'Bulgarian Carrot' ('Shipka') Hot Pepper

Capsicum annuum

Origin: Bulgaria

Improvement status: Cultivar

Seeds per packet: ~30

Germination tested 11/2025: 80%

Life cycle: Annual

These fruity but hot peppers (about as spicy as a serrano) are about three inches long, shaped liked little carrots, and grown in profusion on plants up to two feet tall. Known as shipka peppers in their native Bulgaria, they are very versatile in the kitchen, great for drying whole, pounding into chili flakes, roasting, frying, adding to salsa, or pickling. Bright orange, around three inches long, and shaped like carrots. The variety is believed to date to at least the 1850s, and rumor has it the seeds were smuggled from behind the Iron Curtain toward the end of the Cold War in the 1980s.

Our seed comes from our friends Dylan Bruce and Cody Egan of Driftless Seed Supply in Wisconsin.

GROWING TIPS: Start seeds a few weeks before last frost indoors. Plant out once soil warms later in spring. Give plants about a foot of space, and stake individual plants if they begin to topple from the weight of all those peppers!