What is going on everyone? Welcome back to the epic gardening podcast. Kevin here and I'm here with the one and only Steve Churchill of the Urban Worm Company.

Today I know you guys like myself have dealt with damping off disease in fact we've done a

podcast on damping off disease before and there's an entire article on epic gardening

com about this disease if you are unaware what it basically does is it attacks the

connection point between the stem and the soil of an early seedling and just

decimates it and sort of liquefies it in a sense and causes it to collapse and then your seedling is dead.

Now, Steve's been in the worm game for a while

and he's found that there's an interesting relationship between

introducing worm castings and damping off disease.

So I figured I would do is let him jump in and drop some knowledge on you guys.

Cool, so this is one of the coolest things I think I've heard in the past few years and

there is really so much new information coming out about

verma compost and how it does what it does to improve the soil and improve growth and this one's really interesting because scientists noticed over the past few years

and there's been a lot of studies on this is that verma compost or at least soils

that have been treated with verma compost do a really good job of preventing

damping off diseases particularly pithium which is known to afflict cucumbers quite a bit

so what I believe it was at Cornell what they found was that

well first it's probably good to explain how the these damping off diseases even find the plants.

So when you have a germinating seed, that seedling puts out something called exudates.

And it's essentially stuff it's putting out into the soil which effectively acts as a signal that's saying, hey, I'm a germinating seed.

Well, Pythium sniffs this stuff out and says, hey, there is a vulnerable seed around around here I'm going to go attack it and so

it's these exudates that are sending out these these signals well in soil that's

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