Growers’ Notes and Photos (USDA Zones 3-11 Experience)
Livingston’s Yellow Oxheart, sometimes you’ll see it called Livingston’s Yellow Magic.
A little history.
Alexander Wilmer Livingston was a pioneer in modern tomato breeding. During his career, Alexander Livingston introduced fifteen tomato varieties. In total, A. Livingston and his Livingston Seed Company introduced thirty-five varieties. By the mid-twentieth century, most of Livingston’s varieties had practically gone extinct. Starting in 1999, Victory Seeds began the long process of recreating the Livingston seed collection. This particular variety was introduced in 1929.
Livingston’s Yellow Oxheart is an indeterminate, mid-season variety. Reached about 5 ft (1.5 m) in the greenhouse. Pruned it to two leaders. Compact plant with classic wispy, drooping foliage. Regular leaf.
The fruits are cool heart shapes, medium-sized, weighing 7-10.5 oz (200-300 g), with a gorgeous golden-yellow color. The skin is thin, tender, and smooth. The flesh is meaty, buttery, sweet, aromatic, super delicious, and practically seedless. The flavor stayed rich and really nice all season long. Excellent slicer for fresh eating, salads, or sandwiches. For me, it put out a great concentrated yield and blew me away with the flavor. Production was average.
Edited November 16, 2019 by Tiffany
Huge fruits, 14-17.5 oz (400-500 g). Quality is outstanding, uniform, smooth, and firm. The flavor is fantastic, refined, complex, with a really nice texture. Absolutely mesmerizing beauty.
The vine grew just over 3 ft (1 m). Yield was low for me the first year. Total grower error. I’ll gladly keep working with this variety.
Here’s how mine turned out. Average yield.
Full Summary: Plant, Yield, Taste and History
- 🌿 Plant: Indeterminate, mid-season. Grows to about 3-5 ft (1-1.5 m) depending on climate. Features regular, thin, wispy foliage typical of oxheart varieties.
- 📈 Yield: Generally rated as average. Tiffany noted it produced a great concentrated flush, though Vadim had lower yields due to newbie mistakes.
- 👅 Taste: Universally praised. The flesh is described as meaty, buttery, practically seedless, with a sweet, rich, and complex flavor profile. Makes a top-tier fresh slicer for sandwiches and salads.
- 📜 History: Introduced in 1929 by the legendary Livingston Seed Company, whose founder Alexander W. Livingston was crucial in developing stable, uniform tomato varieties in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Thanks to Victory Seeds, this nearly extinct heirloom was saved and reintroduced to the gardening community.
- 🌎 Who Reviewed It: Grown successfully across drastically different climates, from the intense heat of Las Palmas, Spain (Zone 11) to the short, cold seasons of Magnitogorsk and Nizhny Novgorod, Russia (Zones 3 and 4).
Alexander Livingston is widely considered the father of the modern tomato. Before his work in the 1870s, tomatoes were often ribbed, hollow, and inconsistent. The fact that Russian growers are actively cultivating and preserving his 1929 Yellow Oxheart speaks volumes about the global reach of the US heirloom seed preservation movement, particularly the efforts of Victory Seeds to pull these historical gems back from the brink of extinction.
