welcome to the rustic garden today I'm going to show you how to use cinnamon to deal with funguses like damping off disease and how do you use soap and neem oil to deal with fungus gnats and also with fungus and diseases you want to be cautious with your seed starts when they're tiny because if you use a high concentration of soap panetta soap may damage it so let me just talk about the setup this is a quart of water I use one teaspoon of neem oil and a couple drops of soap in here for my quart spray if the plants are bigger like these tomatoes back here you wouldn't have to worry so much about the soap because it's soaps not going to damage it so when you're setting it up for your seed starts use a little bit less so you're going to have to shake it more to make sure the oil disperses through there but a little less soap is fine and then the cinnamon actually has antifungal properties and it's really good to use right on top of your seed starting mix now let me show you the problem here's one let me figure this out okay there you go so these are Walla Walla onions are these actually uh white Spanish onions and you can see some die-off right in there some of the onions are just collapsing and dying and right in here there were plenty of onions that look just like this germinated onions and they died back that tells me something is going on what I did notice is I do have fungus gnats even so I'm extremely careful when I move stuff in and out of the house the fungus gnats come back but this is more of a sign in my opinion of some sort of fungus here's another example this is my time and they all looked just like this and you can see little bits of green left there just one plant left there slowly they've been dying off and you can see all the die off right in there so they were nice lush and healthy and now they're dying back and that's probably damping off disease now if you don't use the cinnamon right at the beginning it is okay to take it and gently sprinkle it over the surface all you're doing is laying the cinnamon on the surface of your starting mix and that makes it an unhospitable environment for the fungus to grow so it deters the fungus the better way to do it let's just say we just got done planting our seeds in here we pack everything down take the cinnamon right after you plant and cover it cover the starting lips just like that and then you just leave it you don't really have to reapply it it's down it's your preventive and it helps to deter the damping off diseases now the neem oil spray really does work to control fungus gnats I've used before when I pet in infestation and what you want to do if you already have your seed starts going and then you get the fungus gnats is you really do shake it up and you want to spray the tops and get beads of water all over the place that's what the fungus naps are going to crawl in that's what's gonna help get the neem oil onto them the other thing that's most important is the fungus Nets also crawl down into your seed starts crawl on the bottom lay their eggs and stuff like that you want to soak the underside of the plastic trays inside the tray just get beads of water and neem oil all over the place and you're going to probably have to do this every three days or so for I don't know 10 days 12 days something like that because you need to kill out the fungus gnats that are adults and moving around you also have to kill out the hatching fungus gnats that come in a lifecycle so you always have the eggs of the insect and you also have the adult insect you have to take care of so one spray I'll take care of some of the adults but it's not going to take care of the hatching insects the better way to use neem oil the prevention is when you have your starting tree before you even start really spray the inside that will get the neem oil inside of there and then you go ahead I'm going to step behind the camera fill it with your starting mix it only takes a second you know to spray down all the insides of the cells and then you have your neem oil already inside of there so anything that goes and crawls in as an insect is going to come in contact with the neem oil so those are two great ways to use organic products to take care of your seed starts and again cinnamon is great for putting right on top of the surface and creating I don't have really enters it doesn't so much kill the fungus it makes it unhospitable which means it's harder for the fungus to really grow and take hold to this the cinnamon will take care of damping up disease and other fungus like that the neem oil takes care of fungus gnats it will also take care of some funguses to use them preventative ly don't wait until something shows up because by that time you're already losing some of your seed starts so just think about what you might want to use it's you don't necessarily need to neem oil if you don't get fungus net but the cinnamon is great to use no matter where you're at because it doesn't take much to just bring in something that has some a fungus Spore on it or some sort of sport on it and it'll just spread across your seed start hope you enjoyed the video gives you some idea how to use these products in your garden in this case obviously indoor in your seed starts please check out my blog at www.canninsider.com/consulting