Lawrence, last year I had a terrible time with my seed germinating,
and what did germinate damped off. It turned out , in my opinion,that
it was the peat cups and peat pelets. It was the first(and last) year
I had used them. Another thing is the potting soil. I purchased the
best potting soil I could find (I thought) Miracle-grow. Why did
mushrooms sprout in all my pots?????(because they used mushroom
compost (a bi-product of muhroom production) and did not sterilize it.

On the issue of water, a couple bucks will buy you 2 gals of distilled
water, and will be more than enough to get your seedlings going.

The way I sprouted my seed this year is, I have a glassed in
entertainment center. I set me a thermometer on one of the vacant
shelves, Overnight (with nothing operating) thetemperature remained
above 70 degrees. In short I sprouted my seed there with near 100%
germination. Okra sprouted in 3 days, tomatoes in 5. The only
problem is that as soon as the first start to sprout you have to get
them out of there and to a good light source.

Have a good one. SodB!

On Wed, 31 May 2006 22:08:13 GMT, "Lawrence Akutagawa"
wrote:

This spring I tried - as usual - to start the veggies indoors. Not as
usual, I had little to no luck with the eggplants, cucumbers, and tomatoes.
Only the pole beans sprouted well. Some that sprouted soon died as though
from what looked like dampingoff...even though I had placed the containers
with soil in the microwave a good ten minutes to sterilize the mix. I never
had this problem in prior years. I just didn't know what was going on.

But then I noticed some volunteer tomato seedlings in the ground outside.
So when we had an unexpected rainstorm some weeks ago, I captured and kept
about three 5 gallon buckets of rain water. I used that on the
containers...now moved outdoors...and lo and behold - sprouts.

The conclusion is that the city water has something that the rain water does
not. The big difference is that the water company started fluorinating the
water last November. Could this have been the difference between last
year's success indoors and this year's failure? Anyone out there have
similar experiences?