You can let them grow larger. If you want maximum size and flesh thickness wait til one starts to go to a dark red color like farmerdill's picture shows....you wanted to pick it a few days earlier, so gauge your future harvests off of that. In your variety, the tiny peppers are usually green when they first develop, soon change to purple, grow for several weeks as purple, and then ripen to a deep red/burgandy. If I recall correctly, they do not have solid purple flesh through and through but a purple surface and green underneath. Only after ripening to the dark red will the flesh lose the greenish color. Why only one color per plant? Each plant's genetics determine its fruit color. Some are advertised as multicolor because the fruit(peppers) go through dramatically different colors as they mature. Your pack is multicolor in that way, but the plants are also different varieties of peppers with genetics to produce a variety of fully mature colors as well as intermediate colors as they grow. It may be hard to decide just when to harvest, but all stages are safe to eat. I think waiting until they are well along but not quite to final color gives the best taste and good yield. Others may give up some yield to get the sweeter taste of fully mature peppers.....but you won't have any that are purple at that stage in your mix.

Hi everyone, thanks for the feedback. I'll look at http://www.tomatogrowers.com/ since that sounds familiar and may be the site I was thinking of. Yeah, many peppers turn to red when they are fully mature, but this particular site stated that theirs never turned red. So their white peppers stayed white, chocolate stayed brown, yellow stayed yellow and so on on full maturity. I love that I would never have to worry about them turning any other color than what I was looking for. I have chocolate beauty planted now, but even they turn red. And the purple beauty I have planted now are about too bear fruit, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed with them. Thanks again!

It sounds like you did most everything right and they should have done fine. For some reason the plants didn't root well and thrive so i'd look into the soil ph (most likely) but also if there was anything feeding on the roots, like symphylan. Also drainage, cool soil (straw mulch doesn't help) and various pepper diseases. -Mark

No one seems to have answers for you so I'll give you my thoughts. Container planting for veggies isn't one of my favs for suggestions, never had much success with that method other than possibly a small cherry tomato plant for minimum production. That being said, a max of one plant per 5 gal container is your best bet, I say this because later on when the pepper or sweet potato plant grow large it will keep you pretty busy watering the plants. Also black containers aren't the best color as they will get very hot in the summer sun and roast the roots on the inner wall, so it's best to shade the container portion. And 25 gal containers? would not like to move those when the time comes. Sorry for the dismal report, just too used to planting veggies in the ground where moisture, temperature, and daily attendance is less cumbersome (though weeding part is easier). Good luck!