Grew in the greenhouse, productive, tasty, very similar to Black Oxheart..
I love this variety.
Two years ago I planted Brad’s Black Heart from seeds sourced from the “South.” The bush was finicky and set only 3-4 fruits. Last season, growing it from my own saved (acclimated) seeds, this variety showed good yield and was one of the tastiest varieties in my garden.
Mine are exactly the same!!! The taste—the absolute best for salads!
I came to this thread to sing the praises of Brad’s Black Heart 🙂
Our family really loves dark tomatoes. I grew two bushes in the greenhouse on the sunny side. Height was about 1.5 m (5 ft). Trained to three stems.
They were very, very productive. And the taste! Mmmmmm! The fruits looked perfectly calibrated, all roughly the same size—about 300 grams (10.5 oz), round-heart shaped. Dense, juicy-meaty, sweet, not bland in the slightest. Just awesome! However, all my fruits had characteristic longitudinal greenish stripes. I don’t seem to see such stripes in the photos from other forum members.
Nearby in the greenhouse, for comparison, grew two bushes of Black Oxheart (BShCh). They fell short of Brad’s in both yield and taste. The bushes of both were about the same height, but Black Oxheart’s were more frail. And its fruit shape is more oblate.
Next season I plan to compare Brad’s Black Heart with Black Heart with a Beak.
Taste gets an A+! Meaty, sweet. The bush turned out medium-height in the greenhouse.
This is my third year planting this variety, and the third year I couldn’t be happier with it. This year, when practically all varieties dropped their blossoms from the middle of the bush upwards due to the heat, Brad’s Black Heart held strong. A delicious favorite.
Oh, the high hopes I had for this variety! It was in my very first batch of unusual tomato seeds I ever bought. You could say it triggered my tomato-mania. I was waiting and waiting for it… but alas!
It didn’t fire. It was frail, weak, and unhappy with life in open ground during this cool, rainy summer. Not that it got sick—but you could just look at it and hear it saying, “Ewww, muuuud, ewww, suuuun, oh no, wiiind!” and pulling its feet up in disgust.
Nevertheless, it managed to push out a few trusses with medium-sized fruits (around 150-200g / 5-7 oz). Beautiful in color and shape. Eaten plain, the taste was just a standard black tomato, balanced, without standout acidity or sweetness. BUT it revealed its magic in a salad eaten with meat. If you eat tomatoes exclusively with BBQ/shashlik—this is your variety! I don’t know what kind of magic they perform with grilled meat, but it’s a fact. The perfect side dish.
In my opinion, it loses to Black Heart with a Beak in all parameters. I planted both varieties in open ground this year. The one with a beak is much more productive, earlier, sweeter, and fundamentally tastier. And the bush itself is stronger. My family considered it the tastiest among all the black tomatoes this year, and some relatives said it was the tastiest of all varieties period.
Brad’s BBH is tasty, but just a standard black tomato, without that special “zing”.
Personally, Brad’s Black Heart has shown excellent yield for me for the third year in a row. It especially stood out this year, even though the summer was disgusting. And I love its taste. The good, classic taste of a dark tomato.
I agree that Black Heart with a Beak has beautiful, very tasty fruits. But the yield for the second year in a row has been, to put it mildly, modest, even though my seeds this year came from a highly productive source.
In a greenhouse it might be productive, but mine grew outdoors in open ground. In our heat and dryness, Brad’s is no match for Black Heart with a Beak in terms of yield.
For me this year, Midnight in Moscow was tastier than both of them. I also grew Chocolate Stripes, Black Krim, and black plums, but Midnight in Moscow was the sweetest.
My Brad’s BBH seedlings are falling over. It’s my first year growing it—the leaves look like limp rags. Sowed on March 25th, maybe this is a variety trait?
This should probably go in the troubleshooting section. But generally, if the leaves are like rags and the stem can’t hold itself up, it’s a loss of turgor pressure. There could be many reasons: the room is too hot, underwatering, overwatering (roots are suffocating), edema—there might be a constriction on the stem, or maybe the light is only coming from one side, causing it to lean. For the life of me, I can’t remember what my Brad’s looked like as a seedling. But if it had been finicky, I would have remembered.
@mirna, Most likely, your plant is starving because it cannot photosynthesize due to a lack of light. Last year I lost half of my “heart” tomato seedlings for exactly this reason—they wilted and then just fell over. The cure is 5 days of continuous, 24/7 supplementary white light (4000 Kelvin), adjusting the power so that the plants get at least 10,000 lux at the canopy level.
Large-fruited, oxheart, and white-fruited varieties are more demanding of light during the seedling stage and are the first to react to its deficiency.
It doesn’t look like the plants are suffering from a lack of light. You can see in all the pictures that the seedlings are not leggy/stretched.
Most likely, the cause lies in the soil itself—the roots are rotting and the plants are wilting. It was correctly noted here that this happens from overwatering or underwatering. Or maybe there’s too much mineral fertilizer in the soil, and the plants are burning.
You need to urgently change the soil and transplant them, completely freeing the roots from the old soil. Otherwise, they will die soon.
Unlike other oxheart varieties, Brad’s Black Heart actually has a fairly sturdy bush with large leaves. I grow without artificial lighting. Sown on March 14th, so the seedlings are 37 days old. Bush height is 20 cm (8 inches), pushing its 8th leaf. They will move to the greenhouse soon.
Sorry for chiming in here. I sowed all my varieties in one tray, seedlings looked identical. But I pricked out half of them into a commercial “tomato soil mix” I impulsively bought, and the rest went into pure peat. The ones in the commercial mix wouldn’t budge, while the same varieties in the other soil are already pushing flower trusses. I repotted them, and they finally started growing. A lot depends on the soil! The problem is definitely in the soil or watering.
Brad’s Black Heart turned out to be very early for me. I planted the seeds for it last (in early April), while my main sowing was March 10th. Yet we ate the very first ripe tomato from this exact variety! The bush is vigorous, but not unruly. Yield was pleasing even in this difficult 2020 year. It survived a very cold spring and flooding in early summer with dignity. Set fruit without skipping. The fruits are sooo beautiful hearts. Disease resistant—many varieties had spotted leaves, but this one looked brand new.
Overall, it is a very good variety by all metrics, but I won’t plant it again. I was absolutely not satisfied with the texture of the fruit. It has absolutely “potato” flesh (dry and crumbly/mealy). And we like meaty-juicy, almost oily fruits. For lovers of meaty (sugary) fruits with almost no seeds, this variety will be a godsend. But I’ll keep searching for my perfect oxheart tomato).
I try not to miss oxheart varieties of different colors and shades. There are many interesting and beautiful ones. Brad’s Black Heart is in this category. A beautiful black heart, very pleasant to the taste.
Productive variety, disease-resistant, sturdy mid-height bush, dark foliage. Mid-early.
This season it was even more productive than Black Heart with a Beak. I liked the variety.
This variety is one of my favorites too. I’ve been planting it for the fourth year. It has never let me down during this time, always yields well. The tomatoes look calibrated, practically the exact same size up the entire height of the bush.
Juicy, meaty, tasty tomato. It literally looks like a real anatomical heart, you could scare a pathologist with it!
Mine are large, beautiful, very juicy, but not very tasty. Maybe they will change taste towards autumn.
It is delicious in salads and in juice, but eating it straight off the bush—yeah, there are better ones. Plus, I can’t eat such a huge tomato all by myself anyway! 😃
I’ll update my review of this tomato. Only 2 weeks have passed since I wrote that the tomato wasn’t very good. Now Brad’s Black Heart has become very tasty and interesting. I tried a tomato yesterday and was pleasantly surprised.
Grew in open ground. Bush of medium vigor, weeping foliage, height about 1.6m (5.2 ft). The first tomato weighed 550g (1.2 lbs), the rest were around 350g (12 oz). The taste of a ripe, freshly picked fruit had a slight tartness, but when allowed to rest on the counter, it became very tasty, sweet, without acidity. The flesh is juicy. Shape-wise, there were both “hearts” and oblate ones. The photo doesn’t quite capture the color—when sliced, they are very beautiful, dark burgundy.
Edited February 22, 2022 by Elena Elena
