📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Dey Huanchi
- 🌍 Origin: A commercial variety with Chinese roots (the name roughly translates to “Big Yellow”), heavily popularized in Eastern Europe and Russia by the SeDeK seed company.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Determinate (bush). Generally does well grown outdoors without greenhouse protection.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Beautiful yellow-orange slicing tomatoes. Average weight is around 5.3 oz (150 g).
- 👅 Flavor: Highly rated! Growers specifically praise it for its excellent taste profile.
- ⏳ Maturity: Mid-season.
This variety absolutely blew me away in terms of flavor. The only downside was that it was pretty disease-prone for me – it developed some sort of black spot or rot right around the stem end, and the fruit would just drop off. Oddly enough, it didn’t really rot much further after dropping.
The other varieties planted right next to it were perfectly healthy, so maybe it just didn’t like my climate outdoors, or there was some other underlying issue. Still, the flavor was so good that I’m definitely giving it another try next year.
I grew this one a long time ago from SeDeK* seeds. It’s a determinate bush. I didn’t have any issues with rot back then. I really loved the flavor too. It was a mid-season producer, and the tomatoes weighed right around 5.3 oz (150 g). It’s a shame I wasn’t taking garden photos back in those days!
It looks awfully similar to Orange Fleshed Purple Smudge*. 🤔
- Rot near the stem: Alexander describes a black rot near the stem that causes fruit drop. Unlike Blossom End Rot (BER) which appears on the bottom, stem-end rot is usually caused by fungal pathogens (like Alternaria or Phoma rot) often triggered by high humidity or stress in an outdoor growing environment.
- SeDeK: A major Russian agricultural and seed company known for importing, breeding, and distributing many unique tomato varieties across Eastern Europe.
- “Orange with purple spots”: Vera is directly translating and referencing the well-known heirloom variety Orange Fleshed Purple Smudge, which shares a very similar visual profile to Dey Huanchi when exposed to direct sunlight.
