All summer I have been helping to take care of this vegetable garden in my parent’s backyard. I will go out back and occasionally pick the tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, lettuce, and pears etc. Last week I was de-weeding the vegetable garden and doing a little harvesting when I picked two yellow peppers (not of the bell variety) as well as a lot of miniature tomatoes (though not cherry tomatoes). I didn’t think anything of it and placed the tomatoes in a bowl on the counter and just threw the peppers on top of them.
After about a week the peppers began to turn an orange/red color and now they are pretty much completely red. It turns out that the color of vegetables has to do with their pH levels. The tomatoes are red because of their pH level. When I put the peppers in with the tomatoes they began to absorb some of the akaline base and this change in pH level caused the color transformation. Generally tomatoes have a pH of -3.1 and peppers have a pH of -1.4.
I guess those science classes paid off after all.