An Irritating Infestation

Meet Bob:

Bob is a Fungus Gnat. A few weeks ago, Daniel and I became well acquainted with Bob and many, many of his relatives. Let me tell you about Bob's own. Fungus Gnats are little flies that live and reproduce in the soil. They're very small, so we originally thought that they were fruit flies. They look much like them.

Daniel and I have a small indoor tree, and within the last few months, we repotted our plant into some nice soil in a real ceramic pot. I think our tree was very happy to be in a new niche. But we soon found that the amount of "fruit flies" in our house had increased, rather quickly.

So, we created traps like this one:

It has orange juice concentrate (to seduce the little buggers) and vinegar (to kill the little buggers). But, the traps were not disposing of as many as we would like. Then Daniel began noticing that a lot of the flies congregated around our little tree. And the more he watched them, the more he saw that they were crawling around in the dirt. And there were LOTS of them!

After some more research, he learned the truth about these little pests. In an effort to rid our home (and plant) of them forever, Daniel removed our plant from it's pot and the "soiled" dirt, put all of the dirt in some cake pans and jelly-roll pans, placed these in the oven, and baked the dirt. Yes, he put dirt in the oven and baked it. The idea was to cook all of the larvae and the flies out of the dirt, so that we don't have anymore.

The funny thing was that I was making a curry, peanut stew at the time that Daniel was taking care of all this. As I'm making the food, I keep smelling the pot, and I notice it smells increasingly like dirt. I kept asking myself, "Man, did I just not wash the vegetables well enough? What did I accidentally toss into the pot? This smells like dirt!" It took me several minutes to realize that the dirt in the oven was causing the smell!


The venture was successful so far. We don't have flies buzzing around our faces or food anymore, which is a delight. We've put our tree in our spare bedroom (with the door closed, of course) and covered the pot with foil, so as to prevent flies reproducing once again in our plant.

What a funny adventure that was!!