What is up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening Podcast. We are here with our final

episode of the second week we've done with Leslie Halleck. She is a professional

horticulturist. She's the author of Gardening under lights which we talked about yesterday and she is the author of plant parenting easy ways to make more house plants vegetables and flowers.

So we talked yesterday about lighting techniques for seedlings. vegetables and processed, you've well lit your seeds, and perhaps you're still running into some potential issues

with those seedlings.

So, Leslie, do you think we could start off with, and I think we both know what it is, the number

one most frustrating thing when it comes to

your seedlings dying on you what is that thing it's it's the triad of fungal death

it is damping off which is a combination of a few

different fungal species rhizoctonia fusarium and pithium so I call it the

triad of death. So when you use soil or really any type of

growing media there's a lot of other bioactivity going on. Oftentimes there's

bacteria, there's microorganisms, there's you

know fungi and and they feed on your plants, right? So and seedlings are a

really easy target, especially if they're in moist humid to cool conditions with not enough light.

So damping off is a disease or of a combination of fungal species that is really common with especially new seed

starters that really haven't quite figured out how to manage their moisture and humidity and temperature

yet.

And there are a few different signs that your new seedlings are suffering from damping off.

And you're right, it's the most frustrating thing you get all excited because your seeds have germinated and you think you won you did it successfully and then all of a sudden

The coddleads on those seedlings start to look discolored or mushy or the base of the stem starts to look kind of thin and water soaked or the leaves are discolored or the seeds fall over and you realize there's no roots on them or even a white mold like growth just starts to grow all over your seedlings and it's like, oh my gosh, you know, what did I do? Well, that's damping off. And usually there's no recovering

from damping off. Once your seedlings have succumbed to it, you're usually going to have to start

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