Hello there,

Yeah, you dont want to overdo it on the chemical treatments. Boiling the soil should not cause any problems, just sterilize it. Your VFT will be alright for a couple of days without soil as long as you place it in a damp paper towel or some long fiber sphagnum during that time. I also got a bad case of fungus infected soil. I placed it unopened in a shelf for a couple of weeks and when I looked at it it was full of yellow fungal mycellium and fruiting bodies. Talk about spore central!

I am going to perform an experiment on them since they are ripe for destruction, so I will post some pictures showing how the Neem oil works on them. I am only going to spray one section with one light dose of Neem oil and observe it for a few days, taking photos of it at various intervals to show what happens to it.

Neem oil is intended to be sprayed on the plants and on infected surfaces, like the perlite in your soil. Just don't overdo it. A mist over the entire plant once over should do it. In any case, if you do not see mold on the plant's leaves or roots, it is not infected and really does not need to be sprayed. Just kill the fungus in the soil and repot the plant as quickly as you can. The entire process should only take a couple of hours to steam up the soil good for a few minutes then let it cool to room temperature, then repot the plant.

Good luck.

How would you boil the soil? because if you put the soil in a pot with water you would have a little trouble seperating the soil from the water, unless you evaporated it off. and if you just put wet soil in a pot it would burn. What I recommend for boiling soil is to go to the supermarket and buy some plastic steamer bags and put the wet soil in the bag and put it in the microwave for a few minutes. It would probably kill the mold and you wouldn't have to wash soil out of your pots.

I haven't done this but boiling the soil seems like a good idea to kill mold and whatnot.

poolboy:

Yes, you do certainly have to watch out to ensure the soil does not burn. So far as the water, you would need to let the soil cool, then you could squeeze out the excess distilled water and then use the soil. There are several methods to do this, but the main thing is to heat the soil and steam it to kill of infectious agents. Your steamer bag idea in the microwave would work well too I would think.