I’m now plot number 19 at the Southwest Corridor Community Farm. Laurel picked me out a sweet sunny spot, right next to a really inspirational super-gardener named Cathy. But there are issues.
The garden is great, it’s 12 ft by 13 1/2 (huge, by my standards), with its own water spigot in the corner, what a luxury! But the whole place was built, long ago, with pressure treated railroad ties that are now deteriorating and leaching arsenic into the soil! Argh! I’m told not to grow anything for eating within 6 inches of these borders, and to take them out if I’m up to it and replace them with stone pavers, which is a lot of muscle work. If I’m going to do that I should do it before planting anything, or before loading in all the compost it can use to build up the soil. Which means I’d have to do it now. And I’ve got a lot of onions who are very anxious to get into that dirt. Hmmm.
So now I get to do the most fun part, planning out the garden and what will go where. I geeked out at the garden, measured out how big the beds are in there (the previous occupant put down a kind of inefficient pattern of brick paths and I think I’m going to redo the whole thing (more muscle work) to make just a little more space for all the veggies I want to stuff in there. I’m now consulting all my sources, trying to decide how many onions I can squeeze into every 9 square feet. Does each one need 6 inches? 7? 8? I might even give them 9, at least the yellow storage onions. I want them to get big: we eat a lot of onions at my house and it’s more efficient for us to have big ones – less work chopping them up.
Peas have not come up yet. I’ve brought them back inside hoping they’ll sprout where it’s warmer. Wish I had done that in the first place.
More tomatoes have come up, peppers are up, still waiting on those eggplants! I’ve got one spinach plant that survived whatever little fungus was killing off the others.
Below is an email I sent to a friend in response to a question about moldy seedlings and damping off. I love to hear myself talk about gardening, apparently:
Stacey Cordeiro wrote:
I’ve
actually given up on those 72 cell seed starting things, and the mold
and damping off were one of the reasons. Usually I’d have 6 seeds
starting of 12 different kinds of things in one of those trays, but the
problem is 12 different plants are all going to sprout at different
times. And once a seedling sprouts it doesn’t need the same things as
a seed under the ground waiting to sprout – that is, it doesn’t need
quite as much heat and humidity, it needs to have its cover come off,
so the leaves can dry off and not get moldy. Also, those 72 individual
little trays dry out really quickly, it’s hard to keep the dirt "evenly
moist" like you’re supposed to do, which stresses out the plants.
I’ve
switched to starting seeds in 3" pots as recommended in one of my
favorite gardening books, The New Victory Garden by Bob Thompson -
depending on the plants, I put somewhere between 3 (tomatoes) and 100
(onions) seeds in one pot. I keep a little water tray under them
(usually a shallow plastic hummus container) and a plastic bag on top.
As the seeds sprout, I can take the plastic bag off the top right when
they need it. And when they get big enough, I separate them out of the
3" pots. Thompson recommends transplanting them into individual seed
cells at that point, but I don’t see why – mine go from sharing one
three inch pot to each seedling I want to grow inhabiting it’s own 3"
pot. Either that or they go straight into the ground, like the onions
will (hopefully) do.
I’m
not actually sure damping off and the mold you have are exactly the
same thing, but I do know damping off is a kind of fungus. Most dirt
has a multitude of funguses and mold spores just waiting for the right
conditions to grow. A lot of places will tell you to sterilize
everything in your seed starting kit – to wash your seed trays and pots
with bleach, use only sterile soil-less starting medium, but I think
that’s kind of dumb, actually. I start my seeds in the same soil
they’re going to be growing in when they’re grown. I think the logic
they’re using is if the seedlings grow up in a sterile environment and
then get transplanted into some dirt all full of funguses and bacteria,
they will get a head start and then be stronger and more developed when
assaulted with all those microbes? But I wonder if they’ll have been
too coddled and will just die when exposed to that stuff. Kind of like
kids who grow up in overly sterile environments developing a lot of
allergies. I choose to go not-sterile. Which means sometimes I get
mold and damping off sometimes. If I do, I just try again, or do
without the seeds that didn’t make it, and the next year I plant more
of the stuff that seemed hearty and resistant to the particular bunch
of fungus and mold living in my soil and my house. If I do find that
white fuzzy mold growing in my seed pots, which I do, I scoop it out
with my fingers or a spoon and throw it away, to avoid spreading it
unnecessarily throughout the dirt. I doubt it really matters, though,
because if the spores are there, they’re there, and the important thing
is keeping the dirt wet enough for plants but not wet enough for mold
and fungus. Also keeping enough good stuff living in there, like good
bacteria, worms and microbes, to out-compete the fungus. I do this
with a lot of homemade compost.
As
for the peas, I bet they will be fine. I have always thought that peas
didn’t need to be started indoors, you can plant them outside in the
early spring – but I am not having good luck with mine this year! I
planted them more than two weeks ago now outside in flower boxes on my
porch, and they haven’t sprouted yet! Probably some combination of
using old seeds, and it being so damn cold. So maybe it’s a good idea
you started yours inside, maybe I should have tried that! In any case,
I wouldn’t worry too much about it – if your plants get the damping off
there’s not much you can do except take the cover off and let them dry
out a little, and just start again with new plants if they do die. But
I’ve never noticed that fuzzy white mold actually kill any of my plants.
There’s
this famous tomato gardener in Maine who says that the way she prevents
damping off is to mound the seed starting soil up above the top edge of
the container. She says the little space that most people leave
between the top of the soil and the top of the container is a tiny
little micro-climate that pools cool air and encourages damping off,
and that if you mound the dirt up over the top they get better air
circulation that way. I haven’t actually tried that before but the
logic seems reasonable, I guess. You could try that.
Right, and bottom-watering is definitely
the way to go. If you find that your soil mix is not getting wet on
top after an hour of sitting in some water, you probably haven’t tamped
it down enough. That used to happen to me when I left the soil too
loose because I thought the seeds would like it better that way. I
still keep a mister near the seedlings and do mist them sometimes, but
only in the morning when I know the sun will dry them out. When I used
to mist my seedlings as the primary way of giving them water, they used
to get damping off much more often. Now I mostly just bottom water
them.
Never used any fungicide sprays myself, so can’t weigh in on that one.
Sorry
for rambling, but I was working at a computer today (I don’t always)
and I love to think about and write about gardening more than most
other things…
Good luck,
Stacey
Laurel Kirtz wrote: it’s called damping off
when seedlings develop mold
take the top off to dry the plants and soil a little, while it’s in the sun
switch to bottom watering if you can, find a tray that can fit the thing and
water the tray…
and get a fungicide spray
just in case
mahoney’s in alston
maybe allendale – call first.
mold could spread. a quick spritz of spray may cause furthur damage from
happening.
i forwarded my response to stacey C. to see if she has any bits of wisdom.
love from laurel
ps: baton twirling at around 11 tonite at the middle east for whats up
benefit!
> From: Meg Rotzel
> Date: Wed, 11 Apr 2007 10:20:47 -0400
> To: Andi Sutton Sutton , Laurel Kirtz Kirtz
> ,
Susan Sakash Sakash
> Subject: mold on my sprouts?
>
> Hey Gals-
> A little help here- I just transplanted my sweet pea sprouts into 2
> pots (organic potting soil)- and watered them slightly- I don’t think
> I over watered them. Today I went to water the other spouts that live
> in one of those 72 slot baby sprout incubator green houses. The spot
> where the pea sprouts used to live have some fuzzy mold in it- and
> when I inspected my pea pots they had evidence of mold too. The other
> wells with my other sprouts didn’t have mold and needed some light
> watering, which I did. I then plowed under the mold in my pea pots
> with my fingers, checking on the moisture of the pots. It all seemed
> OK, slightly damp… but dry along the edges of the pots…
>
> Any case for worry? The fuzzy mold was only in a couple of small
> patches, only associated with
the peas, and only near the stems where
> I may have over watered them….
>
> Lemme know what you think!
> THANKS fellow gardeners!
> Mega
>
