Carmen

[Reign]

First time giving them a go. I'm tempted to pick a green one. Right now the Carmens are my only peppers with fruit. I planted three of them. This particular plant was abused. It never got hardened correctly but recovered well. Then my niece yanked it out of the ground.

My husband has nice hands.

[bully]

My husband has nice hands.

And soft as a babies
I have no idea why I wrote that LOL, I blame the radio paradise I'm listening to ..it puts me in a silly mood

I'm growing a plant named 'Karmen' that I got from geza in Hungary. I don't suppose yours started out like little round balls before they elongated?

Karmen

[Mantis]

Looks like Karmen with a K is not Carmen with a C eh

[Reign]

Karmen and Carmen are friends but not the same.

Bully update the pictures as Karmen grows. I want to see how the fruits turn out.

[obispo45]

I'm growing a few Carmen's too. Not as productive for me as I thought they'd be, however don't have any real complaints with the cultivar either. Tasty, solid and thick walled, attractive fruits, sturdy plant with good foliage. Still have a while to go till autumn...pretty certain many more of them will wind up being happily eaten here. Just my experience so far.

[FlipTX]

I found this discussion from last year when looking up Carmen peppers. I've tried growing other peppers at least six times over the years and it always ended in heart break. When I got two Carmen seedlings I swore this would be my last attempt.



Well so far, so good!

[feldon30]

5 gallon pot


6 peppers are 4-5" long. Another 3-4 peppers are about Jalapeno sized.

[robbins]

I grew them last year. Waited until the ripened and picked hundreds and hundreds off about 50 plants. I really liked them and planted lots more this year. Only pepper I liked better was Melrose - incredibly(sp?) sweet and productive, but smaller.
Robbins

[tomakers]

People don't know what they are missing if they don't wait for them to ripen. They are soooo much better ripe than green.

[feldon30]

I had a long conversation with my stomach one day. It politely asked me for no more green peppers. I've kept up my end of the bargain.

[FlipTX]

If my Carmen peppers turns out to be as good as they look, I'll definitely plant more next time. I've just had such bad luck with peppers in the past that I didn't want to waste the space if they didn't do well. I'll be waiting for these to ripen to red. The only green pepper I like is a pickled jalapeno.

[feldon30]

As I mentioned in another thread, I am not growing any bell peppers and really don't see any point since they set so few (often as few as 2-4 per plant) and take FOREVER to ripen.

Carmen, Jimmy Nardello, and Golden Marconi should fulfill my need for large sweet peppers even if cutting them is a little bit different than the familiar blocky bell shape.

One thing I have done which seems to be paying dividends is to pinch off the first flush of blossoms/fruit while the plant is under 2 feet tall (if it's a variety known to reach 3 feet). I did this on all of my plants and the plants spent energy growing larger before trying to reproduce.

[FlipTX]

Are you having much blossom drop with the Carmen, Feldon? My two plants set 5 peppers each, all of which are nice and big and healthy, and for the past two weeks all the following blossoms have dropped.

[feldon30]

I haven't been watching blossoms much on my peppers. I have 5-6 larger peppers and 4-5 smaller peppers on Carmen.

Hopefully the resumption of fruitset on the tomato plants also happens on the peppers.

[Love2Troll]

Bully's Karmen looks like a C. chinense that I've grown called Carmine.