Pink Oxheart Tomato – A Tasty Heirloom!
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I received Pink Oxheart Tomato seeds to review for free from Mary’s Heirloom Seeds. All opinions are my own.
Earlier this year I received a selection of vegetable seeds from Mary’s Heirloom Seeds (#ad )to raise in my garden and review. I’m so happy that Mary sent these wonderful seeds and I’ve really been enjoying the fruits borne of her gift! You can also read about the Royalty Purple Podded Beans and the 5 Color Silverbeet Swiss Chard I’ve grown this year.
I’ve grown Pink Oxheart Tomato (#ad) once before and found them to be a very tasty, attractive tomato. They are not the most productive tomato I’ve grown, but for an heirloom variety, I’ve had very good luck with them. My experience with larger fruited heirloom tomatoes has been somewhat tentative. It seems that blossom end rot, fusarium wilt, sunscald, and low yields are the norm for them in my garden. Mind you, I have a tendency to be a ‘low maintenance’ gardener. If it requires a great deal of coddling, it probably won’t be planted again. So, for me to say that I really like this heirloom tomato, now that’s really saying something!
I remember quite clearly that I really enjoyed the flavor of the Pink Oxheart tomato the first time I grew them. It is a very mild tomato and tastes great with a little sprinkle of salt. They are also quite meaty and firm, unlike some of the other large heirloom tomatoes I’ve tried. The color is a pleasant shade of pink to light red and looks great cut up in salads or sliced on its own. I will definitely be saving some seed from these tomatoes to grow again next year!
Growing Pink Oxhearts
My tomato patch has received so little care this year, I’m embarrassed to even say “I grew these.” Really, all I’ve done is apply fertilizer once and water sporadically. Some of my Roma tomatoes are succumbing to blossom end rot, sun scald, and cracking from too little water, followed by too much water. These meaty ‘oxen’ are having no such issues. Ok, the biggest problem has been a tomato horn worm that I don’t want to kill because they turn into the really cool Sphinx moth that looks like a miniature hummingbird….really, I kid you not. So a couple of my tomatoes have had some holes munched in them, but not too bad. And I still get to see the little sphinxes flitting around my flowers. I think it’s a worthwhile trade off. 🙂
Heirloom Tomato Successes and Failures
I’m sure I’ve had more failures in my garden than successes. Each season brings its own challenges. Sometimes my garden and I rise above those challenges, and sometimes we crash and burn.
Heirloom tomatoes are one of those love/hate plants that I’ve been trying for years with more failures than successes. I’ve tried Cherokee Purple, Amish Paste, Tigerella, Yellow Pear, Red Pear, Principe Borghese, Pink Oxheart, Brandywine, Black Krim, and Mortgage Lifter, to name a few. I’ve had very good luck with Tigerella, Yellow and Red Pear, and Pink Oxheart. The others haven’t produced as well…except maybe Mortgage Lifter…the jury is out on that one.
I assume that the failures have a lot to do with ‘user error,’ since I’m not the kind of gardener who babies along the tender plants. Weeds are really more my speed…and I eat plenty of those too! But tomatoes don’t tend to grow in the wild around here, so I have to learn from my experience and choose the varieties that do best in my growing conditions, and under my somewhat dysfunctional gardening abilities. And let me tell you, Pink Oxheart makes the cut!
Have You Ever Tried Pink Oxheart Tomatoes? What is Your Favorite Heirloom Tomato?
I have pink ox blood tomatoes plants full of flowers but only have 2 tomatoes. I water 15 min every evening if it don’t rain. I live in Florida . Who can I get my plant to turn the flowers into the tomatoes? I have hundreds of flowers on the plants they open the close And then dry out or just stay closed what can I do?
Hi Cindy,
It’s possible that the heat is too high for your tomatoes right now, or maybe they are not being pollinated. You can try brushing a bit of pollen off a flower and then brush it onto the other flowers to see if that helps. However, if it is too hot you may not get tomatoes until the temps cool down. Best wishes!
I grew this tomato fifteen years ago. I had one of them which produced prolifically spring through fall giving me loads of pretty heart shaped tomatoes that I ate in salads and sandwhiches and cooked up in sauce along with some other tomatoes. I decided that I wanted to grow them again and came across your website. I believe I bought this tomato as a transplant from Bonnie’s at a local store. I haven’t seen this tomato in a very long time. It was a very delightful and favorite of mine! My very favorite tomato, however, is Principle Borghese. It is a small-fruited Iitalian paste type tomato, that in my opinion, is outstanding, yet very underrated.They are quite versatile in that they can be made into sauce, dried and canned, and eaten with salad like cherry tomatoes. I love to pop the smaller ones in my mouth.They are delectable and burst with flavor! You can keep them out on the counter for as long as you want and they won’t get moldy. They also grow great sprawling on the ground. I started growing them four years ago as an upright plant in a plot that I ended up neglecting at the end of the season. Since then, every year, dozens of plants grow up among my other vegetables. They are very easy to manage and I hardly tend to them at all. They are very hardy and produce a constant supply of tomatoes. They come as close to nearly “wild” as you can get! They will not disappoint!
Hi Sharon,
I hope you have a nice harvest of Pink Oxheart tomatoes this year! I have also grown the Principe Borghese tomatoes and loved them. They also went wild along the edges of my garden and I’ve had some nice little gems for popping in my mouth as I work away. This year I haven’t seen any of them coming up. So I think that next year I will order a packet and plant them again. I’ll have to save seed so I can keep the little sweeties every year. Thanks for sharing!
Hey don’t be embarrassed, remember us townies out there get our Toms in a punnet so we’re dead impressed!!!!!!! I want to see the Sphinx moth, now there’s a challenge for you for the weekend!
Wrenx
Lol 😉 I followed the elusive Sphinx month for a few minutes before it had enough of me and disappeared into thin air!
We also got some Pink Oxhearts from Mary’s. The transplants looked a bit feeble so at first I wasn’t so sure they would pull through. They were also very late bloomers in the garden but once they got going, they did well. We still have quite a few. I would do them again. I like the unique color and shape.
I bring them in when they just start to turn and let them finish ripening on the counter. That has been the best way to alleviate the worms. :/ And we have lots. We’ve also done well with cream sausage, Austin’s pear, reisentraube ( a grape tomato), Cherokee purple, marglobe, and an heirloom roma.
Hi Jenny,
Sounds like you’re having better results with your heirloom tomatoes than I am 🙂 Thanks for sharing…I might give some more varieties a whirl next year!
The cream sausages have been my favorite. They are a beautiful butter yellow and have a wonderful flavor. They are divas in the garden, the plant seems to have a weeping habit and if the conditions aren’t just right she won’t perform. This year (or maybe it is this different location) the conditions were perfect and we have several. I’m hoping as we save seed we’ll get a hardier strain. They look really pretty in a pasta dish, salsa, or combined with red tomatoes on a plate.
With a name like cream sausages, how could you go wrong?! 😉