I was stocking up on seeds a couple months ago, and for some reason I bought two quarter pounder auto seeds. I don’t usually just buy two seeds, so I don’t know if they were on special or why I bought just 2… They came in a test tube instead of the usual bag.
I marked up a sprout pad, planning to germinate 6 different plants. It looked like the quarter pounder seed was germinating 6 hours later, but when I looked closer, I realized it was a white slime mold coming out of the seed, so I tossed all of the seeds, the media, everything. The next sprouting I isolated the seeds, and no molds appeared, but I also didn’t germinate the second qp seed. Saving qp for last, I germinated it without incident.
One plant, gummi bear auto, turned a burgundy color. I thought it was just putting on a display, but it was also very stunted, despite the impressive other-worldly coloration and thick buds.
Gummi Bear was showing a color change on the trichomes, so I progressed her to harvest, and much to my dismay I found a mycelial mass in the heart of the plant. Other people had posted photos of larger green plants, I had a small purple plant, so I thought I had mishandled the plant when it was young. But it was stress from the heavy fungal load.
I did not see any signs of flowering of the fungi, but not all of them are visible, and it’s been 40 years since my last biology class. So I assume the entire grow room is compromised. No other signs of infection, so once the current harvest is complete, the entire building gets shut down and sterilized. The infected plant is being steralized to make it safe, and this is a rdwc system, so if anything is in the water it is everywhere… already ordered new buckets, and what parts are not new will be soaked in bleach. I live in the desert, so getting the room to 140ºf is possible, but I will want to chemically sterialize the flooring as it has a slab interfacing with the ground, so it would take fire to get the floor hot enough, and we aren’t doing /that/.
I always knew that sooner or later I would have to decontaminate the room, but I was expecting spider mites, not mold. This was a white fungal mass that originated in a “quarter pounder auto” seed. I had 2 qp seeds, and the first one took about 12 hours to go from wet to sending out a slime mold to eat all of the seeds being germinated. I got rid of everything, and started fresh, with no slime mold the second time. However the second qp seed was touching the first when I bought them, so it was probably infected, and I just couldn’t see anything.
I did not expect to get a mold infection like this, not in the 12% humidity of the desert. I work hard to get the grow humidity above 30-40%, so high humidity is not the main contributing factor in this infection. I had a clearly aggressive slime mold, and I underestimated what I needed to do to eradicate it. I probably should have torched the second qp seed, because if one was infected both had to be infected, they were in the same test tube when shipped to me. The QP plant does not appear infected now, nor anyone else, so they are probably resistant. Quarter pounder auto was supplied by someone that ships in test tubes, the only seeds I’ve seen shipped like that, so nothing else I have came from that breeder. So I’m reluctant to throw away my whole seed inventory.
Does anyone have any experiences with bud rot? How persistent is it? Were you able to grow an uninfected crop soon after?