📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Fish Lake Oxheart
- 🌍 Origin: A highly regarded Canadian heirloom variety originating from the Fish Lake area in Ontario.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate. Unlike many wispy, fragile-looking oxheart varieties, this one has a very vigorous, powerful, and robust bush. It easily reaches 6.5 ft (2 m) in a greenhouse.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Large, blunt heart-shaped (oxheart) tomatoes. They ripen to a deep pink/raspberry color. The flesh is incredibly dense (“pure solid meat”) with very little gel and no wateriness.
- 👅 Flavor: Universally praised. It has a classic, well-balanced old-fashioned tomato flavor—sweet with just the right amount of tartness and a long, pleasant aftertaste.
- ⏳ Yield & Growing Traits: Mid-season ripener. It is an excellent yielder that handles heat waves very well without dropping blossoms. Pro Tip: Because it sets fruit so heavily, some growers prefer to “thin the trusses” (cull some blossoms/tiny fruits) down to 3-4 per cluster to ensure the remaining tomatoes grow massive.
A very prolific, tall-growing (up to 6.5 ft / 2 meters in the greenhouse) tomato variety with large pink, heart-shaped fruits. The fruits are juicy, have excellent flavor, and are sweet. It is a mid-season ripening variety.
Last year, this variety was a dud for me and didn’t turn out well. But this year, I am extremely happy with it. It’s become another favorite of mine. 😘
According to the description, it’s a large-fruited variety, but I don’t really like massively huge tomatoes, so I immediately thinned the trusses, leaving only 3-4 fruits per cluster. I pruned the plant to a single stem. The largest fruit weighed 17 oz (480 g), and the rest were no more than 10.5 oz (300 g). The taste is sweet and tart — a true, classic old-fashioned tomato flavor.
Just a heads-up on the translation, the original name “Fish Lake” is a proper noun (the actual name of the lake in Canada). So it really is Fish Lake Oxheart.
Fish Lake Oxheart tomato, seeds from Yuri Kuzminykh.
An absolutely wonderful tomato. The bush is powerful, height — 5.5 ft (1.7 m), it set fruit very well despite the heat. The fruits are rounded-hearts with a deep, rich raspberry color. The flesh is incredibly dense — it is pure solid meat, not watery at all. Sweet-and-tart flavor, though the sweetness dominates; a true tomato flavor with a very pleasant aftertaste. Great for salads/slicing and for any kind of processing/canning.
I loved it very much; it’s going straight into my permanent seed collection.
I liked the variety. Heavy yielder. There was almost no blossom drop. A tall, vigorous bush. The fruits are excellent slicers/salad tomatoes with a great tomato flavor; mine were red. It grew in a fairly bright, sunny spot.
