I Still REALLY Hate Gnats

I can't believe it's been over a year since I last posted! 2022 was an epic uphill battle of Me v. Life and I'm happy to say I've come out victorious in that fight. Continuing with that "Can Do" attitude I'm tackling my old nemesis, gnats. I've posted before extolling the virtues of the homemade Fruit Fly Trap and am back to offer more tested tips on duking it out with this fiendish foe. 

I'm a huge plant lady. They are all over my apartment in nearly every room. Due to some mindless overwatering as I tested out a new plant tracker app, I developed a flying pest problem in most of my pots. My worst nightmare made real.

To the internets I scurried to find a natural, or at least to-hand, solution to my problem with two missions in mind, kill anything that flies and then make sure they never come back. Through a bit of blog scrolling on my go-to sites I discovered recommendations on ways to employ Hydrogen Peroxide and Cinnamon to clip the wings of these pests.

To start tackling the first task I held off watering anymore for a few days then mixed the suggested 1 part Hydrogen Peroxide to 4 parts water in a spray bottle and went around spraying the now dryer soil of all my plants. The diluted peroxide solution is totally harmless to your floral friends and has no odor but starts plaguing those nasty gnats right away. I did try to keep the spritz concentrated on the dirt as much as possible and was especially careful with my African Violets who get brown spots on their leaves where water has touched. Some plants are just too full to completely avoid the leaves and I'm happy to say it hasn't done anything to their appearance. After about 2-3 weeks of casual misting the gnats have dramatically reduced and are almost gone. Sweet! Step one is working. 

Now to make sure they never come back, this is where Cinnamon enters the ring. In conjunction with the spray bottle solution I also started dusting the soil with cinnamon to kill the eggs before they hatch. Where the peroxide emits no odor this home remedy leaves your house smelling like the best parts of autumn baking, win! I just used the regular shaker dispenser that I use in cooking to sprinkle the surface of all the pots in week one and then again in week three to make sure I had hit most areas. I can still see the residual from both rounds sitting on top not harming my beautiful roomies and doing a number on the unwelcome house guests. Step two, accomplished. 

Sitting in strategic spots near some of the worst effected plants are little plastic shot glasses full of my favorite fruit fly solution to catch anyone trying to escape to a neighboring plant. The bottoms of these shot glasses look like a liquid-y mass grave and I'm unsurprisingly ecstatic about that. A friend recently joked that this whole scheme sounded like witchcraft when I was describing the methods I was testing. To that I would say, if this be witchcraft, then sign me up cause I'm a convert - Haha!