🍅 Quick take: Ocharovanie (which translates to “Charm” or “Fascination”) is an indeterminate, mid-season Russian variety that produces beautiful, apricot-looking orange fruits with a slight blush. Weighing up to 3.5 oz (100 g), they are firm, sweet, and perfect for canning. Greenhouse performance shows massive vigor and excellent late blight resistance, but growing it outdoors might lead to severe blossom drop in some climates. Full summary ↓
Growers’ Notes and Photos
Excellent, tasty tomato! Tall, vigorous indeterminate, the vine structure is just like De Barao Pink. Grew it in the greenhouse. Mid-season, tough against bad weather and diseases. It stayed totally healthy for me, and was the very last plant in the greenhouse to succumb to late blight.
The vendor description says the fruits are round, but mine turned out slightly oval with a little nub. Weight up to 3.5 oz (100 g). They are orange with a blush, absolutely gorgeous, they look just like apricots. Sweet, juicy, and firm. I bet they’d be perfect for canning, though we just ate all of ours fresh 😋. They grow on beautiful, dense, hanging trusses of 6 to 8 tomatoes each.
Definitely growing this one again 👍. While typing this up, it hit me: if it weren’t for the orange color and the sweeter taste, this would be a dead ringer for De Barao Pink 😲.
I grew mine outdoors. It didn’t set a single tomato 😲😲😲 just tiny little dried-up blossom nubs. First time I’ve ever had this happen. So the “Ocharovanie” (Charm) variety turned into a total disappointment for me, to put it mildly. Scored the seeds from Kulik.
Full Summary: Plant, Yield, Taste, and Looks
- 🌿 Plant & Looks: A tall, highly vigorous indeterminate mid-season variety. The fruits are stunning: orange with a rosy blush, slightly oval with a small pointy tip, strongly resembling real apricots. They grow in dense, cascading clusters of 6-8.
- 📈 Yield & Resistance: Performance seems highly environment-dependent. In a greenhouse setting, it is a massive producer with outstanding disease resistance, noted specifically for fighting off late blight longer than almost any other variety. However, grown outdoors in cooler/wetter climates, it can suffer from severe blossom drop and fail to set any fruit at all.
- 👅 Taste & Use: Sweet, juicy, yet very firm. Maxing out around 3.5 oz (100 g), they are the quintessential dual-purpose tomato: fantastic eaten fresh, but their dense texture and thick skins make them elite candidates for whole-canning.
One of the reviewers above compares the plant’s massive, unruly vigor to De Barao Pink. For American growers unfamiliar with it, De Barao is a legendary series of bomb-proof, ultra-vigorous Russian canning tomatoes that grow like weeds and produce relentlessly until hard frost. Comparing a variety to De Barao is high praise for its stamina.
Also, a fun note on the translation: The second reviewer makes a pun that gets lost in English. The variety name is “Ocharovanie” (Charm/Fascination), and she calls it a complete “Razocharovanie” (Disappointment). Gotta love forum humor!
