The Most Interesting Tomato Plant of The Month! JUNE 2024 Edition!

The Most Interesting Man in the World

Grow Tomatoes My Friends! Fine words of advice indeed from a treasured actor like Jonathan Goldsmith. He used his persona as The Most Interesting Man in the World to convince you to drink Dos Equis beer. Which isn't a bad idea. But I'm using his character for a much different and healthier reason.

I don't think he will mind very much.

I do know that I'm a tad late with this blog post. After all, it does come about seven days into the month of July. But I have been dealing with a bit of a difficult heat wave in Northern California at the moment. While it seems like it's been two straight weeks of temperatures at or near 1001 degrees, that's a tad facetious. However, I can tell you that it's tough to do anything in the garden over a long period of time when the mercury hits 110. Which it has. Far too often for my liking to be brutally honest.

Don't get me wrong here. Summer vegetable gardens LOVE heat. Those summer producers love everything about bright sunshine and sizzling hot afternoons. As long as they get enough water, everything in the vegetable garden world is as good as it gets. Peppers, for example, LOVE heat. Hot peppers and sweet bells love it equally. Given them enough water in a heat wave like this one, and they will respond with record growth and happiness.

Pink Vernissage Tomatoes

The same is true with just about everything in the summer garden. This includes The Most Interesting Tomato Plant of the Month. This is a large cherry variety. It's about the size of a golf ball. It is one of six cherry varieties that call the garden home this year. But this one is a tad unique. It's not native to California. It's not native to the USA. It comes to my garden by way of a Eastern European country that's been in the news for the last few years. That country is Ukraine.

There's a Russian tomato grower there who is attempting to do all sorts of increidble stuff with my favorite summer fruit. He is the Ukrainian copy or counterpart of California's own Brad Gates, the founder of the Wild Boar Farms collection of unique tomato varieties. The cross-breeding done at the farm of Ruslan Dukhov has resulted in my Tomato Plant of the Month: Pink Vernissage. Dukhov runs his experimental tomato breeding farm in an area called Mushirin Rog. That is in the Dnepropetrovsk region (Oblast) of Ukraine. Please don't ask me to type that out again, let alone try to pronounce it.

The Pink Vernissage, according to Dukhov, is a cross between the Stupice (Stoo-Pick) tomato variety and another that is local to Dukhov's region. it's called the Kitaiskiy Barkhatnyi. Please don't ask me to pronounce that either. I could barely type it. I've grown Stupice a number of times. It hails from Czechoslovakia, near the town called Stupice. It is a time-honored favorite in Eastern Europe, and was one of the first varieties introduced to American growers after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Stupice is one of those varieties that seems to grow extremely well no matter where it is planted. This includes a crack in a sidewalk.

Pink Vernissage Clusters

The Pink Vernissage, or Vernissage Pink as some seed websites call it, is as unique as the striped varieties that have been developed by Gates at Wild Boar Farms. Loosely translated, the term Vernissage means art. It certainly is that. This unique tomato variety is both spotted and streaked with colors of pink, brown and orange. Like every tomato that is vine-ripened in extreme heat and sunshine, every bite is a delight to the tastebuds. My Pink Vernissage plant produced the first ripe tomatoes of the summer season and continues to set clusters of four or six tomatoes on a plant that is now reaching six feet in height. It's open-pollinated, which means it will continue to deliver fruit until the frost of winter shuts it down.

Pink Vernissage isn't Dukhov's only contribution to the world of unique tomato varieties. He's responsible for dozens more. This includes other contributions in the Vernissage variety that carry colors of green, black and yellow. If there is one difference between the work of Dukhov and Gates, it's this: Gates isn't doing his experimental work smack dab in the middle of a war zone. Dukhov, unfortunately, is. His farm is uncomfortably close to the front lines of the conflict between Russian and Ukrainian forces. While it seems that soldiers would not at all be interested in raiding a tomato farm, that hasn't stopped errant shells from falling. One of those misfires reportedly damaged a greenhouse.

Pink Vernissage

That hasn't stopped Dukhov from doing his wonderful work with tomato plants at his small farm. He has a website, which is in Russian and tough to follow. He also posts videos on YouTube, which are also in Russian. Which means it can also be a little tough to follow. Unless you know Russian. Which I do not. Despite the language difference, there is an infectious excitement in his voice when it comes to discussing his favorite subject.

Every tomato tells a story it seems. The Most Interesting Tomato Plant of the month certainly does that and more.