Mould on Propagation Boxes
Answered by: Inge Poot
Question from: Scott Hamilton
Posted on: February 25, 2002

I have a garden of about 15 plants now. I am having a terrible time with mold. When I clone (that is, make cuttings of my plants) it is all over my (propagation) cubes after a couple of days and it’s driving me nuts. Is there any way of preventing this problem? I have recently put a dehumidifier and an air cleaner/ionizer in the room to see if that will alleviate the problem. Do you have any other suggestions?

P.S. I never really had a problem with humidity it was around 60% and my temp in the room is 22-26 Celsius all the time.

Powdered sulphur is a good fungicide/bactericide and should be sprinkled all over your flats of cubes. Watering with 3% hydrogen peroxide would probably help. You can buy this at any drugstore. Powdered cinnamon sprinkled all over everything may help.

When you start with this procedure the next time make sure you wash down the propagation room with a 10% Javex (in the USA-Clorox) solution (ventilate while doing this so that you don’t damage your lungs and eyes with the chlorine fumes). Otherwise the spores that by now must be on all surfaces will forever come down and force you to take remedial action.Also make sure the propagation cubes you use have not been standing around open, prior to use, because they could have accumulated all sorts of spores from the dust. You might wish to sterilize them by wetting them throughly first, then cooking them one hour in a 400 degree Fahrenheit oven for one hour. They will stink! This may not work if they are in nylon mesh bags, because the bags may melt. In that case you could try swabbing the surface with the 10% Javex solution and then presoaking with the 3% hydrogen peroxide solution.

Also lowering the night temperature by 5 Celsius degrees (10 Fahrenheit degrees) will result in sturdier plants that will be less troubled by fungal attacks.

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