📌 Quick Summary (TL;DR): Zdorovaya Zhizn (Healthy Life)
- 🌍 Origin: A Russian commercial variety marketed specifically for its exceptionally high lycopene content and potential health benefits. The name translates to “Healthy Life”.
- 🌿 Plant Habit: An extremely vigorous indeterminate (tall) vine. It produces complex, multi-flowered trusses and can easily surpass 6.5 feet (2 m) in height, even when grown outdoors in open ground. Highly disease-resistant.
- 🍅 Fruit Characteristics: Red, perfectly round fruits that fall somewhere between a large cherry and a small cocktail tomato, typically weighing around 0.7 to 1.4 oz (20-40 g). They are crack-resistant and hold up well on the counter if harvested on the truss.
- 👅 Flavor: Exceptionally sweet. Growers note it is often the sweetest red cherry variety in their garden, making it a fantastic snacking tomato and excellent for whole-canning.
Healthy Life is an anti-cancer variety with an elevated lycopene content. Plant habit: reaches around 6.5 feet (2 m) when pruned to 2 main stems. It produces multiple trusses, with 7 to 10 tomatoes on each truss. The fruit is red, perfectly round, smooth, and globe-shaped, weighing about 1 oz (30 g). The yield is unbelievably high, and this variety commands top dollar in supermarkets.
I could only find one photo of it. For me, this variety grew way taller than the stated 6.5 feet (2 m), even when planted outdoors in open ground. The fruits aren’t really cherries, they are more like cocktail-sized tomatoes. When it came to canning, they were the absolute sweetest out of all the red cherries I grew! 😋 👍
Edited November 26, 2013 by Danko
I grew these cherries in my garden without staking them at all. I had plenty of space, so I just let the vines sprawl directly on the ground! The plants had very dense, leafy foliage.
The fruits were quite large and very sweet, they definitely matched the advertised size of 0.7 to 1.4 oz (20-40 g).
Also, absolutely no diseases touched them. 🙂
This variety is a soooo insanely heavy yielder! 🤩 🤩 🤩 My seeds were originally from Amira-12. 🌸 I grew a single plant outdoors in open ground. It’s an indeterminate, and I barely pruned any suckers off it at all. Every single sucker immediately threw out a massive, complex flower truss. The fruiting window on this plant is incredibly long.
The fruits are small, sweet, and didn’t crack on me. 😋 When I harvested them by snipping off the whole trusses, they stored really well on the counter.
Edited January 7, 2015 by Svetikk
Mine lived in the greenhouse. It grew to well over 6.5 feet (2 m) tall. I absolutely loved the taste and the yield. I got my seeds from some awesome folks right here on the forum! 🌸
In this thread, Amira-12 mentions growing this variety without any stakes or trellising, simply letting the vines “sprawl on the ground.” While many American growers are religious about staking, caging, or string-trellising indeterminate tomatoes to prevent rot and pests, sprawling is actually a very viable, traditional method if you have plenty of space and dry weather. It saves a lot of labor, and the plants often root along the stem where they touch the soil, creating a massive root system that pumps even more water and nutrients into the fruit!
