Look up "damping off" (of seedlings), see if that seems to fit.

Thank you for your answer.

Yes, damping off seems to be right. Rhizoctonia solani comes close in description and google-images. I was under the impression it might have been a fungus or sort of infection, so with the last batch I went as far as boiling the soil in a pan on high heat and wiping everything that came close to the plants (tools, cups, hands, water bottle, etc) with alcohol and vinegar an used distilled water which I also boiled before use. Yet some of my last batch are already starting to fall over. How resilent is this damping off? Anything to be done against it? Will it help to grow the remaining seedlings of this batch in the shade until they have a woody stem (if they even reach that stadium without direct sun)?

When you say spray with 3% h2o2, you mean until it's really soaking into the gound to treat both the plant and the soil?

I guess I have some shopping to do then. It's a rural backwater here, and even though agriculture is the main business for the area, some things are just stupidly hard to find or come in industrial volumes only.

If I can't find a steril mix, are there good ways to sterilize small quantities of soil? I now placed some new potting soil in a big pan with a lid, added enough destilled water to it to make it wet and boiled/baked/steamed it on high heat till it was only moist. I thought this would kill most diseases, but at least one seedling already died.

When plants grow a bit bigger, do they become less susceptible for damping off? If so, at about what stage?

Also you could try a seeding mix that is sandier, and don't keep it as moist as you did last time. Damping off tends to happen in damp conditions.

No, just spray the soil surface and the part of the seedling stem that is just emerging from the soil (the part that is constricting and collapsing. The more water there is in your potting mix, the more the chances of damping off. The fungus really appears out of thin air.....

Yes, as the seedlings get older, the chances of damping off go down. Are you growing seedlings in pots indoors or in the ground outdoors? Damping off is mostly an indoor seedling growing affliction. If it's already warm outside, why not start seeds directly in the ground outdoors in the sun. I don't think there should be any damping off there.

I'm growing in pots and indoors at the moment, because as soon as they see the sun, BAM! dead. 'Indoors' is a relative term here though; I live in a caravan in the middle of the Cretan (Greece) olive fields.

The reason for growing in pots is threefold.

-One is that this is the way I used to do it back in the Netherlands and Belgium, where my chili plants always grew very well without any diseases or stunting at all.

-Crete's weather is quite extreme in both the summer (dry, hot) an the winter (lots of rain with cold wind from the snowy mountains). So my thought was that it's wise to be able to move the plants.

-Last is the pot limiting the amount of water needed in the summer. During a very dry summer it happens that the government limits the agriculture water to only two days per month and I cannot go building enourmous reservoirs on a terrain that isn't mine.

I will however try planting some directly in the ground, if only to see what happens. It's my first time trying to grow anything here, and the climate is so different from NL/B that all my experience from before feels unusable.

A sandier seedling mix sounds like a good idea. Would adding an amount of washed beach-sand do the same? If there is one thing we have in good amounts here it's sand. :

D

The issue with the temperature and the sun intensity here is however that when I try to keep the soil dry I'm really walking a knife's edge, and going somewhere fr half a day is a death sentence for the plants. But when I water them they fall over, unless I keep them in the shade, where they won't grow. It's like this triangle with three things, but you can only have two.

The peroxide, 3% can be used like that? Did some Googling and see ratios mentionedranging between 10% directly to the soil, to half-a-teaspoon of 3% per gallon.

maybe you can grow in the ground to start with and pot it up once it has grown up a bit? Or grow in a pot outdoors to start with? 3% H2O2 is safe to use. diluting to half that strength would still be effective, can't say about further dilution. Maybe the 10% dilution refers to a stronger strength (apparently some places you can get 30% strength H2O2). I have sown seeds directly in the sun in clay in Delhi, India ( in spring) and they come up and grow just fine. Sand should help, beach sand would be fine. Maybe you can sprinkle to have a sandy layer on top in the container you are currently having damping off issues. it could probably deter the fungal infection.

You might want to try a remedy that I found to be easy and it worked for me: Sprinkle ground cinnamon on top of the soil in your seedling pots. For some reason, it totally prevented damping-off for me. Good luck!

Roxanna makes an excellent point.....a light sprinkling of ground cinnamon is a well known method to stop damping off. It contains a natural compound, Cinnamaldehyde, that has antifungal, antibacerial and antimicrobial propertes.

I did suggest cinnamon in my first post

I have enough new germinations and seedlings to try all the ideas you mentioned and combinations of. I figured this year probably is too late for actual chilis (although the summer here lasts till end of Oktober and plants easily survive the winter), but if I can find my flow in growing in this climate this year then nothing is lost and all the good stuff will just come the next year.

Thank you all for your help!

And thank you for sharing the vision of life in a caravan in a grecian olive field! The closest I can come to traveling anytime soon.

Hi again!

I want to give a quick (loooong post!) update on the progress. I tried all the suggestions given in this thread, the cinnamon, sandy-mix, sand layer, growng from zero outside in the full sun and the H2O2. I used some quick sprouting and growing cress and some left-over herb seedlings for the tests.

- The cinnamon seemed to work at first, but I guess that was what I wanted to see. The seedlings started dying again as soon as they met the full sun, in the same way as the seedling in the Original Post's picture.

- Sand-in-the-mix or sand-on-top, with or without cinnamon mixed in or sprinkeled ontop didn't prevent the seedling from dying either.

- The Hydrogen Peroxide, which was impossible to find in stores or pharmacies an had to be ordered online, seems to help so far. However, not on all seedlings. I have some chilis and basil in toilet-roll-pots and they seem to do fine so far. They now just got their first set of true leaves. Some herbs in plastic cups still fell over despite both a watering of a ˜0.5% h2o2 and a light drizzle of ˜2-3% on the top soil and base of the stem. I like how the earth puffs up though, that's got to be good for the roots! Some other seedlings in plastic cups (basil, cress, chili) I cut the cup to just above the soil surface for better airflow, and like the paper cups those are still standng. These cut cups I also wrapped in tinfoil to prevent the ground from overheating ad as an experiment if that would keep the roots nice and white. The basil is developing roots like crazy, so I *hope* the chilis in the paper cups are as well.

But I keep noticing that plants only collapse in the full sun. Even when treated with all of above and even with a dry top layer. The collapsed pants did have thinned and brown roots and were in transparent plastic cups with a high wall and no tinfoil-wrap. This brings me to the thought that it might have to do with the soil's surface temperature i.c.m. with a compromised ability to take enough water from te soil either by thinned brown roots or by being too dry or too wet. It's as if the plants not neccesarily get attacked by something but cook, dry and shrivvel where they touch the soil. According to a local farmer-shop it's pythium, damping off like you guys said as well. But I would think that boiling the soil + using new plastic cups or paper cups + wrapping the plastic cups to shield from the sun + H2O2 would kill and prevent any spores of any nasty. I guess we will know in a few days.

Just to be sure I put a lot more seeds to germinate, and the box I use for it I cleaned with bleach, same for the tools, boiled the water and gave the seeds a quick H2O2 soak just to be sure. I will be buying a new bag of soil as well (again, something sterile or soilless will be impossible to find over here. (It's a beautiful country, but sometimes I seriously think about starting an import/export with the Netherlands.)

One new question about the seedlings:

One of the chilis in the paper cups, a Madamme Jeanette, got it's first true leaves and is now starting to show the econd set. The first set however turned yellow like this winter's failed batch, so I added some liquid fetilizer (which you guess, is also hard to find here, so it's not the most optimal stuff: 'for green plants', npk 6-5-6). This turned the leaves a bit greener again. But now they are developing purple veins and edges! I've seen that before, but that plant damped off as well, so I never saw how it progresses. Any idea what this might be?

Perhaps you should protect the seedlings from too much sun till they are a bit more developed. What was the outcome with growing from zero outside in the full sun? I don't think boiling water is going to help with damping off fungus. Damping off is more of a cold weather phenomenon (https://extension.umn.edux/solve-problem/how-prevent-seedling-damping), perhaps you are dealing with plain old dehydration from too much sun without due acclimatization (hardening off) of the seedlings. I can't answer the purple coloration issue (haven't grown chillies much) but it could be sunburn.

I looked at the seedling pic again and it certainly looks like damping off/fungus.

Some seeds seem sensitive to damping off. I use sterile seed starting mix from the garden center, with lots of sphagnum moss, and it prevents this problem. You can also use a surface spray of a dilute solution of captan, an artificial fungicide, to stop this (if you don't mind chemicals). I only see it when I start seeds indoors, which I do for most plants.

Also, plants grown indoors can't take the hot sun and wind outdoors without protection. You can expose your plants to a few minutes of outdoor conditions every day until they can stand it, but I found that really difficult and a lot of work. One time my plants blew away in a windstorm when I was using this 'hardening off'. Animals can come up and chew on the young plants. It is too easy to forget them and they get damage from overexposure. For years I have been avoiding this and just use boards on the southern side of the plants to protect them for a week or two after transplanting, until they get new leaves and start growing outside. This also protects them from high winds, hail, and other problems. This has provided 100% success for decades here in Pennsylvania.

Growing from zero in the full sun seem to do the trick. Either that or the H2O2 (should have made a non-H2O2 control...).

The second and third week of May we had a heat wave, which on Crete during May means 30+ degrees in the shade and lots of humidity and a scorching sun-intensity. I guess this wasn't exactly beneficial for the tender seedlings. Some I kept in the shade and those so far survived and seem to handle the full sun fine now that the weather is normal again for May/June. But I did treat them with the H2O2 as well, so was it the slower hardening or the treatment that did it? We will never know :)

Starting the seedlings indoors, especially after te cold months of the winter, seemed to have been a very important factor in this whole problem. I guess 'stop-messing-around-and-just-let-them-grow' is the adaptation the Cretan climate demands from me. In the Netherlands you'd have to start the plants indoors in the early months, but here the barrier between indoors and outdoors is a lot less defined. So I started the plants with all the nasties from outdoors, but locked them in a nicely warm and humid box (the caravan), effectively turning them into petridishes.

So far this has all been a very learnfull experience. Of course the plants are still a bunch of babies and a lot can happen (like now the ants are placing aphids on my mint like crazy and the mice ate two chilis and a lemon-seedling), but for the damping off problem I will try to update this thread sometimes. ('try' as most posts on the interweb with a promise like this never gets updated again :) )

Thank you all very much for your help!

The other half of the plants I gave away to a friend.

What made the difference between all the seedlings that died? It could be a few things:

1) More water but less often. I now waited till the soil was dry enough that when watering from the top the water would rush straight through. So I either watered in two steps from the top, or from the bottom even though that gas a risk of infecting other plants is pythium would be in one plant's soil.

2) I now used paper coffee cups for the seedlings instead if transparent plastic cups. I got the impression that the sun would get the soil too hot and humid with the transparent cups because of the growth of algae in those cups. If algea grow then so do bacteria and fungi.

3) As recommended in this thread I added a small amount of H²O² to every watering and did a soak of the stem and top soil with a higher concentration every so often. I think this one made a real difference.

4) I watered mostly with distilled water when the plants were still little. The water here is very hard, perhaps too hard, hinted by a few seedlings that developed an iron deficiency.

5) Eeeaasssyyy on the feeding. Another mistake that could've prevented the plants from getting enough nutrition was perhaps thinking that more food is better, but it makes them obese weak couch potatoes that don't have the strength to fight any disease.

6) I kept the plants in the shade of one of the trees almost permanently. It's only since a week that I'm putting them in full sun. Yesterday was the first day where they didn't need to be out back in the shade during the afternoon heat.

I think this one made a huge difference as well, as none of the shaded seedlings collapsed like in the original post's picture. Besides, the half-shade of an olive tree on Crete is about the same intensity as full-sun in the Netherlands. Also it helped me, as it caused the plants to consume less water, so I wasn't bound to the caravan with watering duty as much. It's nice to take care of plants, but they're also very limiting to freedom.

It's too late for the year for them to grow fruit. Perhaps the Cayenne can still get one or two peppers, as the growing season here lasts all the way into half-way November. But I don't mind. This last batch was more of a last try for me to synchronise with the climate here, and chili plants have no problem overwintering, so next year I have an early start.

Some things to do differently next year:

- Start early, but keep the seedlings protected from the big differences between night and day temperatures in the winter and early spring. Perhaps make a banana-box mini-greenhouse to keeo the temperature more stable.

- Build some kind of automatic watering system so the plants won't chain me to the terrain with watering duty. If someine has ideas for low-tech diy ways preferably with recycled materials like bottles then please let me know. I though of using bottles with a pinhole in the cap, but that would keep the soil perma-moist, which would promote rot?

- Be more positive.

- Find a friend. :)

I don't know why, but Houzz on my phone never lets me properly edit a post and always messes up the paragraphs and linebreaks. And with a BT-keyboard it sometimes won't register moving left and right with the arrow keys. So the post above might be a little hard to read. :)

Those plants look very healthy. I would not give up on getting fruits yet. Peppers are probably perennials in Crete if you can save them from the odd frost. Also, considering the time and effort you have put in on these, it might be worthwhile to bring them indoors and use cheap led growlights, if need be. Good luck

Yes, the idea is to keep them in the small 1 litre pots until halfway the winter, so it's easier to move them if the need arises. I live in a caravan, so bringing ten 10+ litre pots inside is impossible.

How often do you need to water them? If it's once a day or more, I think you can safely use the inverted water bottle with holes in the cap. I don't see the danger of root rot in that scenario. Why not do a trial run on one of the plants (the least favorite) and see how it goes?

The least favorite? To those plants I'm their father, so with a poker face I will say that I like them all equally much! Hehehe

It depends if they're in the sun I need to water them about every day. In the shade they can last for three days.

With the bottles you mean to only have enough holes that the drip keeps the ground moist, but not wet, right?

Haha. As much as love my plants, when it comes to prioritizing, it is easy. The smallest, weakest, ugliest are the least favorite except if I am dealing with flower seedlings of a hybrid parent. In that case, the strongest are usually the more vanilla parent species, the weaker smaller ones have the exciting and sometimes new hybrids, e. g., petunias.
Keep experimenting till you get it right. Start with fewer holes and increase them till they stop needing supplemental watering to keep them in full sun without wilting. If the water is just enough to prevent wilting I would think there would be no root rot. Frankly, root rot is mostly a cooler climate problem.