📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Bychok Chernyi (Black Steer)
- 🌍 Origin: Sourced and popularized by a well-known collector (Vitaly / “Señor”) from Almaty, Kazakhstan. The name translates to “Black Steer” or “Black Bull-Calf”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, PL (Potato Leaf). This plant is an absolute monster! It grows incredibly vigorous and tall (up to 14 ft / 4.25m if unstopped) with massive foliage. Give it plenty of space, or it will choke out its neighbors.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, dark (black/purple) blunt oxhearts. Very meaty with very few seeds. Size ranges from 9 oz up to 1.7 lbs (250g – 800g) depending on how aggressively you prune it.
- 👅 Flavor & Use: Sweet, meaty, and classic. Growers often compare it to Brad’s Black Heart. However, it lacks the intense, bold punch that some folks expect from dark tomatoes.
- ⚠️ Grower’s Note: The shelf life is absolutely terrible. You must eat or process them immediately, as they turn to mush and start leaking within just a few days of picking. Also prone to blossom drop during early heat waves.
Bychok Chernyi (Black Steer). Seeds from Vitaly-Señor out in Almaty. It’s a vigorous PL (potato leaf) indet. The fruits are uniform, large hearts with blunt noses, meaty, excellent taste, and have very few seeds. Yield was average; at first, it suffered from blossom drop because of a heat wave right when the first trusses were flowering. Grew it in the greenhouse, pruned to 2 stems.
I also grew this variety from Vitaly. The bush was an absolute monster with massive potato-type leaves. Grew it to 2 stems. It was a slow starter, but then it just kept growing and growing, taking up a ridiculous amount of space and totally crowding out its neighbors. After that, it aggressively started flowering and setting fruit on all trusses. Turned out to be a late-season ripener for me. Yield was excellent. The fruits are large, blunt hearts, very uniform, weighing 14-18 oz (400-500g). Meaty with a very pleasant flavor.
Rounded heart with a blunt nose, meaty, nice sweetness to it. Was mid-season for me. Had a good yield both in the dirt (open ground) and in the greenhouse. A bit smaller outdoors. Greenhouse fruits were around 14 oz (400g), outdoors they were 9-10 oz (250-300g).
You guys won’t believe it, but I actually managed to cram 2 roots of this monster into one planting hole. I pruned this beast to a single stem, which gave me perfectly uniform fruits, but they were massive—1.5 to 1.7 lbs (700-800g). Good thing it was tucked in the corner of the greenhouse; it only crushed out Lavender Lake on one side. When I finally pulled the vine at the end of the season, I measured it—it was 14 ft (4 meters 25 cm) long from the root base.
My neighbor and I admired it all summer long in anticipation. It was a late-season ripener for me, but when we finally tasted it, we were totally underwhelmed. We are used to a much bolder, punchier flavor from our dark tomatoes. And the second huge disappointment was its shelf life—it is complete garbage. Just 3 days after picking, it got watery, turned to mush, and literally started leaking. Definitely not planting it again.
Borisovna:
We are used to a much bolder, punchier flavor from our dark tomatoes. And the second huge disappointment was its shelf life… turned to mush, and literally started leaking. Definitely not planting it again.
I actually thought the flavor was pretty good! I figured it tastes a lot like Brad’s Black Heart, but BBH is a much shorter plant and yields less. BBH’s fruits are bigger, though. I let my Black Steer go to 3 stems, so maybe that’s why my fruits turned out a bit smaller.
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