Shoo Fly!

We have a problem with flies buzzing around our garage. It's annoying & we hate it! I read the following article written by Cisco Morris in The Seattle Times yesterday. I was convinced enough to purchase several geranimums this afternoon and place them near our garage. I hope it works!!

A caller on my gardening show once asked me how to keep flies out of her house. Other than window screens, I lacked a good solution. The next caller was from Austria and offered a suggestion. She told me that Austrians don't plant Pelargoniums (zonal and other types of geraniums) in their window boxes just for aesthetics. Their real purpose is to repel flies.
Although I was somewhat dubious, I had the perfect place to test her claim. The day we moved into our house, we discovered that we had a problem with flies that constantly flew in circles between the house and detached garage. Nothing we tried would make them go away, and their presence embarrassed the living tweetle out of us whenever we had visitors.
I planted up a container with Pelargoniums where the flies hovered. To my great surprise the flies instantly disappeared, and the only time they ever came back was one year when I purposely didn't plant any.
If you've got a fly problem, give Pelargoniums a try. I think that any kind from Martha Washington to ivy geranium will do, and even if it doesn't work, maybe visitors will notice the attractive flowers rather than the embarrassing flies.