📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Cherokee Purple Heart
- 🌍 Origin: An oxheart variation/mutation of the legendary American heirloom, Cherokee Purple.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate. Like many classic oxheart varieties, it has a very “wispy,” weeping, and delicate plant structure (often looking wilted or wimpy even when perfectly healthy). Some growers recommend planting two per hole to maximize space.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Medium to large heart-shaped fruits. The color is a dusky pink-purple.
- 👅 Flavor & Storage: Meaty, juicy, and sweet without acidity. However, it has very poor post-harvest shelf life and needs to be eaten quickly. Flavor can also be highly weather-dependent (some found it bland in bad weather).
- ⏳ Maturity: Mid-season.
An indeterminate, mid-season slicing variety. The fruits are heart-shaped, pinkish-purple, medium and large in size. For me, the taste turned out somewhat grassy/bland. It grew outdoors in open ground, the bush height was about 1.1m (3.6 ft), and the plant structure is quite thin and delicate.
Seeds from Redko. Grew in the greenhouse. The bush was very wimpy and spindly. Mid-height, and the yield was no higher than average.
Mine grew outdoors in open ground. It was quite productive. The bush was about 1.1m (3.6 ft) tall, very flimsy/wispy; I think you could easily plant 2 of them per hole. In the photo, it is still unripe. I don’t remember the taste, but I will be growing it again.
A rich, sweet taste with no acidity at all. Meaty and juicy. But it has absolutely zero shelf life, it does not store at all. ((
Cherokee Purple Heart turned out to be very productive for me. In the greenhouse, it grew to almost 2 meters (6.5 ft) and was mid-season. The fruits were medium-sized, heart-shaped, and purple. Very tasty, meaty, and sweet.
