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These 3 front seedlings died overnight; basils and peppers. Picture's a bit fuzzy but I think if you click on it, it will come up sharper?
They're under lights in my heated workshop. As you can see neighboring plants are so far unaffected. The trays have 'soaker fabric' in the bottom and I believe there's been no shortage of water. The pattern of the deaths makes me suspect otherwise, as if a slope caused dry-out of the front row; but the bench is within a hair's breadth of dead level.

"Dead" level haha.

I've separated the healthy ones, all together into a new tray but with wider spacing ~ couple of inches.

What d'you think?

I’m not sure —my first suspect in seedlings is always damping off, and in case of basil, basil downy mildew ... but these are neither.

The affected basil has what I would describe as “water soaked brown lesions” on the leaves, so that’s what I searched for ... and this was the closest I found —

https://plantvillage.psu.edu/topics/basil/infos

Leaf spot Pseudomonas cichorii
Colletotrichum spp.

Symptoms
Angular or irregular brown or black water-soaked spots on leaves; streaks on stems.

— what do you think? I rather hope I’m wrong because bacterial diseases are always harder to control.

applestar wrote:I’m not sure —my first suspect in seedlings is always damping off, and in case of basil, basil downy mildew ... but these are neither.

The affected basil has what I would describe as “water soaked brown lesions” on the leaves, so that’s what I searched for ... and this was the closest I found —

https://plantvillage.psu.edu/topics/basil/infos

Leaf spot Pseudomonas cichorii
Colletotrichum spp.

Symptoms
Angular or irregular brown or black water-soaked spots on leaves; streaks on stems.

— what do you think? I rather hope I’m wrong because bacterial diseases are always harder to control.

Don't know. None of the examples on that website looked like mine; and my plants are so completely destroyed (and small) that I didn't attempt a detailed postmortem. What has really surprised me is that they were healthy looking one day and totally demolished the next - I saw no advance symptoms.

By the way the leftmost row is peppers - Ajvarski - whose front seedling was also destroyed. This is the first time I have tried Ajvarski and I was extremely pleased with the germination speed and vigorous looking starts.

It will be interesting to see whether the problem surfaces in the surviving plants.