, corono di toro pepper, anise hyssop and teddy bear sunflowers at the same time. All in recycled six packs all with same water/light exposure. The opalka seeds germinated at least a week before anything else. I'll report on the fruiting later. The weather is very eratic here this year so it will be a good test of the hardiness of this tomato.

I love this tomato - I just wish it produced a few more seeds. I was only able to save a few and then we moved and I lost them somewhere.

I would add to lupinelover's perfect description only that this is a hugely productive plant, and in our experience will bloom twice. With enough water and food, we get two complete harvests in a 110 day season: about 1 1/2 bushels per plant.

This tomato does not look like a tomato, it looks like a wax pepper. Outstanding for canning, very large paste tomato also good for slicing. Very productive vines that grow very large. Best picked before fully ripe and allowed to finish ripening off the vine.