Whenever a pansy has its leaves changing color, it's a sign that something is wrong. Several diseases might change your pansy leaves' color and thus change their color from the beautiful green to yellow.
But what causes pansy leaves to turn yellow? Improper fertilization, presence of pests, and diseases like root rot, powdery mildew, downy mildew, and alternaria pansy Leaf disease can cause pansy leaves to turn yellow.
Pansy leaves could also change its color to yellow as a result of the crown or root rotting. They might be suffering from a fungal disease that remains common to pansies caused by Fusarium fungi or Phytophthora.
These are present in the soil and could infect the plant's roots. If you have a pansy that flops over when it gets lightly pushed, that could cause a color change. These plants could die, wilt, or could end up having yellow leaves.
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What Causes Pansy Leaves To Turn Yellow?
Below are the various pests and diseases that could cause pansy leaves to turn yellow:
1. Powdery Mildew
Being a disease caused by fungi that are favored by temperatures and very high humidity, powdery mildew might appear whenever the weather gets dry.
This leads to different patches of gray or white blotches on foliage, stems, and flowers and might make pansy leaves yellow.
2. Downy mildew
Downy mildew makes the pansy leaves blotchy before they become yellow.
This tends to appear before you fully know there is fungal action on the pansy plant and it ends up becoming prevalent on the lower leaves of the plant where there is moisture.
The fungal disease enjoys wet, cool weather.
3. Root Rot
Root rot condition ends up causing stunted growth, mushy, brown roots. The root rot also leads to yellow leaves and wilting in pansies. There are a variety of pathogens borne from the soil.
These include Rhizoctonia, Fusarium, and Pythium. These makes the roots of pansy plants to rot. They are caused by overwatering, drainage of the soil poorly, or having containers that stand in water.
So you need to be mindful of how often you water pansy plants.
4. Alternaria Pansy Leaf Disease
Yellow-looking lesions changing to dark brown could appear in your pansy leaves. As these lesions grow older, they might look sunken or concentrated with brown-looking rings.
The spots centers might drop out. The disease is usually carried out by seeds that are contaminated and favored by humid, warm conditions.
5. Necrotic Impatiens Spot Virus
Being a well-known virus that affects pansies and changes the color of their leaves from green to yellow.
These plants could develop bull's eyes, yellow, dark ring spots, stem lesions, and leaf lesions that would find it challenging to thrive. Some thrips are usually blamed for this sort of viral infection.
6. Aphids or Spider Mites
These aphids or spider mites are common insects that disturb most plants, including pansy plants.
After they affect the pansy plants, these spider mites end up seeing your leaves changing to either yellow, pale green with some whitish leaves, which have stippling of these colors on the upper part of the surface of the leaves.
There could be horrible infestations when mites leave their webbing on these leaves. These aphids take nutrients from the stems and leaves. These end up resulting in having pansies that have yellow leaves.
How to Treat Yellow Leaves On Pansy Plants
Now that you know what causes pansy leaves to turn yellow, you could use soap spray, an insecticide, to get rid of tiny insects. You could get rid of light infestations using a solid water stream.
There could be severe problems that might need systemic insecticides. Some fungicides have limited use that fights yellow leaf spots and mildew or other horrible fungal diseases.
These might be effective when they get applied at the beginning in the development of diseases. You could make use of products that are appropriately registered for usage on these pansies.
To make sure that these pansies have more than enough sunlight. You should completely forget about planting your pansies in areas that have been affected by this disease at a previous time.
Conclusion
Knowledge of what causes pansy leaves to turn yellow will teach you ways to eliminate all diseased leaves and all affected plant parts immediately they are noticed.
The diseases mentioned above have different ways to be tackled by using insecticides and soap sprays. You get to keep your flower beds debris-free and clean all through the beautiful blooming season.