Houseplants and Fungus Gnats

I have never had much of a green thumb, but over the last several years or so I've had much success with several of my houseplants. A couple of my stars are a Wandering Jew Plant and an Umbrella Plant. A few months ago I realized that the Wandering Jew had outgrown it's pot. I found a larger pot in the basement and headed to the local home improvement store to purchase some peat moss for repotting.

After several weeks, I discovered a few little gnat like creatures flying around my dining room where the Wandering Jew rests. In the next couple of weeks they became unbearable. You couldn't even sit and have a meal without one of these nasty little critters landing on your plate or in your glass. I knew I had to do something.

First I started with a little research. It seems that these little buggers called fungus gnats are a pretty common problem for household plants. It also appears that my purchase of peat moss is probably how I inherited these unwanted guests. The two things that seem to attract these pests are moist soil and fungus. Although I knew that I didn't overwater my plant, a look at the soil confirmed that I indeed did have a fungal problem.

There are many websites out there promoting pesticides and miracle cures for this problem, but because I prefer to stick with natural products, I decided to use common sense to come up with a solution. Here is what I concluded:

1. Decrease watering. If these buggers like moist soil, I decided to make the soil as dry as possible without bringing harm to the plant.
2. Get rid of the adult gnats. Sure I could go around with a paper towel or fly swatter killing them one-by-one (my husband did this one morning in frustration), but I knew there had to be a better way. When I discovered that fly traps were out of season and unavailable at stores in Michigan, I came up with my own solution. Since the gnats like water, I filled two paper cups with water and placed them in the center of the plant. One I cut in half to make a shorter cup to catch those that maybe didn't fly as high. I'd also read that they as well as other insects are attracted to the color yellow. So I put some drops of lemon juice in the water for added ammunition. Initially it looked like this wasn't going to work. Within the first couple of days, only three gnats were in the water. I decided to fill the cups to the brim and within just a few hours, several were floating in the water. Now mind you, this is not very attractive, but it is extremely effective.
3. I didn't want to have cups of lemon water in my plants indefinitely, so I knew I needed to do more work to really get rid of these pests for good. The next step I thought was to kill their food source - the fungus. Sure pesticides would do the trick, but I wanted to try something natural. Now if I have a viral or fungal issue, I always turn to garlic. It's stinky, but it does the job. I boiled some minced garlic in water, and after cooling poured the mixture on both the plant leaves and the soil. This seemed to help some.
4. Still I was concerned about the food source. As long as fungus was around, I knew that a few of the adults would be able to reproduce. So I decided to try adding another anti-fungal, rosemary, to the garlic water. Just a few drops seemed to do the trick.

Some other natural remedies for getting rid of these pests include: making your own sticky traps using paper towels and vaseline, killing them with soapy water (although I'm very sceptical that this would work) or putting a layer of sand on top of the soil to hide/disguise the moisture in the soil.