Not planting anything out here. 1 outside and cold wind as well as rain and maybe wet snow in the next couple days.Spring seems to be later every year. As for summer well that is just a dream for maybe in the far away future.But at least you have that one petunia to give you hope.

A plastic vapour barrier and fg are the worst choices for insulating basement walls. But if that's what you have, at least keep the humidity below 50% RH. I suspect the odour is taking the easiest route to your nose. Not all mould is visible. And not knowing your construction, details, it 's possible that the mould is growing under the base plates for your walls. Are you sure it's not sewer gas from a dry trap or unvented appliance? The bathroom in a rental house I owned always had a dank smell. I attributed the aroma to the hygienically challenged university students who lived there. But when they moved and I renoed, I found the appliances were vented into the wall, not into a stack. Here is a link that might be useful: Building Science Corp. on Basement Insulation

I've been meaning to post about this very thing myself. We bought a dresser a couple of years ago to put family pics on top of, and I had planned to store dining room linens in it, but we've never completed gotten the stink out of the drawers. We tried coffee, baking soda, and a heavy-duty tub of air freshener (from Home Depot or Lowe's), and the smell is still not completely gone. We also gave all the drawers a good cleaning with Scott's Liquid Gold. We not-so-affectionately call the piece "Old Stinky." I've thought of resorting to priming and painting the insides of the drawers.

I see one of four potential problems here: 1.Pour about 2 quarts of water in the drain then use a flashlight and look down the drain to see if there is any standing water in the pipe? If you see standing water down in the pipe that is your trap. Hexus mentioned pouring distilled water in the drains to prevent evaporation. I can assure you that will not work because distilled water would evaporate at approximately the same rate as tap water. On the other hand, if you pour about 2oz of vegetable cooking oil in the drain it will float on top of the water and retard evaporation. 2.Examine the floor drain. If it is cast iron and appears to have a center pipe extending up to approximately 1/2" below the floor level and an outer section surrounding that pipe about 2" wide that holds water there is no trap under the drain opening. For those type of floor drains the lid has a pipe section that hangs down into that outer channel. With the lid in place water enters through an outer ring of holes into the outer ring, flows under the section of pipe extending down from the lid, then up and over the center standpipe to enter the drain. If the cap is missing or lost there is no trapping action. (In most jurisdictions we are no longer permitted to install that type of floor drains), 3. Check your furnace to see if you have ducted return air or is the air ducted into the basement then is drawn from the basement into your furnace return air duct. If this is the case you may not have sufficient return air ducting and while the furnace is running it is creating a slight negative air pressure in the basement and the sewer gas is being sucked up through the water in the traps. The solution here is to have dedicated return air ducts installed from the living space above directly to the furnace air return. 4. If you pour water in the traps and top it off with the cooking oil but you are still smelling the sewer gases your basement may be too tight to permit an adequate supply of combustion air for your furnace, water heater and laundry dryer. The code requires that we must find the manufacturers BTU rating on each appliance and add all the BTU values together to get a total BTU/hr rating for all combustion appliances. Code defines a "Confined space" as any space that has less than 50 cubic feet for each 1,000 BTU's. By example furnaces typically range 50-200Kbtu/hr. For the purpose of illustration let us assume the furnace is 100Kbtu plus 35Kbtu for the water heater and another 35Kbtu for a laundry dryer. The total combined BTU/hr rating would then be 170Kbtu per hour. We are required 50cu.ft for each 1kbtu so it would be 50cu.ft x 170 = 8500cu.ft. Now assuming the basement has an 8ft ceiling we have 8500cu.ft / 8'= 1062.5sq.ft. In this example if the room in the basement where the furnace, water heater and dryer are located has less than 1062.5sq.ft it is a "Confined space". The end result of a confined space is that the appliances will produce a negative air pressure, resulting in improper combustion which produces high levels of carbon monoxide. In addition the slight drop in air pressure will result in sucking air down from the living space and both air and sewer gases up through the floor drains. Whenever we determine that the gas appliances are in a "Confined space" we are required to install ducting to allow additional outside air into the machinery space. (The size and placement of the air ducts is also very closely regulated by code.)