📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Bychiy Glaz (Bull’s Eye)
- 🌍 Origin & Naming Confusion: The name translates to “Bull’s Eye”. Important Note: There is a major name collision here! In the North American heirloom community (via Tatiana’s TOMATObase), “Bychiy Glaz” refers to a medium-sized, heart-shaped red tomato sourced from a private Russian collector. However, the commercial Russian seed company “Sibsad” sells a totally different red cherry tomato under this exact same name. This forum thread primarily discusses the Sibsad cherry version.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, very tall (up to 2 meters / 6.5 ft) and highly ornamental. Shows excellent cold tolerance and disease resistance, though susceptible to late blight at the end of the season.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Beautiful, round red cherries weighing about 25-30g (1 oz). Highly resistant to cracking, even in heavy rain. The seed packet claims it produces massive multiflora trusses of 30-40 fruits, but growers typically report more standard trusses of 12-15 fruits.
- 👅 Flavor: Exceptional. Consistently rated as incredibly sweet and perfect for snacking right off the vine.
Seeds are from Sibsad. A cherry tomato. Claimed to be: Early maturity.
“A new cherry-type variety of early maturity. Recommended for growing in greenhouses. The bush is highly ornamental and will make your greenhouse look beautiful and festive. The plant reaches up to 2 meters (6.5 ft) in height. The first two trusses are simple, with 10-12 round tomatoes weighing up to 30g (1 oz), subsequent trusses will have 30-40 fruits.”
In reality, it turned out to be very late, it only really hit its stride by autumn, when the whole bush became covered in blossoms. Perhaps it needed to be pruned very strictly.
Grew it for the first year, the cherries are awesome, delicious, the kids happily snacked on them right off the bush. One plant is still sitting under a row cover with a couple of tomatoes on it, trying to bloom at temperatures below 10°C (50°F). We already pulled the ones in open ground in the first week of September due to Late Blight (Phytophthora), harvesting the last trusses. Both bushes gave an equally good yield, very tall. We didn’t pinch the suckers (no pruning). The cherries outside in open ground didn’t crack from the excess rain. They never made it into canning jars, somehow someone was always popping them into their mouths straight from the vine.
Reading the first post… the packet and the State Register do claim that subsequent trusses will have 30-40 fruits. We didn’t have that on our two bushes. Only 12-13 per truss. I might try sowing the remaining seeds from the packet, maybe as the seed ages it’ll decide to show off those massive trusses. Here is the lower part of the bush.
Sibsad, of course, did a great job, it’s a wonderful variety and the cherries really do look like eyes, size-wise. But before this one, there was already a variety by this name, and T. Kushnareva from Canada currently has it: Bychiy Glaz. The source is listed as Alla from the Chelyabinsk region. When I was once chased by a bull and flew up a concrete fence taller than me, and then didn’t know how to get down (I’m no athlete), even then, I didn’t notice the bull having heart-shaped eyes! That tomato has heart-shaped fruits weighing up to 200g (7 oz). I guess it reminds them of something bovine…
Bychiy Glaz really surprised me; out of all the cherries, it turned out to be the absolute sweetest, hands down! It’s an early little tomato, we trained it to two stems, the trusses are medium, about 15 tomatoes per cluster, average size, about 25g (1 oz) each, very beautiful. The name isn’t exactly pretty, but otherwise – it’s quite good.
Edited November 18, 2020 by Igor Pechurin
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