"Doug Kanter" wrote in message
...
"dps" wrote in message
...

You don't describe exactly what happens to your plants. Is it damping
off?
You can reduce damping off dramatically by just putting a fan in the
room
where you're starting your seedlings. The air circulation will remove
humid air at the air-soil interface where the damping off fungus takes
hold of the plants.

Along with air circulation, it helps to add some bottom heat, using
heating
cables made for this purpose. It doesn't eliminate fungi, but it
accelerates
sprouting. If the seedlings reach a certain size more quickly, they'll
often
"outrun" the fungi.



I've tried to think up a poor man's solution to bottom heating for a while
and never really came up with one. The new area would have a gas heater on
the floor with the market packs sitting in foil trays so that the rising
heat might warm the metal faster and that's about the best I can think of at
this point.