It probably is fungus gnats. They like to lay thier eggs in peat based potting mixes in the top layer of dirt. Bt-i based products will take care of the babies (white worms) for the adults place sticky yellow cards to catch them. Alot of people think the Bt isn't working because they still see the adults. You have to kill the adults separately. The adults look like teeny tiny blackish flies.
Also treat a few times with the Bt. Knock out gnat is what I bought. It took a few times and had to kill off the adults but now they are all gone.
Some people also put a 1 inch layer of sand over their potting soil to deter fungus gnats. I notice I never have any in my cactus either which is a mostly sandy mix. Fungus gnats must not like it.

Barry

Nip them in the bud right now! The larvae are the problem- they will eat the roots of your seedlings. Usually, brug cutting roots grow so fast, the larvae are not a problem for me, but I can get my plants outside and into the ground earlier in the year than you can.

The most effective treatment is BT---- but didn't work for me, my infestation was too large! Also, can use sand on the soil surface and some use hydrogen peroxide solution. Keep you soil on the dry side, which you should be doing anyway, so you roots don't rot.

I would catch thousands in several days on flypaper. The adults are tiny but you can see them with your eyes!

Brenda B

I usually have fungus gnat problems when I start seeds inside. I agree with SJN, use a Bt product. I can't stand that fly paper for the adults but don't know of any other method to get rid of them. My hair and loose clothing are always getting stuck to the damn things. I buy Mosquito Dunks and break a piece off and soak it in a jug of water. I use that for watering the plants. Use it on all your plants even if you don't see any gnats. They are probably there too. It's the larvae that cause the problems, especially with young or newly rooted plants because they feed on the roots. The adults, besides laying eggs are more of a bother then anything. I don't think that they feed on the plants but am not sure about that. I've tried using a thin layer of sand and it seems to work. Just make sure that you water from the bottom if using sand. Watering from the top leaves gaps where soil shows through and the gnats will find even the tiniest ones and lay more eggs.
Karyn

I need to get something to prevent them I guess. My cousin was moving and gave me an ivy that had been outside all summer and I put it in the house and those things drove me crazy for weeks til I finally took it back outside. I don't ever want those things again!

So what can we do to prevent? The sand method? Will that work or should I say, will that agree with all types of plants?
Daniella

I would assume using the mosquitoe dunk water would work as a preventative. Is that correct.

No one uses the Yellow sticky paper?? Just hang a few of them and let them do the trick. I used to pay a quater a dead gnat when the kids were little, yes you had to bring me the body to get paid!! Mom got wise when they got the vac out to suck them up off the windows. LOL

I always get it stuck in my hair too and my husband is from Hawaii and has long hair and he gets it even worse, lol.

Thanks all for the great advise! have some old BT for Cabbage caterpillars. Does it stay viable?

Foe the adults.....

If you have them in your home and are doing war against them, each night put a tablespoon of cooking oil in your sink traps too. They go there looking for water ti drink and drown in the oil.
If you purchase bananas to eat, dip the stem ends in soapy water a few moments when you bring them in, the gnats love to hide in there.
If you can't stand the sticky traps, leave shallow lids of open water with cooking oil on the top, they go there to drink too and drown in the oil.

Good ideas RA. I will try that next time I have a big problem. I noticed that gnats do like to get around the brug cutting that are in water. I find them drowned in there every once in awhile.

I tried to make my own sticky yellow cards this summer. Ha what a joke that was. I read that you could use molasses and other things like oil to coat yellow card stock and place around the garden on stakes. I did that and a few gnats stuck to the molasses and then it dried and then wasn't sticky any more so then came a gazillion ants lol. The oil didnt really work either. I recently read you can use Tanglefoot but when I asked about that at our boxstores etc they looked at me like I was from Mars :)

Has anyone else tried the tanglefoot in making thier own sticky cards?

Nope, as for the standing water I did notice when I had them that they would come up from the garbage disposal in the mornings. They must have been down in there getting a drink. Yuck.

When you make your own sticky cards add some vaseline ( white petroleum jelly)to the molasses to keep it soft and pliable or forget the molasses and just use the vaseline on a yellow shiny card.

I have to tell you what I did this year when I put my cutting under lights this fall...I started getting fungus gnats right away and thougth I would try something new..I took my green can of RAID and sprayed just a little bit..no more gnats since then....its been way over a month since I sprayed and no return....Judy

Ha - had a BAD problem inside once, from some grapes at Jewel. And it turns out, everyone that I knew that had them bought those grapes. They were unusually gorgeous and on sale so quite a few of us bought them.

I found that drizzeling oil into the garbage disposal, putting it's cap on, then running it for about 5-10 seconds was really effective. It flung the oil around on those inside. And the ones in the kitchen flying at that moment - a few seconds with the shop-vac - boom - gone.

As for near the plants - I'm gonna shift to neem oil/water and try that for a lite watering. See if that doesn't stop the stuff in the soil. Supposedly you can do that with neem oil. Just a little gun shy about doing it.

Shhhhhhhhhh on the RAID, I hope you had some air movement and didn't inhale to much inside??

Poisons are a really poor choice to control fungus gnats. They are less efective, shorter lasting, and more harmful to humans than BTi (neem is a poison too). Even sticky traps, oil, soaps, etc. don't come close to being as effective as BTi.
It's Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis, a strain of bacteria that is lethal to fungus gnats and mosquitos but has zero effect on humans.
Oxmyx your BT for catepillars is a different strain & doesn't work on gnats.
I use 2 drops of Microbe-Lift BMC in a 1 quart spray bottle of water(mosquito dunk water works too, Gnatrol, plus many other brands). I use one tiny spray for each plant, plus a little wherever else they may congregate. That lasts me a whole year! You do have to wait through 1 short life cycle for them to be all gone, but it's complete control. I would also avoid any treatments that would kill bacteria for a few weeks, like hydrogen peroxide water or insecticides.
It is less harmfull to humans than any poison, home rememdy, or even the glue on sticky traps, and it works so much better. You have to try it. :^)
- Tom

NEEM OIL - Mix in 1tb per gallon of water and add a few drops of dish soap. You can adjust appropriate amounts to size of spritzer bottle your going to use (like an old fantastic bleach bottle). An 8 oz bottle goes along way and for a lot of things. Adult and baby insects, mold, some fungus. If you have a huge garden you plant to treat a few times buy a bigger bottle.

Spritz across the top of your soil for these bugs.

very informative thread.

Thanks Tom for the info.

I had a thought. Fruit flies look like these gnats. is it possible they are the same?
I had had some fruit spoiling this fall and attracted the fruit flies, then I cleared out the fruit at the same time I started cuttings.

Barry, not sure, but the fruit flies and gnats could be the same. I set out small dishes or lid tops with cider vinegar and they go to it and drown.

Fruit flies are different from fungus gnats.

Question: I have used a systemic in the soil of many of my houseplants (for mites, etc.). But want to try BT for gnats. If I now use BT, will the BT not be effective? ....that is, will the systemic 'kill' it?

Fruit flies and fungus gnats aren't the same. Fruit flies are small but they are quite a bit bigger then a fungus gnat and they will congregate around fruit, not foliage plants. Someone on another board gave me some great advice on how to get rid of fruit flies of which I recently had a bad infestation. Take a small glass and fill it partway with cider vinegar then squirt some dish liquid in it. The flies are drawn to it and drown. I had hundreds of dead flies after 2 days. I kept it up for about 10 days just to make sure there were no stragglers. The vinegar didn't attract any fungus gnats though, just the fruit flies.
Karyn

Now i am confused, Karen you are always confusing me!! :)

these gnats I have are larger than a fruit fly, hmmmm maybe they are just friendly gnats :)

I cut up some yellow cards and put vaseline on them and taped them to bendy straws so I could position them how I wanted to. I set them up around my newly rooted cuttings. I will see what I can catch, I don't think I have too many but its a neat idea (thanks RA) so I want to try it lol.

Larger than a fruit fly? Maybe sewage/drain flies? They have woolyish-looking wings.

Fruit flies have red eyes don't they?

dave_in_nova .......... your eyes are that good ? :)

Dave most fruit flies do have red eyes and straight wings but you can get short or curly wings as well as orange or white eyes. I remember that from my genetics classes with labs full of Drosophila melanogaster. lol
Karyn

Hah! My eyes are terrible!

Hi,
Seems to be some confusion over what your flies actually might be.

{{gwi:587700}}

The most noticeable differences - fungus gnats have rounder wings and thinner backends. The wings are not always darker. As far as I know - BT will not work on shorefly larvae.

Hope this helps,

Jack

Hey is there anyway to make that picture bigger??

Just click on the pic and it will fill the page.
Karyn

Oh silly me!!!

THANKS KARYN!!

great pict. Now I have no clue, for sure, what I have; not with my eyes! Might have to resort to RAID!

(just kidding)

Oxmyx, little blue can of Flying insect RAID should do but hold it back about 16" so you just mist. Then run like heck to the outside and stand there in the cold until you can't smell it!! See the yellow stick paper is better.

Oh no! Waaaaahaaaaa. I got em! I went to stick my finger in the potting soil to check if my brug cuttings needed water and there was a whole cloud of them that came up. These were on a a 3 shelf stand to I told hubby to carry the whole thing in the garage so I could spray it and he pulled down a vase of water that was behind it with ivy cuttings in it and made a huge mess. I hate those pesky little critters. They better not kill my cuttings I have worked so hard to root. I am going to use the flying insect stuff and put a little neem oil in the water for now. He took my mosquitoe dunks to the shop to use for the standing water there and I forgot all about bringing one home!

In Monika Gottschalk's book, she cautions that "Angels Trumpets do not tolerate insecticides very well which contain oil" (Engelstrompeten,89). I think Raid also has some sort of oil/petroleum base. Gloria

Well for the moment I just opened the garage doors. I couldn't find anything to put on them. DH rearranged some things in the garage and I can't get to the cabinet with all my stuff in it til he gets time to move all the stuff out of the way. I hate when he rearranges things. I at least leave a way to get to everything even if it is all over the place with all my plants in there right now. With my neck hurt again right now I can't do any sort of lifting at all. I am grouchy too can you tell, lol. I'm going to go to Edna's house and the 2 of us can drink hot toddies and tell flower stories to each other, lol.

i was reading about using the mosquito dunks, quartered and soaked in 1 gal. water over night and water plants to get rid of the pesky fungus gnats. I'm very hopeful this will work as it's main ingredient is BT. Question; the seedings of broccoli (2 leaves and 2" pot) will it be ok for consumption when ripe 85 days from now? Not sure i should have used on vegetable seedlings. Will all have gone through the system of the plants aby that time?

Bt is perfectly safe for human and animal consumption. The only organism that it will affect is insect larvae. You don't need a whole 1/4 of a dunk for 1 gal of water. You just need a tiny piece. After soaking the dunk can be removed, dried and used a couple more times. There's a whole thread about the use of Bt to control fungus gnats. You will have to treat the soil a few times about a week apart to stop the gnat cycle.
Karyn

That's good news, I sure would have hated to loose the broccoli at this point, anytime for that matter. That also answers another question of "can the dunk be reused?".
What do you mean by "there's a whole thread about the use of Bt?"

Hi Hawk I did a search on BT. Here's all the discussions on Gardenweb.
Theresa

Here is a link that might be useful: BT

Hawk you can fish out the chunk of the mosquito dunk that you've allowed to soak in the water, allow it to dry and use it again a couple times. I just soak the dunk for several hours or overnight. Sometimes I just keep topping off the jug that it's soaking in.
Karyn

After reading this post in January, I decided to purchase and try Bt (Bacillus Thuringiensis). I'm a very disappointed user. I started using it in February along with the sticky fly traps. I used is according to direction (purchased as Gnatrol). I watered everything with it. After 4 weeks I saw a great reduction in the fungas gnats and thought woo hoo, this stuff works great. I didn't let up using it and at 8-10 weeks the fungas gnat population began to grow. Now at about 11-12 weeks they are about as bad as they were. They are eating off the roots of my baby seedling plants and killing them. Still watering with the Bt., but the gnat larvae are somehow still living. I'm wondering if they build up an immunity. I tried finding more *specific* information but the searches are volumonous. How is everyone else doing with their fungas gnat control?

Sorry you are having such a bad time... Save your money.. If you will put a layer of sand on the top of your potting soil when you plant you will have much better luck.You can also resterilize your soil..Alot of folks buy the "doughnut" that they use for standing water .. take a little (not sure how much ) and dissolve them in water and use that when you water.. I have them but they don't seem to bother the seedlings.. They are just annoying..
Welcome to the Forum!! I hope to see you around!!!
Kylie

Sorry, never treated my gnats ferifourously (* is this a word?)

And I don't really beleive there is a real threat to a healthy, growing plant!

my 2 cents.