How To Get Rid Of Fungus Gnats! | How To Control Fungus Gnats

Want me to video? Okay, I know I love you too. Go get your toy. Hey guys, it's Harley and today I'm going to be talking about fungus gnats and how I have prevented infestations and then also gotten rid of any infestations I have had. How I deal with bugs is one of my most frequently asked questions, so instead of doing a super general video about it, I thought I would go, I thought I would do a video more specific on each type of infestation and how to deal with each different kind of bug individually. So let me know what you think of that down below and if you have any other video requests, please let me know down below as well. And today we're going to be talking about fungus gnats. I would definitely say that fungus gnats are like the most common house plant pests. Although they don't really harm the plant in like small numbers, if it isn't dealt with then they definitely can take a detrimental toll on your plants. So let's see. So basically, oh I should probably read this whole thing. So basically fungus gnats are those tiny little annoying flies that seem to fly right up into your face whenever you get near them and that's actually because they are attracted to carbon dioxide. So that's why So fungus gnats lay their eggs in damp soil. So there are a few ways to prevent a fungus gnat problem from growing or even beginning. A couple of things you can do are cut back on watering and make sure that the soil is completely drying out between waterings. I know that always isn't possible, especially depending on like how dry it is where you live, how warm it is, and then also the type of plant of course. Some plants like to be kept moist all the time. Did you hear that? Another thing you can do is switch away from a compost or peat moss soil mixture to a strictly perlite soil mixture. The compost and peat moss soils have decomposing materials which is actually what the fungus gnats feed on. So if you switch to a perlite soil then there won't be as much like food readily available for them. So those are just a couple of things you can do to help prevent a problem from developing in the first place. The fungus gnat life cycle involves four different cycles. So first they start out as eggs of course, then they develop into larvae, then they develop into pupa, and then they turn into an adult. Most of their lifespan is spent within the soil. So adult flies will lay their eggs into damp soil about an inch down if the soil is moist and then they live there until they become an adult. So the easiest way to tackle this problem is taking care of the problem while it's still within the soil and in a constrained area. Whereas when they're adults they don't live very long so they're just going to naturally die off anyway if they have made it into adulthood. So you just kind of want to deal with it before it gets to that point. A lot of the common solutions for fungus gnat problems involve like placing a couple layers of sand on top of soil because sand drains water very rapidly. The gnats will naturally not want to lay their eggs there because it's not as moist as like soil or dirt is. So you could do that but personally I don't like the way that looks. So most of their short lifespan is spent in the soil so in my opinion it's a lot easier to tackle the problem there before they're actually really annoying flying around because once they're out of the soil anyway they're not alive for long. So if you prevent them from making it into adulthood then new generations are not going to be created which breaks the cycle really. Then I would definitely recommend mosquito bits. The main ingredient in mosquito bits is BTI which is actually wait what bacillus thuringiensis subspecies israelensis. Did that sound right? Anyway that's the main ingredient so we can just call it BTI and keep it simple. BTI is a naturally occurring bacterium that's deadly to both mosquitoes and annoying fungus gnats and the cool thing about BTI is that it's not actually toxic to animals or pets unless it's ingested. The way they recommend to use it is to shake a little bit over the top of your soil and water it into the soil over a three-week period. For me that was just a little bit too long to wait so what I did instead was I poured a whole bunch of mosquito bits into my it's really like a lemonade thing where you put lemonade or kool-aid in your fridge. I use it to water my plants so I just shook out some of the mosquito bits into the bottom of that and kind of crunched them up a little bit so they were smaller pieces and then I soaked it in hot water for a couple of hours until it was mostly broken down and then I just watered all my plants like normal. You can continue to do this over the course of like seven days every time your soil gets dry. They say to do this in of intervals of 7 or 14 days. Like I said you can water it you can shake it out and water it into the soil that way but the reason I didn't like doing it that way is because when I shook the bits out onto the top of the soil and like watered it in after a few days it kind of got like fuzzy and moldy looking and it just wasn't cute so that's why I decided to try a different way. So anyway I would definitely recommend mosquito bits to take care of fungus gnats. Since I started doing this I have noticed less fungus gnat in my house which is very nice. I am not going to lie they are still kind of there but I did just start doing this a couple of weeks ago so I do think that it'll... what was that? You made me lose my train of thought. So anyway I hope this video was helpful to you. If you have any other input please leave them in the comment section down below and like I said leave a video request of something you would like to see me do a video about. So thank you so much for watching. I will see you in my next one. Bye!