Soil Mites That Eat Fungus Gnat Larvæ

[Harvy Howard]

The butterworts sound as if they could be an interesting addition to an indoor garden; TY Leafmite and weederwoman. Those stickies may be hard to find in Edmonton, but I hear that the Orchid Soc of Alberta sometimes have them for sale. I should join.

[My Green Pets]

I applied the BTI last week. Still have little gnatties flying around. I think I need to wait a little longer to see any results.

[burz]

Ive never had an infestation but would see a few of them fly out of a couple of my regular soil potted houseplants

A few friends and myself mulched all of our potted plants in soil with Grow Stone "nat nix" and have had rather quick and good results. Its not too expensive.

[Harvy Howard]

Thank you, burz, for the heads-up on the Growstone products. That's something that I'll want to try. I am checking to see if it's available, retail, in Edmonton. It sounds ideal in many respects, and should work well as a major constituent in non-soil media for orchids. It appears that the only negative aspect of this material is the silica dust in the dry product; one user points out that it will clog your drains, and he also recommends using a respirator while unpacking, as it's very bad for the lungs.

I have recently been using something similar to the GnatNix! for my regular-soil potted plants such as cacti. It's locally available, and the product is "zeolite." I simply remove the top layer of soil to the depth of about one inch (removing it to the outdoors in case there are fungus gnat eggs or larvae in it), and replace the medium with straight zeolite. So as not to disturb this protective mulch, I use the bottom-watering method.

I'm also making sure that my kitchen fruit-and-veggie peelings go quickly from under the sink to the outdoor compost heap.

While not wishing to appear smug, I can now say that my fungus gnat sightings over the past few weeks have dropped from "abundant" to "extremely few."

[OCRC_Dir_China]

Gnats are a real problem in our green houses in China, I use fly tape we hang all around the plants. And cut 10 cm lengths and leave them around the top of the pots works well. We change them bi-monthly.