Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Gnasty Gnats!

Sarah had rat invaders, we have gnat invaders. Yuck! Omid & I recently repotted a bunch of our house plants. Little did we know, we were supposed to "bake" the soil first (to rid the soil of gnat larvae). Well - we didn't and now we have a house full of gnats. At first I thought it was fruit flies from the fruit we had out. I put all the fruit in the fridge and we still had gnats.

Then, some lovely person had the gall to say maybe Remy was bringing in the gnats. How dare they! My dog is bug free!!! I make extra sure he doesn't play with other dogs, doesn't lounge in the grass, etc. Remy is one of the cleanest dogs I know, so there! Hmmppffh!! Lesson to be learned: DON'T insult my husband, my kids or my dog. Now, back to the story.

We started seeing these gnats in different places last week. I cleaned all the drains with ammonia as I read online that the ammonia should do the trick. Nothing. We still had gnats. Yesterday Matty and I set a bunch of apple cider vinegar laced with Dawn dishwashing liquid traps all around the house. That's how I found out our plants were infested. The traps near the plants caught about a 50 gnats in less than 5 minutes. I placed a trap in the giant plant container and had 100's more. I took a flashlight and bingo! Millions of gnats! Omid helped me take the plants outside and ever since I have been researching ways to get rid of the gnats without throwing out the plants.

Apple cider vinegar trap



I want to do this pesticide free if we can (c'mon people - I have kids & pets in the house - I don't want them to be poisoned as well). Matty is spray painting cardboard bright yellow for me right now. When he is finished, we will rub petroleum jelly all over the strips and make our own glue traps. We'll see how well this works!

But for now, the plants are staying outside until I can dig out the top 2 inches of soil and replace it with baked soil. Then, I will cover the final layer with an inch of sand.


3 comments:

Laurel said...

Hey, I'm down with Gnats. I am not down with the dealing of four-legged, red eyed creaters. Yay, for toxic free solutions.

Arezou said...

We had them when we replanted our plant in the kitchent. The one that is reaching the ceiling now...I didn't know how to get rid of them, other than to sweap away hundreds of them every day. Couldn't figure out where they were coming from, now I know....Eventually, they will go away. It took, um, about a year!!! Who was the lovely person to insult Remy?

erinz said...

I have to protect the ignorant! I don't think they will make any more comments like that to me though. You know how it is with pets...they become like children. :)