Hello, I have a problem, my seedbeds have mold or fungus like as images A an B (less issues). I suppose they are fungus.
I used 90% pumice and 10% coconut fiber and baggie method. They are 12 days in their bags. I sowed frailea, mammillaria, haworthia, lithop, blossfeldia and rebutias.
What do you recommend me to fight against mold/fungus?
I have in my house hypochlorite, chamomile (flowers), neem oil and apple vinegar.
Are you sterilizing your potting mix before sowing?
2 or 3 minutes in a microwave oven for the (damp / wet) mix should prevent many problems with fungus in the first few days or weeks after sowing. Remaining problems early on after sowing are likely to be due to seeds themselves not being sterile.
yonnoy wrote: ↑Fri Oct 23, 2020 6:14 am
Hello, I have a problem, my seedbeds have mold or fungus like as images A an B (less issues). I suppose they are fungus.
I used 90% pumice and 10% coconut fiber and baggie method. They are 12 days in their bags. I sowed frailea, mammillaria, haworthia, lithop, blossfeldia and rebutias.
What do you recommend me to fight against mold/fungus?
I have in my house hypochlorite, chamomile (flowers), neem oil and apple vinegar.
I doubt any of your available remedies would be effective against damping off. Remove the pots from the bag to decrease humidity and improve air movement. I would always remove lithops and haworthias as soon as I thought germination was tailing off. In future sow your seeds thinly and well spaced as crowding encourages damping off.
I used to dribble very fine grit or sand on the mold or fungus to smother it when the seedlings were a little higher. The seedlings were fine. Daydreamer is right in suggesting spacing out seeds.
Hypochlorite will kill the seedlings if it is strong enough to kill the fungi.
Acetic acid (vinegar) is toxic to many plants, so will probably wipe out seedlings
I have no idea on the other two.
Earlier this year I tried a plant fungicide to treat mould on over 100 pots of seedlings. The result was 100% kill, but sadly of the seedlings as well as the fungus. Not a single seedling survived! I would support the “give them air” suggestions above...
Hello,
Many thanks for your advices. I sterilized the soild before sowing, but the mold appears after 11 days. Yesterday I opened one container and added a solution of 250 ml of water + 2 ml of hipoclorite, then I pick out the mold and stone of pumice and finally I put it again into the bag. I have just seen the container and the seedlings are alive and the mold disappears.
Acording with your advices, in this stage (13 days in baggie method):
1. For containers with cactuses with fungus and a little germination: Do you recommend me remove the bag (ziplock)?
2. For containers with cactuses seeds with fungus and no germination: In some containers I saw a point of mold without seedlings (maybe they died), and others seeds haven't germinated. Do you recommend me open and treat them or wait for more germination?
3. For containers with succulents with mold: after 13 days in baggie method they haven't germinated. Should I give up and open and treat them?
4. For containers with succulents without mold: after 13 days in baggie method, they haven't germinated. Should I open them or wait more days?
For whatever reason I think you have spores in several of your bags, and without knowing how they got there I would err on the side of caution and assume they are in all of your bags. So, in your position I would take everything out of the bags and just keep the growing medium moist by regular watering. I would expect the lithops to be up by now. The rest should be showing some germinations, but my experience is that Rebutia can take up to a month to get the majority of the seeds up.
I'm assuming you don't have any of the difficult mammillarias like saboae and its varieties, theresae etc which can take a long time and multiple wet/dry/wet cycles or other tricks to get any seeds up.
You could try Camomile, as it has anti-fungal properties. Just get some Camomile tea bags and steep in boiling water, and then water with it once cool. Its definitely helped with some of my seeds.
