Dody,

Oh no, don't let them fall over! If they are dry and falling over, do you mean they are wilting? If they are, don't let them get quite that dry. I keep mine slightly on the dry side but never let them reach the wilt point. If they are moist and falling over, they may have a disease issue like damping off, but normally they'll die pretty quickly if they have that.

I suspect the peat pots are the issue. In general, I hate peat pots and avoid using them. If I buy a plant in a peat pot, I remove it from the peat pot the minute I get home, even if I am not yet ready to put the plant into the ground. I'll just remove the entire peat pot and replant the young plant into some other non-peat container. I have more disease issues by far with any plant grown in a peat pot at any stage in its life than with plants raised any other way.

Peat pots absorb moisture so tend to suck up the moisture like a sponge when you water your seedlings, which may mean your seedlings are drying out too much in between watering.

With seedlings, aim for uniformly moist soil that is never allowed to completely and totally dry out but also do not water so much the soil is soggy and excessively wet.

What's the air temperature like in the room where you're raising the seedlings?

The odd yellow splotches on the cotyledons of your SunGold seedlings concerns me a little but I don't know that I've ever seen young seedlings splotch like that, so I have no idea why it is happening.

The purple stems in your second photo are not a concern at all. Young seedlings often show purpling and it is partly an issue with nutrient uptake, specifically phosphorus, (which is slow to be absorbed in cold soils) and often just a general reaction of young plants to cool temperatures. I ignore purpling because it corrects itself as the plants grow older and the temperatures warm up.

I normally pot up from starter flats to individual containers when my plants have two true leaves, but you can pot them up when they have only one true leaf.

You can water seedlings anytime with any water-soluable fertilizer, organic or synthetic, at half-strength. You really don't need to feed them until they have a couple of true leaves. However, if I had some seedlings behaving poorly in comparison to other seedlings and I couldn't see an obvious reason for the different behavior, I'd probably feed them with a diluted, water soluable plant food (liquid fish emulsion or liquid seaweed if you're growing organically, liquid Miracle Grow or Peters plant foods if you use synthetic fertilizers) to see if it made any difference.

Could the two poorly performing seedlings be sick? Yes, they could, and it can happen for several reasons, one of them being that the seeds themselves might have been infected with a fungal dsease before you even bought them. However, it also could just be environmental stress. Maybe the plants in question are more sensitive to some sort of environmental issue like air temps or soil temps or whatever than others are. Plants are like people in that they are individuals and they react differently to different issues.

If these were my seedlngs, I'd feed them and watch them and see how it goes. I tend to not take any sort of hasty action with seedlings because often there's nothing wrong with them that time won't resolve on its own.

Dawn

What do you mean by watering when they are falling over?

thanks dawn, i'll settle down and bit, feed and perhaps pot up into plastic cups...never knew that about the peat pots.

the temp in the room is 70's during the day, and 60's at night unless we have a fire going in the wood stove, and then it goes up to the mid to high 70's.

soonergrandmom, i was so concerned that i would fall into my habit of overwatering, that twice, when i turned the lights on in the am, i saw that the seedlings were literally fallen over. i watered them and they perked right back up.

so i've been trying to catch them just as they start to fall over. not always an easy feat, but i will do as dawn suggests and not let them get that dry. i thought i was doing the right thing as i was determined not to lose any to overwatering and damping off. - do you more seasoned gardeners shake your heads and chuckle at our newbie antics? :)

on another note, my brocolli is growing beautifully! already potted up and looking good!

Dody, I read your post then left it up on my computer and went away. I came back and asked that question without refreshing my screen, so Dawn had already answered your question before I posted.

I wish I had broccoli doing good, but mine is still in the seed pack. I want to plant but I have had lots to do and still have people staying with me until Tuesday. Today I am also keeping the baby and I find I'm not too good at that anymore.

My friend that died was 51 years old and has two children that are in their early twenties. Both are married and each have a son. I have kept the other one a few times so he knows me a little better. This one is younger and lives in Idaho so I have only seen him once before this week. They had business things to take care of today, so the baby is with us. I'm glad my DH just came home because he seems to do better with him than I do.

Dody,

The temperatures are fine, so the purpling is more related to a phosphorus deficiency because they are in Jiffy Mix and peat pots, and neither would contain phosphrous in an absorbable form. So, feed them as described above if you wish or ignore the purpling until after you pot them up. Either way the purpling is not a life or death issue and will correct itself within a few days to a few weeks.

I can't answer for any seasoned gardeners except myself, but I can assure you I don't shake my head or chuckle at newbie antics at all because I remember things I did when seed-starting, for example, was new to me.

We all do the same things at times like that and we all learn the same lessons. Everyone I know who grows from seed indoors under lights tends to overwater and overfeed seedlings the first year or two or three that they raise them, and you can guess what caused them to change their behavior, can't you? Damping off, of course.

We all live, learn, and move on. Mistakes, problems, issues and outright disasters are great teachers! And, by the way, damping off can happen to anybody's plants and I don't care how well-seasoned a gardener they are. Damping off is a general term given to a handful of fungal diseases that kill seedlings, and well-seasoned gardeners are not immune to having their plants affected by those diseases. (Oh, if only it were so!) What well-seasoned gardeners might do that reduces damping off is they focus (based on what they learned when less well-seasoned) more on good air flow, correct temperatures and keeping seedlings moist, not too dry and not too wet, but just right (it is sort of a Goldlilocks thing.....).

I will tell a funny tomatp story about a former neighbor of ours in Texas. She wasn't a very pleasant person to be around although her husband seemed nice enough. She's the kind of person who could live next door to you for 10 years and never once speak to you....so when she planted tomatoes, she never asked for any advice and I certainly didn't offer my unsolicited opinion. She planted in a shady yard that might have 2 or 3 hours a day of sun. She must have been using a gardening book written for northern gardeners who raised their tomatoes very differently (this was in the late 1980s or earliest 1990s) from how we raise them here. She diligently kept them pruned to one main stem and periodically pruned off EVERY branch and EVERY blossom. So, she had these 6 to 8' tall, leggy, thin tomato plant stalks with about 3 leaves at the tip-top of each plant, and every other bit of vegetation pruned off weekly, including the blooms. Her plants looked like green bamboo poles.

Finally, her husband (poor henpecked thing that he was)came over to our house in late August and asked what they were doing wrong. He said they could see our plants were loaded with tomatoes and theirs had none. With a perfectly straight face I told him I believed their problem was she was pruning off 99% of the foliage and the few remaining leaves at the top of the plant could not conduct enough photosynthesis to produce tomatoes, especially since they were growing in shade. He understood that as soon as I said it.

Taking a deep breath, I then told him that the other problem likely was that she kept pinching off all the blooms and since blooms develop into tomatoes, that's why there were no tomatoes. Give me brownie points here because I said it as kindly and gently as I could. The look on his face was both incredulous and sort of scared-looking. He looked down at the floor, then looked back up at me and said something like, "Well, I think we'll forget we ever had this conversation and I'm not going to say anything to her about it. She wouldn't take it very well." I solemnly nodded my head and agreed with him that he probably was making the best decision because I knew she didn't handle criticism well. I did suggest that maybe he might buy her a book about vegetable gardening in Texas if she wanted to give tomatoes another try the next year. She didn't. I will admit I snickered to myself every time I looked at her plants that whole summer and fall, but I was younger and less mature then.

Carol,

I only started broccoli seed this week, so if you start yours next week, yours will be only a week behind mine and that's not bad considering we're in different zones. I'm not in any hurry on the broccoli because I am sure the cold weather isn't done with us yet.

It is very hard for me to look and see nice big broccoli plants in the stores now and mine haven't even sprouted yet, but those big plants are a whole lot more likely to button head than mine are so far, so I get over it.

I've had you and your family and your friend's family on my mind all week and hope the week has gone as smoothly as possible, considering the circumstances.

Dawn

i'm so sorry for the loss of your friend. there's nothing else to say about that. :(

i'm sorry you're having trouble with the baby. they really can pick up on our stresses, and i'll bet his parents, as well as you, are dealing with some pretty powerful grief right now. please take good care of yourself.

i'm more than happy to share broccoli plants with you! do you need me to do the onion run for you? or am i completely oblivious, and gotten the dates mixed up again?! it seems i can't keep anything straight in my head anymore. i'll blame it on the "fibro brain fog", but i think there's just too much "stuff" in there.

my DS used to say i had a mind like a steel trap. he now describes it as "more like a chain link fence!"

Thanks Dawn and Dody. They just picked up the baby and everything is good. The baby wanted to touch the dog, but the baby didn't want the dog to touch him. The dog thinks he is the baby and cried if I put him in the kennel, so it was like having two babies to care for. My husband had offered to help some other friends move, so he wasn't here to help out. He came home and we finally got things under control and the baby was happier. I haven't had a little one around for a long time.

As for the seed starting, I have tried to have little gardens here and there as we moved around the world but it wasn't until after my DH was out of the Air Force that I could really settle down and be the kind of gardener that I had always wanted to be. Even now, things interfer, but I love gardening and I learn something new every year. Even if we laugh about one person today, they get to laugh at us tomorrow, because none of us get it all done right every time. Last year I wintersowed some onions, and finally threw them away when the next winter rolled around because I just never got them in the ground. There were only a dozen or so, but they spent the whole summer in a milk jug. LOL

When I joined this forum, I planted tomato plants outside at what I thought was a reasonable time, but it turned cold again, or hail was supposed to come or something. Anyway, I covered everything up as much as I could and hoped I didn't have to start over the next day. I came inside to see what everyone else was doing. I saw a post where this lady named Dawn had just come in the house after putting five gallon buckets over a gazillion plants, and the ground where they were planted wasn't level. I got a real mental picture, and I felt more sorry for her than I did for myself. I thought she must be a market grower to have so many plants. She wasn't! So even when you know how to do everything right, sometimes the weather deals you a different hand.

Dawn, Everything has gone quite smoothly and even the weather co-operated for the funeral service. I think most of the family left today, but her son, DIL, and baby Noah are here until Tuesday.

Things should start to slow down for me a little now and I can start getting serious about my garden. I don't see any problem in making the onion run, but thanks. Seedmama is going to let me know when whe has them, and I will go for them. I think we only have 2 in Tulsa, and 2 that I will bring home. I've kind of lost track of days with all the snow days and other things going on. Seedmama knows my weaknesses, so I'm sure she will keep me posted.

I overwater and overlove too.

Last year I attempted to start some random seeds in Jiffy peat pots/ starter dome kit. Nothing made it. NOTHING. Not one plant.

This year I have 40 seedlings in dixie cups. So far so good. but I am terrified to underwater/overwater transplant too soon/too late.

These are great questions.

Jo

dody - being a novice myself, I PROMISE no one is chuckling. You would NOT believe the spindly tomatoes I tried to grow 4 years ago. They were awful...and now that I look back, they were so brave - trying to grow with little light, and too much warmth & moisture. Last year, with the help of our peeps here - is the first year I have EVER had any survive. My first reaction was "OMG!!! Someone speak up!! I think maybe it's the peat pots???" Thanks Dawn! I have learned a LOT! Today I sowed 20 varities of peppers and 21 of tomatoes! See Dody??? Someday you too can achieve total garden and seed addiction!!!

Carol - I'm so sorry for the loss of your friend. And gulp...she was younger than me. I'm sure she will be missed by many. You are such a true friend to be there to help her children & grandkids thru this, but then...I knew you were a "salt of the earth" person anyway! You or Seedmama let me know if I can help with the Onion Run, ok?

Seriously, my DH is threatening an intervention...but that would rob him of a great source of entertainment so I think I'm safe for now. Keep us posted on the progress, Dody!?

Paula