📌 Quick Summary: Kardinal (Cardinal)
- 🌍 Origin: A classic Russian/Ukrainian commercial heirloom. The seeds in this thread originally came from the “Narodnaya Selekciya” (People’s Selection) company in Dnepropetrovsk.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall) in a greenhouse, requiring strong staking, but generally stays shorter when grown outdoors in open ground. It produces very sturdy trusses that don’t kink under the weight of the fruit. Best pruned to 2 stems.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, raspberry-pink oxhearts with relatively thin skin. They have a denser, firmer structure compared to many other classic, soft oxheart varieties.
- 👅 Flavor & Use: Very juicy and tasty, with a slightly firmer bite and a bit more acidity than typical sweet hearts. Excellent for fresh salads and processing. Warning: Some growers note it can be sensitive to foliage diseases.
Another super variety. The fruits are heart-shaped, raspberry-pink, very large, and delicious! Seeds are from the “Narodnaya Selekciya” brand, Dnepropetrovsk.
Yesterday I sliced up a couple of beautiful fruits for seeds and did a taste test. I really loved Kardinal all summer long, but in a direct side-by-side comparison, it lost to Eagle’s Heart, which I hadn’t valued much before.
Before that, I was extremely happy with its flavor, plus the fact that the trusses don’t kink under weight and the fruits are so perfect. It turned out it’s slightly firmer and slightly more acidic than my other oxhearts and beefsteaks. By the way, yesterday we also really loved Cosmonaut Volkov, a variety we completely despised before.
Maybe the autumn fruits behave differently and the flavor profile changed??? Miracles happen.
I kept it for next year’s grow list, but I need to keep a closer eye on it. Or maybe I’ve just eaten way too many tomatoes and my taste buds are ruined…
My Kardinal was about twice the size of Eagle’s Heart.
Though Eagle’s Heart is also very beautiful and tasty.
Every variety is good in its own way!
Variety Kardinal. Indet, vigorous bush, great seed germination, high yield. Pruned it to 2 stems. It is sensitive to diseases. Requires tying up. Fruits are large with thin skin, heart-shaped, raspberry-pink color. It is one of the very first to ripen in the greenhouse. Perfect for salads and processing. We plant this variety every year in the greenhouse. Very happy with it.
Poltava, open ground. The bush wasn’t very tall. It didn’t end up being very productive. But I really loved the fruits. Juicy and delicious. They differ from a lot of other oxhearts because they have a much denser, firmer structure. The outside is dark raspberry colored, and the inside is pink.
User Alyona mentions that her Kardinal tomatoes suddenly started losing taste tests in the autumn, becoming more acidic. This is a very common phenomenon with heirloom tomatoes! As the days get shorter, the nights get colder, and the sun angle drops in September/October, the plant’s ability to photosynthesize and pump sugars into the developing fruit drastically slows down. An oxheart that tasted incredibly sweet and fruity in peak July heat will often taste bland, watered-down, or noticeably more acidic if harvested in late fall!
