All depend on variety some peppers are light green till they change to final stage what ever color is ripenig color.

Rick, are you talking about foliage or fruit?

Jim

jimster,

i believe rick is talking about his foilage. i'm having the same problem and am waiting for responses.

some of my plants are light green and starting to turn yellow. yesterday in our 90 degree heat some had dried out and contributed to this i figure. but they were light green before our winter to summer drought weather.

wildlifeman

If you have leafs light color depends on if you feed the plant with enough fertilizer what ever you use or not enough lighting, don't forget not to water to much make plant to saggy.Plant will recover if you put the plant in shady side not direct on full sun.

Yep. He did say plants, didn't he. Gotta read more carefully.

If these are small seedlings, it can be difficult to get all the factors in perfect balance. The Pro Mix I use, which is wonderful stuff, has no nutrients added. That's good, because I don't want any until the seedlings have one or two sets of true leaves. I try to resist getting impatient and feeding heavily. It's better to err on the light side. It doesn't take a large amount of any mineral to overcome a deficiency. The text book pictures you see that illustrate various mineral deficiencies required careful preparation of the growing medium to almost totally exclude a given mineral. Otherwise the symptoms would not be obvious.

It is important to remember that an excess of some minerals can interfere with a plants ability to make use of other minerals. A plant can suffer from a magnesium deficiency, for example, even when there is an abundance of magnesium in the soil when potassium is excessive.

I've recently learned that urea based nitrogen can hinder seedling development. I don't understand it fully, but I do know that urea is a big component of the popular soluble plant foods. I have on hand a bag of calcium nitrate, so I'm using that, sparingly, on my seedlings now. They need some nitrogen for vegetative growth. Other nitrates can be used.

Also, since my seed starting mix doesn't provide it, I add a little magnesium in the form of Epsom salts once the seedlings get started. Chlorophyll, which is the foundation of photosynthesis, has an atom of magnesium at the center of its molecule. So I figure I need to provide some magnesium too, sparingly of course, to make chlorophyll. Plants need some sulfur and Epsom salts (MgSO4) has that too.

Controlling mineral concentrations in the tiny amounts of medium we use to grow seedlings is tricky. But I am not trying to raise them to maturity in that situation. So, if I can give them a reasonably good start, they will do fine when set out in the open ground, where the chemistry doesn't fluctuate so drastically.

That's a long winded dissertation on my amateur thinking thinking about seedling nutrition. The highly educated horticulturalists who produce seedling by the millions do better than I. I bought a six pack of tomatoes yesterday that are a little huskier and have slightly darker color than mine. But I'm gaining on them.

Jim

It's the leaves that are light green (slight yellow tint). The plants are in the garden outside. They get plenty of light. They are now all about 9" to 12" tall. Some are even starting to get peppers on them. I guess it could be all the rain that we've been getting lately or maybe it's not hot enough for them yet. They have grown but are not taking off the way the tomato plants are. My tomatoes were about 9" when I planted them and are now about 2' tall and look extremely healthy. I'm even getting baby tomatoes. Much faster than the days to maturity cited for the variety. The weather has been warm enough that I'm also starting to get zucchini (found a baby one today) and lots of summer squash blossoms. I'm wondering if I should have waited more time before planting the peppers or maybe I'm not fertilizing enough. I tilled in 2.5" of manure in the fall and used the recommended amount of 10-10-10 in the spring along with epsom salts, and ironite. The only issue that I have with my soil is the PH which is around 7.2. I didn't attempt to amend it this year. Could this be the problem?

Sounds to me like you did everything just right. Possibly the rain washed out some nutrients temporarily. Whatever the reason, if they are setting fruit it doesn't seem too serious. I would expect them to grow out of it eventually.

Jim