What is Damping-Off?

So let's talk about diseases and pest that can challenge your crop. In the spring we find aphids and sometimes little worms. There are some slugs that overwinter in here, and these are things that we can monitor and usually manage by hand picking and just being aware. If the infestation gets real bad with the aphids, we could use a soap solution a very dilute soap, or even a pepper garlic solution which we could mix up in a spray bottle and spritz them, and that would dissuade the aphid pests. But there's a disease that's way more damaging to seedlings than aphids and that's damping off. Damping off is actually a series of fungal infections that operate at the ground level. So your seeds come up and they look great, and you get all excited, and then within days they rot at the ground level and keel over, usually in mass. So you might lose an entire pot of seedlings to the damping off disease.