Quick Summary of Desdemona’s Heart (Serdtse Dezdemony)
- 🌍 Origin & Name: An heirloom variety sourced from private collector Tamara Yashchenko. The name is a nod to Shakespeare’s famous tragedy, adding a dramatic flair to this beautiful oxheart.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate, though it behaves more like a vigorous semi-determinate in many gardens. It typically reaches 1.6 – 1.8 meters (5-6 ft) when pruned to two main stems. Growers describe the bush as surprisingly “slender” or compact for an oxheart type.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Classic, beautiful oxheart (heart-shaped) fruits. They can reach massive sizes, often exceeding 500 grams (1.1 lbs).
- 🎨 The Great Color Debate: This variety shows fascinating variability depending on location. Some growers report deep, saturated oranges, while others get a bright, warm yellow color with a charming little “blush” or red spot on the crown/blossom end.
- 👅 Culinary Use: Solid, “hearty” classic tomato taste. While some find it lacks extreme sugar compared to other candy-sweet varieties, most agree it has an excellent balanced flavor that makes it perfect for fresh salads and sandwiches. It holds its shape well in slices.
🍅 Have you grown this variety? Scroll down to add your review and photos in the comments below!
Real Grower Reviews & Photos
I couldn’t find this one in our catalog, so allow me to start a thread about it.
Seeds were from Tamara Yashchenko. According to the description, it was supposed to be tall, up to 500g (1.1 lbs), orange.
It turned out to be a medium-height plant, about 1.7 meters (5.5 ft) in the greenhouse. Productive enough. The bush is quite slender. I trained it onto two stems.
Late in the season, the weather warmed up, so the fruits grew much larger than expected.
The taste is normal, a good “hearty” tomato flavor, but personally, it didn’t have enough sweetness for me (I love super sweet varieties).
Grew it in the greenhouse. It proved to be quite tasty and highly productive.
I grew it this year. The bushes grew under a polycarbonate roof, reaching somewhere around 1.6 meters (5.2 ft). They are tasty and beautiful.
The first trusses produced 1-2 very large fruits each, weighing more than 500 grams (1.1 lbs), but somehow those specific photos didn’t make it into my camera roll.
Nadyusha, your tomatoes turned out with such a beautifully saturated, truly orange color! 👍 Mine turned out more of a rich yellow color. I grew this heart-shaped tomato back in 2015. The fruits were of medium size, perfect true hearts, and very tasty!
Nina said:
Your tomatoes turned out with such a beautifully saturated, truly orange color!
Ninochka, mine were actually yellow, a bright, warm shade of yellow. And they had a cute little red spot right on the top/crown. I really liked them!
They say they look identical to Heart of Ashkhabad, but mine looked different because my Ashkhabads didn’t grow in their true heart-shape last time.
Next year, I will compare them again with the properly shaped Heart of Ashkhabad.
