📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Bychok (Little Bull)
- 🌍 Origin: Introduced to North America and popularized by the famous tomato collector Tatiana Kouchnareva (Tatiana’s TOMATObase). The name “Bychok” literally translates to “Little Bull” (a play on the famous “Bull’s Heart” oxheart tomatoes).
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate. It exhibits the classic “wimpy” oxheart growth habit with thin, wispy foliage. Interestingly, it stays relatively short—usually topping out around 1 meter (3-4 ft) tall, even inside a greenhouse.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Gorgeous, perfectly shaped, deep raspberry-pink oxhearts. They are very fleshy, dense, and contain very few seeds. While many fruits are medium-sized, they can easily reach up to 600g (1.3 lbs) under good conditions.
- 👅 Flavor: The flesh falls into the highly desirable “buttery” category. Growers consistently describe it as sugary, sweet, and incredibly delicious—especially late in the season when the fruits have soaked up enough summer heat.
This season I grew an interesting variety from Tatiana Kouchnareva called Bychok. She actually sent me the seeds way back in 2012… it’s a shame I didn’t get around to trying this variety earlier! 😳
In the greenhouse, it didn’t grow very tall (no more than a meter / 3.3 ft). The plant is slender and elegant with wispy foliage. Mid-season maturity. But oh, the fruits! 😋 They are so beautiful and delicious! Perfectly uniform, medium-sized, dark raspberry-pink hearts. The flesh is dense, sweet (without exaggeration) 😊, and falls right into the “buttery” texture category. A magnificent variety! (Though that’s true of most of Tatiana’s varieties) 📝
An indeterminate, mid-season variety with thin, wispy foliage. The fruits are raspberry-pink hearts, very meaty, with few seeds.
In the middle of the summer, the flavor was just average tomato taste, but by the beginning of autumn, the tomatoes became incredibly tasty and developed a real sweetness. My bush grew outdoors in open ground. Since I started the seeds very late (at the very end of March), the final plant height was only about 70 cm (2.3 ft).
Bychok is the one on the right in the photo:
An excellent, high-yielding variety! Seeds were from @Yaroslavna 🙏
Beautiful, uniform, pink, meaty hearts with an exceptionally good flavor 😋, weighing up to 600g (1.3 lbs). Indeterminate, grew it in the greenhouse pruned to 2 stems.
