Nature and Gardening

6651 readers

14 users here now

All things green, outdoors, and nature-y. Whether it's animals in their natural habitat, hiking trails and mountains, or planting a little garden for yourself (and everything in between), you can talk about it here.

See also our Environment community, which is focused on weather, climate, climate change, and stuff like that.

(It's not mandatory, but we also encourage providing a description of your image(s) for accessibility purposes! See here for a more detailed explanation and advice on how best to do this.)

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

NataliePortland@beehaw.org

LallyLuckFarm@beehaw.org

alyaza@beehaw.org

remington@beehaw.org

Would a venus fly trap help deal with house gnats? (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by kbyanyname@beehaw.org to c/greenspace@beehaw.org

30 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I've got several small houseplants in my home office, and I really like having them around. I'm still pretty new to taking care of them altogether, though, and we've gotten dozens of tiny house gnats now. I've put up sticky traps and tried to use some pest control in the potted soil. But would a small venus fly trap be able to help here?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Kurt@lemmy.one 2 points 1 year ago

Venus flytraps are great plants to keep, but they're not effective for pest control, especially against tiny gnats. The gnats you have are probably fungus gnats and your houseplants' soil is infested with their larvae. To get them under control you have to innoculate the soil with nematodes that eat the larvae. The particular brand I got on Amazon aren't available anymore, but the species was s. feltiae and they worked really well. There might be other good or better nematodes, but that's how you get rid of the gnats.