Quick Summary of Black Yum Yum
- 🌍 Origin & Name: A fantastic dark cocktail/salad variety. True to its name, it is highly prized for its incredibly sweet, dessert-like flavor.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, early to mid-season. Reaches about 5.5 to 6 ft (1.7-1.8 m) in height. It is a very well-behaved plant that doesn’t produce an overwhelming amount of suckers, making it easy to prune to 2 or 3 stems. However, it is also resilient enough to survive and fruit even if left completely unpruned.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Small to medium fruits, typically weighing 3-4 oz (80-100 g). The shape is oval/egg-shaped (in between a round globe and a plum). They ripen to a rich brownish-black or deep chocolate color.
- 👅 Flavor Profile: Extremely sweet! Many growers compare the sweetness to cherry tomatoes. It has a rich, slightly spicy, and deeply concentrated flavor. The skin is a bit on the thicker side.
- 📉 Disease & Cracking: Generally very healthy. It rarely cracks under normal conditions, though prolonged heavy rains can cause minor splitting. Because of its thick skin, it holds up decently when canned whole.
Tall, up to 5.5 ft (1.7m) in the greenhouse, early season. Best pruned to 2-3 stems. Produces very few suckers. The fruits are oval/egg-shaped, brown-black, weighing about 3 oz (80 g). There are 5-7 pieces in a cluster. The density of the fruits is medium. Very rich, sweet taste.
I really like this variety, growing it outdoors in open ground for the second year. The bushes grow up to 6 ft (1.8 meters), quite vigorous, but not overly aggressive. Very strong and sturdy as a seedling. For me, it is one of the earliest indeterminates. The taste is indeed bright, sweet, and very good. Resistance to Late Blight is average, and it can sometimes crack from the rain.
The variety performed very well. Grew in a greenhouse, the bush is neat, didn’t drop a single blossom, didn’t skip a single cluster—absolutely every single one set fruit. The tomatoes are slightly oval (close to a round shape), brown, uniform in size, about 3.5 oz (100 g). It fruited for a very long time. The overall yield is above average. I didn’t get much sweetness this year, but I will definitely repeat it next season.
Seeds from Popenko.
Grew it in 2015 in open ground, really liked it! Very productive. Good taste, with sweetness. It turned out pretty good when canned in jars, although the skin cracked a little bit. It wasn’t my absolute earliest, but it definitely wasn’t late either, more like mid-season.
“Black Candy” in the greenhouse was 6.5 ft (2 meters) tall, productive, mid-season ripening. The fruits are medium-sized, roundish, burgundy-colored. Very tasty, juicy, and sweet.
Planted it in 2018 in open ground. I didn’t pay any attention to it at all; it sprawled without support as a tangled mess of foliage and got very overcrowded. Didn’t prune the suckers at all, just never got around to it. It’s hard to judge the yield in this case, but I definitely managed to pick a few clusters just to taste them.
The fruits are not large, round, or slightly elongated (not quite a plum, but no longer a perfect sphere). In open ground, they turned out a natural chocolate color, a very deep, bright brown tone. The flesh is cherry-brown, looking sweet even to the eye. Impossibly sweet and somewhat slightly spicy. If it weren’t for the juiciness, I’d say they are as sweet as cherry tomatoes, if not sweeter. The skin is a bit thick, making it slightly tough. It didn’t crack at all. Didn’t get sick.
Here is my Black Yum Yum sliced open.
