Dammit, Plants! ... A plea for advice

[bookwyrm]

I've been trying unsuccessfully to grow herbs for over a year now. The last batch died after several months, seemingly from being underwatered, so I sprang for a moisture meter. This batch, most of which I bought barely a week ago, seemed to be doing fine. However, I came home last night to discover severe wilt in one basket, and similar wilt on a much lesser scale in the other.
edit: Removed extraneous details on the planting setup.
Looking further, the severely wilted plant has a thick coating of white mold around the edges of the pot (it's one of those burlap-like pots that you put whole into the ground), and a bunch of fluffy hyphae-looking growth over the soil. The other plants don't have any solid white mold, but they do have the fluffy stuff. So I'm guessing I've got some sort of fungal infection. My question is, what can I do about it? Do I have to throw out these plants and start over yet again? Is there some sort of indoor fungicide I can use? Or something a little less horrific? The wilt only seems to be affecting the plants I got from Home Depot thus far; I assume at this point all their plants are infected so won't be buying any more from there. There weren't any visible signs of mold when I intially bought the herbs or anything, though.

I'm really at a loss. All I want is to have some fresh herbs to cook with, and to overcome my black thumb. But if I have to keep buying new herbs every couple months, at about $40 a lot, this hobby becomes a little too expensive to sustain.

edit again I'm about to try the remedy mentioned here. But I'd still really appreciate some advice of other things to try.

Comments

plants

[(Anonymous)]

Get clean plastic pots; fill with 'soilless' mix, and plant herb seeds. Much cheaper. Basil and coriander grow really fast, and parsley, dill, sweet marjoram and savory are easy too. Sage, lovage, fennel, hyssop and lavender are all quite possible. One important thing: buy a plastic spray bottle and a small bottle of a commercial product called 'No Damp', mix according to instructions on the bottle,and spray top of mix when planting, and when seeds germinate and while they are still tiny. That stops them all keeling over suddenly and dying on you. Start seeds on sunny windowsill or outside. Herbs need lots of sun. You get many, many plants from a packet of seed, and the packaged seed itself will stay good for a couple (or several)years.

Re: plants

[bookwyrm]

Thank you for the advice! The soilless mix idea sounds much like what I did originally, though I used cocoa fiber, which is probably a bit weak on the nutrients. The baskets hang by the window and I use grow lights to supplement them as well. I will look for that "No Damp", since I seem to have difficulty with growing things from seeds in that they all fall over in that inbetween state where they're several inches high but don't have any "true" leaves yet.

[cfox.livejournal.com]

I would've expected fungal things to take out grown plants only when the plant was already weakened. You may need much more light, such as having the plants only inches from the grow light for 18hours/day.