Beginner Gardening: Please help with broccoli plant problem! URGENT!!!, 1 by seedsandsuch

seedsandsuch wrote:
Hello;

I have posted this question over lots of forums and no one has been able to help me! Over the past 2 days, the medium sized leaves of many of my broccoli and cabbage plants have a terrible problem. They wilt around the edges and then the wilted area dries up like dried herbs. This travels down the leaf and the whole leaf ends up dried up and then the problem starts on another leaf. If this isn't stopped, the entire plant will die. The stem is healthy, they are growing indoors under grow lights in temps of 55-67 degrees.

Last year I noticed that if I took these out to my greenhouse, many of the plants were saved and the problem stopped. But it is still too cold here to start up the heat in the greenhouse for another couple of weeks but I don't want to lose all of these plants. Does anyone know what could be causing this? I try to let the potting soil dry out between waterings.

The plants were perfectly healthy Friday, and by Saturday night, 2 plants had this wilting on 1 leaf on each plant. By today 10 plants have this! What can I do?????? I don't think it is damping off because the stem in healthy!

My grow lights are 6 inches above the tallest leaf so I don't think they could be burning the leaves. The top leaves aren't affected yet though, just the medium sized ones. These plants are about 3-4 inches tall with 2-4 true leaves.

I really hope someone can help me figure out what this is! I lose so many broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower plants to this every year! My tomatoes and peppers growing right beside these are totally unaffected!

I have the plants growing in moisture control Miracle Grow seed starting soil. While this may not be the perfect soil to use, that is all I could get at the time I started these. What makes me really wonder is when I move them to the greenhouse, sometimes the problem goes away although I water the same and the dirt is still the same. Although I don't have lights right above them in the greenhouse. (I know 6" may be too tall but I don't want to burn my plants and I had heard you could burn them. They are the gro florouscent type bulbs that you can get specifically for growing plants under. How low can I put them without damaging the plants?

Below are some pictures of the problem. This first one shows a plant that just started to wilt this morning. By this evening when I took the photo, the top leaf was totally wilted. As you can see from the photo, it looks like the roots and stem are fine so this probably wouldn't be a damping off problem would it?

I hope this is enough info to help you figure out what is going wrong. I have been unable to grow broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage because of this problem. It attacks every year no matter what! Usually I manage to save only a few plants out of several hundred I start. Thanks for your help!