PakSamGyiShing
New member
This may be a fool's errand, but here goes. Long story short, I'm wondering if it may be possible to save a plant with damping off, or another form of girdling, by re-rooting it above the wound. I also realize that this isn't the infirmary board, but since I'm growing in organic soil I'd rather seek out the experience and opinions of those folks who are already growing in a like manner. Now, the full story...
I'm up in Sonoma County, and I started some seedlings about 3-4 weeks ago for a small outdoor grow and up until now everything has been more or less OK. Not having a proper setup atm I've just been doing the best I can and treating my mj seedlings pretty much the same as the rest of my summer veggie starts, tomatoes and the like. I've been turning the lot of them out during the day to get sun on the porch, and bringing them all back in at night to stay warm. As a result of all this my mj seedlings of course stretched several inches but calmed down after that and have been pretty normal, though perhaps a bit floppier. This stretching could be my saving grace here, but we'll have to wait and see.
I planted all my seeds in at least partially reused soil that came from a conglomeration of different types of plants and individual mixes, none of them diseased. I believe I amended this used soil by half with a some FFOF I had left. The mix has both good drainage and moisture retention - getting neither soppy nor drying too quickly. I didn't use any of my own compost in this mix as I was trying to keep it nutrient light for the seed starting, but in hindsight this may have been to my detriment. I don't currently have any EWC, though my compost has been somewhat worm-worked since it's been sitting and started off as an aerobic pile. I didn't have any endo inoculum when I started the seedlings, but have since acquired some. I have another general purpose bacterial inoculant with Bacillus subtilis in it, that again in retrospect would have been good to use earlier. I hadn't used it yet partially because I was planning on inoculating with VAM endo when I potted the fellows up and knew that there could be some competition between the two.
So anyways things were going fine, I was able to water with various botanical teas and provide foliar sprays. We had some very nice weather and then this past week a cold rainy system moved through. All my plants had weathered a few lighter storms before and weren't out in any major rain, but the combination of conditions these last few days seems to have initiated some damping off.
A variety I picked up at a seed swap(that ironically the person was trying to breed to resist the weather here in West County) was the one most affected. None of these plants had begun to wilt, but I noticed that they had the tell-tale withering of the stems around the soil line. The plants of a commercial variety had varying degrees of infection, from none to a some, though none as severe as the seed swap variety.
So I figured I didn't have much to lose at this point and thought I'd try and see if I could get the most affected seedlings to re-root above the infection. From their stretch early on they all had several inches to work with above the soil line, so I figure that in some sense they're not that different than taking a clone. So the sort of attempt I'm making is to try and suppress the damping off fungus with beneficials, while trying to get the plant to re-root before it dies.
I re-potted the seed swap plants into taller pots, and they had OK-looking root systems for what it's worth. I spread the inoculum with the B. subtilis on all of the roots and portions of the stem with the damping off. I refilled using my compost, making sure to have the inoculum around the stem until the wound was buried. I then did the same thing to the top of the pot but using the VAM endo instead to try and help encourage rooting while also providing a beneficial to try and suppress the damping off. I then watered the plants in (I know too much moisture already but what else to do) using the rooting formula posted by ClackamasCootz in the first LOS Sticky - 1 oz. Ful-power, 2 oz. Aloe, 1 tsp Pro-Tekt per gallon. The plants now look like they're potted in to just below their cotyledons. We'll see how this works out.
For the commercial variety I didn't try to pot them up just yet since none of them appeared to be girdled. Instead I used the B. subtilis inoculum around the stem, covered with some compost, and wet them just a little with the rooting formula above. I'll keep them monitored if I need to intervene further.
I went about this in this manner since I know that although B. subtilis and Glomus spp. are compatible, the B. subtilis suppresses the Glomus from germinating and so shouldn't be applied to the same part of the plant at the same time. Although the bacterial inoculum may not necessarily be able to destroy the damping off (it doesn't have any Trichomonas in it) hopefully it will still be able to hold it off along with the organisms in the compost.
If anyone has any experience to share or advice for this experiment please feel free to chime in. Some of this headache would certainly have been spared had I been using more inoculums, whether the commercial preps or my own compost, and ideally EWC. This has been an unusually cold April, so maybe waiting to start seeds until much later would also have been advised =O
C'est la vie.
I'm up in Sonoma County, and I started some seedlings about 3-4 weeks ago for a small outdoor grow and up until now everything has been more or less OK. Not having a proper setup atm I've just been doing the best I can and treating my mj seedlings pretty much the same as the rest of my summer veggie starts, tomatoes and the like. I've been turning the lot of them out during the day to get sun on the porch, and bringing them all back in at night to stay warm. As a result of all this my mj seedlings of course stretched several inches but calmed down after that and have been pretty normal, though perhaps a bit floppier. This stretching could be my saving grace here, but we'll have to wait and see.
I planted all my seeds in at least partially reused soil that came from a conglomeration of different types of plants and individual mixes, none of them diseased. I believe I amended this used soil by half with a some FFOF I had left. The mix has both good drainage and moisture retention - getting neither soppy nor drying too quickly. I didn't use any of my own compost in this mix as I was trying to keep it nutrient light for the seed starting, but in hindsight this may have been to my detriment. I don't currently have any EWC, though my compost has been somewhat worm-worked since it's been sitting and started off as an aerobic pile. I didn't have any endo inoculum when I started the seedlings, but have since acquired some. I have another general purpose bacterial inoculant with Bacillus subtilis in it, that again in retrospect would have been good to use earlier. I hadn't used it yet partially because I was planning on inoculating with VAM endo when I potted the fellows up and knew that there could be some competition between the two.
So anyways things were going fine, I was able to water with various botanical teas and provide foliar sprays. We had some very nice weather and then this past week a cold rainy system moved through. All my plants had weathered a few lighter storms before and weren't out in any major rain, but the combination of conditions these last few days seems to have initiated some damping off.
A variety I picked up at a seed swap(that ironically the person was trying to breed to resist the weather here in West County) was the one most affected. None of these plants had begun to wilt, but I noticed that they had the tell-tale withering of the stems around the soil line. The plants of a commercial variety had varying degrees of infection, from none to a some, though none as severe as the seed swap variety.
So I figured I didn't have much to lose at this point and thought I'd try and see if I could get the most affected seedlings to re-root above the infection. From their stretch early on they all had several inches to work with above the soil line, so I figure that in some sense they're not that different than taking a clone. So the sort of attempt I'm making is to try and suppress the damping off fungus with beneficials, while trying to get the plant to re-root before it dies.
I re-potted the seed swap plants into taller pots, and they had OK-looking root systems for what it's worth. I spread the inoculum with the B. subtilis on all of the roots and portions of the stem with the damping off. I refilled using my compost, making sure to have the inoculum around the stem until the wound was buried. I then did the same thing to the top of the pot but using the VAM endo instead to try and help encourage rooting while also providing a beneficial to try and suppress the damping off. I then watered the plants in (I know too much moisture already but what else to do) using the rooting formula posted by ClackamasCootz in the first LOS Sticky - 1 oz. Ful-power, 2 oz. Aloe, 1 tsp Pro-Tekt per gallon. The plants now look like they're potted in to just below their cotyledons. We'll see how this works out.
For the commercial variety I didn't try to pot them up just yet since none of them appeared to be girdled. Instead I used the B. subtilis inoculum around the stem, covered with some compost, and wet them just a little with the rooting formula above. I'll keep them monitored if I need to intervene further.
I went about this in this manner since I know that although B. subtilis and Glomus spp. are compatible, the B. subtilis suppresses the Glomus from germinating and so shouldn't be applied to the same part of the plant at the same time. Although the bacterial inoculum may not necessarily be able to destroy the damping off (it doesn't have any Trichomonas in it) hopefully it will still be able to hold it off along with the organisms in the compost.
If anyone has any experience to share or advice for this experiment please feel free to chime in. Some of this headache would certainly have been spared had I been using more inoculums, whether the commercial preps or my own compost, and ideally EWC. This has been an unusually cold April, so maybe waiting to start seeds until much later would also have been advised =O
C'est la vie.
