Hellos to all. Long time no see. My apologies for being away so long. Gainful employment has proven to be a major bummer on the blogging front. Turns out it’s also a major bummer on green living front. The lack of time has made green experiments scarce around here but today I’ve got a doozey.
My little kitchen herb garden has been trucking along all winter. I’ve lost some good soldiers to lack of light and a cold window sill but for the most part, winter has been relatively kind to my increasingly green thumb. Recently I’ve developed a common winter problem for house plants - fungus gnats. At first I thought they were just fruit flies but after carefully ensuring I didn’t have any flies in my worm bin and any nasty rotting produce anywhere, I took a closer look at the little buggers and realized they were something else entirely.
Fungus gnats are little flies that are commonly found in potted plants. Apparently commercial potting soil can be full of larvae and their hatching may have been triggered by me overwatering my plants while they’re in a semi-dormant state. They are also super annoying.
After scouring the internet for a non-chemical cure, I started to experiment.
Step 1: Drying out my plants. Apparently these suckers thrive on rotting organic matter (aka the roots of my plants) so I stopped watering my plants for 2 weeks. This of course came with some risks and it appears that I’ve lost one of my basil plants and possibly my oregano but everything else seems to have survived. I’m down to watering only once a week and very sparingly.
Cutting back on the water helped a bit but still wasn’t doing the trick so I had to try something else.
Step 2: Cinnamon. When I saw this idea on a UBC Botanical Garden Forum, I was highly skeptical but I really didn’t want to have to resort to chemicals so I gave it a try. I started with just a sprinkle on the surface of the soil because I really wasn’t sure how crazy to go but after about a week I went for full soil coverage.
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| Sad dehydrated parsley with cinnamon soil |
Step 3: Lemon juice. Again, seriously? But reason with me for a moment. Apparently the little buggers are attracted to the colour yellow. So I used a couple of our little soy sauce dishes from the ole sushi set and set them up on the window sills. The gnats are attracted to it and then they drown in the lemon juice.
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| See those itty bitty dead flies? |
Result? Victory. Well, they’re not completely gone, but things have improved dramatically. I’m still watering only once a week but the flying population in my household has decreased dramatically. Dare I call this green experiment a success? Do you have any green pest control success stories?
