📌 Quick Summary: Kafyavi Chereshki (Brown Cherry)
Are seed companies just slapping different names on the exact same tomato? In this thread, growers dive deep into a side-by-side comparison of several popular dark cherry varieties to find the truth!
- 🌍 Origin: A Bulgarian heirloom. The name “Kafyavi Chereshki” literally translates from Bulgarian to “Brown Cherry”. Seeds originally circulated by the famous Bulgarian collector, Hristo.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: Indeterminate (tall). A vigorous, highly productive vine that sets fruit very reliably even in cold weather.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Small, dark brown/mahogany oval plum tomatoes, weighing around 1 to 2 oz (30-60 g).
- ⬇️ The Clone Conspiracy: Growers in this thread conducted a massive side-by-side grow-out, comparing Kafyavi Chereshki with Chocolate Bunny, Black Plum, Brown Cherry, and Black Moor. The verdict? Scroll down to read the fascinating results of their detective work!
In the summer of 2016, I did a side-by-side comparison of Kafyavi Chereshki (seeds from Hristo) with:
- Chocolate Bunny (Shokoladniy Zaychik) – my own saved seeds, originally from Kulik in 2013.
- Black Plum (Sliva Chernaya) and Bush Plum (Sliva Kustovaya) – seeds from Y. Petrov in Zhukovsky. (There is absolutely zero difference between these two either).
- Brown Cherry – seeds from Popenko.
The result: absolutely everything is identical. The structure of the bush, the leaves, the blossom trusses, the shape of the tomatoes. Most importantly, the fruiting timeline is exactly the same! Even now they are all still trying to set fruit and bulk up, even though nighttime temps have been around 37-41°F (3-5°C) for a week.
I grew 2 bushes of each. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the space to plant more.
The weight of the tomatoes can fluctuate by about 0.3 oz (10 grams) depending on the conditions: soil fertility, whether it grows outdoors or in a greenhouse, if it gets a sunny spot, or if it just got “unlucky”.
Translated from Bulgarian, Kafyavi Chereshki literally means “Brown Cherry”.
So, you can just grow our good old Chocolate Bunny and you’ll have full buckets of Kafyavi Chereshki!
Gavrish seed company sells “Chocolate Monisto”, and Sedek sells “Chocolate Plum”. It’s highly likely those are all clones too.
Alyona, thank you so much! 🎩 👍
Last year I also desperately wanted these Kafyavi Chereshkis, but the girls and I came to the conclusion that it’s just our Chocolate Bunny under a different name.
But the name is so wonderful – Kafyavi Chereshki
Alyona, thank you so much! 🎩 👍
I had the itch myself, both from the exotic name and the descriptions online. The only thing I missed out on was planting our Black Moor (Cherniy Mavr) for comparison. I’ll compare it in 2017.
The weight of the tomatoes can fluctuate by about 0.3 oz (10 grams) depending on the conditions: soil fertility, whether it grows outdoors or in a greenhouse, if it gets a sunny spot, or if it just got “unlucky”.
Good job! Thank you for the investigation! 😄 🎩
Alyona, I’m guessing the weight is somewhere in the range of 1 to 1.4 oz (30-40 g)?
Alyona, I’m guessing the weight is somewhere in the range of 1 to 1.4 oz (30-40 g)?
A little larger in the greenhouse, around 1.4 to 2.1 oz (40-60 g), and in open ground (covered with plastic at night) they were about 1 to 1.8 oz (30-50 g). It’s all relative though, because the more comfortable they are, the closer they get to the maximum potential of the genetics.
Several bushes, both in the greenhouse and outdoors, across different varieties, pushed out double (intermediate) lower trusses. I’m leaning toward the idea that this was the result of the frost we had in late May. And my hands are pretty big, I’m no Thumbelina 🙂
Alena, my Black Chinese Pearl looked exactly the same too 😄
Alena, my Black Chinese Pearl looked exactly the same too 😄
I would love to trace where all these legs are growing from. I wouldn’t be surprised if they all originated from Black Moor. There was some information floating around the internet that it came over from China in the early 2000s.
Yep! I grew Chocolate Bunny and Black Moor right next to each other, and my conclusion was identical 🤫.
I would love to trace where all these legs are growing from. I wouldn’t be surprised if they all originated from Black Moor. There was some information floating around the internet that it came over from China in the early 2000s.
Yep, and our Russian breeders just stole the laurels from the Chinese breeders 😛, hoping that since they don’t know Russian, they wouldn’t go digging around in our State Register 🤫
[Link to State Register for Black Moor]
Through Tatiana Kushnareva’s Tomatobase, I also found Cinnamon Pear.
It’s only sold here, at least I couldn’t find it anywhere else.
[Link to Tradewindsfruit]
Based on the look of the leaves and the tomatoes, it again looks exactly like Choc. Bunny, Chereshki, and all the rest of them 😄
Yep, and our Russian breeders just stole the laurels from the Chinese breeders 😛, hoping that since they don’t know Russian, they wouldn’t go digging around in our State Register 🤫
It’s an awesome variety, and at that time there was simply nothing else even close to it on the market, except maybe Black De Barao. Which, by the way, has also been in the State Register since 1999, but even newbies know where that one actually came from.
You should probably fix the typo in the title – it is correctly spelled “Kafyavi Chereshki”.
[Link to forum correction]
(Quoting Krasnaya Shapka’s original side-by-side comparison post)
It’s all the exact same thing. The only difference is the name.
This thread highlights a frustrating reality in the heirloom tomato world: commercial renaming. Because open-pollinated heirloom seeds cannot be patented, any seed company (or collector) can grow out a famous variety, slightly alter the name or translate it into their native language, and sell it as a “new” or “rare” discovery. The growers here did a fantastic job proving that the highly sought-after Bulgarian Kafyavi Chereshki, the Russian Chocolate Bunny, and the famous Black Moor (and several others) are almost certainly the exact same genetic tomato circulating under different aliases!
