How to get rid of Fungus Gnats (for free!)

hi guys my name is sean i'm a house plant enthusiast from jakarta indonesia i'd like to narrow down to the science behind how we can keep our houseplants happy and to multiply them in our homes so if you're into contents like this please do subscribe to my channel and send me likes in today's video we're gonna talk all about fungus gnats uh that is actually a very popular topic if you troll around on the facebook planet groups the most commonly asked question is how do i get rid of fungusnets and i should have a copy and paste answer for that which i try to paste on a lot of these problems in the comment section and i'm very happy to hear that a lot of them actually actually wrote back to me to let me know that their method is successful so uh i'm gonna spot it to you first of all the the method that works for me and i'll explain to you the full science uh behind it and if you want to skip the entire video i won't blame you uh but the the key to getting rid of fungus is actually bottom watering and bottom ordering correctly so i if you want to know the details do watch till the end of the video but i will walk with you through you know sort of the the long-winded explanations uh of what they are what they do and how we can get rid of them so before we get started i'm going to show you a disturbing clip of a fungus gnats so as you can see i have a lot of plants in my bedroom and i do get infestations here and then now and then and i was actually sleeping in my bed obviously where else would i be sleeping uh and what happens is i fungus love flying into my ear they just fly around maybe in there i don't know if they're in my ear or not but they're just so loud so one day uh instead of jumping out of bed i decided to quietly grab my phone across the pillow and put the record but and have the record button on and i put the phone next to my ears where the fungus nets are and just recorded them so what you're about to hear is the buzzing sound of them flying about in my ear so all right so i hope you're not having a full meal while you're listening to that it's pretty gross so uh fungus nets are actually not harmful for humans and pets and even for everything for plants unless you have a crazy infestation they generally don't do any harm they feed on the fungus materials in the soil and around the roots but they do fly into our nose and into our ears thankfully i haven't had any incidents in the nose or maybe i do i just haven't felt it but there's a hint that's why they do that why would they go inside your nose and your ears is it because you have free wi-fi in there hmm i'm kidding that's a bad joke so they're flying into your pots and your nose and your ears because they can they're very sensitive to humidity so they can and want to be in a humid environment where they know there's going to be fungus around which is their food and that's also where they breed and where they lay eggs and their larvaes are going to survive and thrive in those conditions so that's what draws them to certain areas so i cannot insert a photo of a fungus gnats even though i've had a lot of experience seeing them in person because you just can't take somebody else's photo and post it in your video and i haven't seen them around in a while but um i do have a close-up picture of them on a penguin they're just getting eaten by that plant so yeah one of the the ways they can get rid of fungus is to get a pingula which is a carnivorous plant that that really works well on the fungus nets but i i'll go through the the methods later on for you uh so yeah that is a clip for you so how does fungus nets get to your plants well they fly from pot to pot and they uh breed reproduce and and basically they multiply very quickly uh they come in uh to your house from you know your groceries uh maybe they're like fruit flies flying around your groceries your bananas or things like that come in from the garbage it could come from other plants that you brought home and potting media and so on so it's no use to say to do any blame games because i know some of you guys are like oh yeah i brought this plan from this seller and fungus fungus are very common and it's out of our control so i don't blame anyone for any fungus control and also i'm confident that my method really works on them to decimate them so uh first we have to discuss fungus gnats um in their uh life cycle so fungus nets adults can live up to one to two weeks they can fly around mate feed and do all that stuff before they die but their whole life cycle which means the egg larvae and adult stage that takes about one month to complete so when we're talking about the life cycle we're talking about a complete one month cycle of um the the insect sorry the past sorry i'm just i'm learning again there are many types of paths there insects there's aphids apparently they're all different categories i'm still learning about that um but yeah so as long as i can lay somewhere from 30 to 200 eggs in one go and that's a lot so if you find a few fungus knives you should start wearing her up a bit because if you leave it alone you're gonna end up with thousands within like a month or two months so it's gonna be quite a party in your bedroom so the leading cause of fungus nets is actually over watering or improper watering when you have a lot of over water plants that's an ideal condition for the nets to fly around actually in our indoor spaces plants don't need as much water as we think if you live outdoors sure you can water your plants more often you can keep the soil a little bit more moist because the evaporation rate is faster that means that the condition for the fungus knives is not as ideal outdoors and also when you're outdoors fungus actually have a lot of natural predators that actually feed on them they find them tasty and delicious so they don't really do that well outdoors or they do but the population is very controlled and it can get really out of hand in your living space in your indoor space and actually if you look around your plants you can actually find the culprit you can see which ones are actually harboring the uh fungus gnats first of all you can look for visual cues they're usually flying around or they're scrambling on the top soil of the the plant in question and the another really common way to find them is that when you're watering that particular plant the nets will fly out they get out of get out of there because they will drown in water obviously so the adult nets will have to get out of there when you're watering the larvaes and eggs they do thrive in a humid and damp environment so they're okay with that condition so yeah so uh back to my solution i've actually tried many many methods of getting rid of fungus nets i've also did a lot of research i will share those methods with you later but i'm going to go straight to the one that really works and it costs no money it's free of charge you guys and that is bottom watering and the key is to bottom water correctly and also to do it infrequently a lot of plants are going to appreciate drying out between watering so trust me when i say that you are probably over watering your plants if you are having a fungus in fact infestation so here's how the bottom bottom watering works nas actually live uh first of all they're gonna be flying around adult nets and when they're ready to reproduce they're gonna have to find a humid damp uh surface to dive into and lay eggs if they cannot find that surface they will die they simply have no place to breathe and make babies so that's one way to prevent them to to come into your plants is to have a dry top soil and i would say you need to keep at least 20 to 30 percent of the top soil completely dry not even like damp like completely bone dry and i'm going to show you how later and also another thing you need to know is that the larvaes and the eggs of the fungus nets actually live also within that top section of your soil they live maybe like maybe one centimeters under your soil down to like i don't know they don't live very deep down they have no business living all the way down into the soil oh and i forgot to mention that when you do have a crazy massive fungus infestation they have they're feeding on the fungus on the roots right but when the fungus is gone they're so overpopulated they may end up eating your roots so and that's like something that is contested like some experts are saying yeah they do that they can't harm your plants and some people say you can't and i'm just putting it out there for you guys i don't know what i believe i just know that they shouldn't be in our plants um so whatever the truth is we need to get the larvaes which are going to be feeding on the fungus around the soil and the roots we need to get them out of there and one way to do that is just to keep their living conditions unlivable so keeping that top 20 to 30 of the soil top soil dry so when you bottom water actually you have um you have to master it it's not as easy as you think so vulnerable watering is basically when you put a pot of plant into a container filled with water and the trick is hang on you know what i'm going to take you to the bathroom i'm going to show you a few scenarios so you know what i'm talking about because bottom watering it really depends on the pot size the pot type the media and the plant like there's a lot of factors in it and it just takes a little bit of guessing and trying to get it right but again keep in mind whatever method that you use for to bottom water you need to have the final result is to have the top 20 to 30 of the soil dry and i must be honest with you in the beginning of my bottom watering lessons that i perform on all my plants i do make a mistake i leave it in for too long and the water is just being waked up all the way to the top so the top becomes soggy so it takes a while to master your plants and based on again your the pot type and all that stuff uh to learn how to bottom water correctly um so yeah let me take you to the sink so i'm in my sink where i bottom water my plants and here i have a vessel that is a little bit filled with water and this is a very thirsty pepperoni in kana look at it just mushy uh yeah it should be a lot firmer than this so when i watered him and i waited a few hours later it will it will be more firm for sure so this needs a lot of water so it's in a terracotta pot and there's not a lot of soil media inside and it's maybe the general purpose of potting soil so this will soak up the water pretty easily however keep in mind when you use terracotta because it's porous water will also escape and it will be soaked in by the terracotta as well so actually terracotta will bottom water slower than plastic pots i'm going to stick that in water and next we have this dishquilla watermelon and this is in a very very chunky uh barky uh mix a lot of perlite and pine bark uh and it's in plastic keep in mind when you're in plastic i'm gonna put this in here and you put the plant in the water it's gonna wick up the water uh and because it's plastic the water has no else to go but up so plastic will bottom water faster than terracotta however between these two i would say they would bottom water around the same time only because this in a very loose media so imagine if you have big particles of media where it's like bark and pearlite it's going to take time for the water to sort of transfer from one medium particle to another all the way up to the middle of the pot so yeah the particle size of the soil does affect how long you bottom water it so it's different for every plant it's different for every plot type so yeah when people ask like oh how how do you bottom water you know how much time do you leave it for the answer is it depends so uh it takes a few times of miss watering like i make so much mistake with bottom water i even do today make mistake like i don't get it right 100 of the time but uh yeah you just keep trying and as you put more plants here this is also very thirsty pepperoni optusifolia leaffalls easily and yeah so as i put all these plants on the water level is going to go up because the displacement of water i guess so i may actually have to add a little bit more water because um as the plants drink up the water water will be taken in from the tray up into the pot now in my experience when i leave plants like this i can leave them here for about i'll say three to five minutes and then they will have enough water to reach probably if you can see the water level here uh it's it's around this level so imagine the water is actually hitting this this much soil in the pot and as we leave it longer the water level will actually drop a little bit because the plant is drinking water but water is going to move up in the pot so you just have to practice a bit of imagination and so how high you want it to be and in our purposes we want the top 20 to 30 of the soil to dry so we want it to be a little bit more than halfway uh wet and there's no way to measure that unfortunately you can get a moisture meter which i do use but i'm not going to maybe you know what i'm going to use it right now on maybe this plant yeah as you can see here i don't know if you can see here you can hang on let me bring this out of course i'm going to make a mess if you establish all the way in into the pot and it's just focused yeah now it's reading that it's wet so what you can do is actually you can slowly insert your moisture meter and see the needle it will jump it will drop yeah so now at the halfway point i'm seeing that the needles jump to like a midpoint in the green if you go further down the needle is going to go to the the blue zone of course i don't recommend for you to stack your plants with moisture meter every time you're going to disturb the root system a bit so just a lot of the time it's just intuition just kind of like hang out hang in there just make sure that you don't see any moisture and topsoil is really like now i can feel it it's like literally bone dry i can just leave it there uh and and and be comfortable with if i do over water it it's fine just like learn just take it as an experience um and and yeah just let it dry out a bit um another thing with bottom watering let's say you are in a hurry you've got like 700 plants like i do i can also keep adding the water until the water reaches like uh to the the near the top of the vessel or i can get even a taller vessel and now that the water level is really high um let me see hang on let me focus one thing at a time yeah let's see when this is really full and the level is really high i know that the plant doesn't need much time to soak in that water as well so i just give it like uh when i have the water at this level i just wait for like 30 seconds or even like 15 seconds depending on the particle and again the pot and all that good stuff so i know like if i'm in a hurry this is how i bought a water i just fill the bag a little bit higher leave it for a short period of time and then i'm done i just take it out so again you can also double check with the moisture meter to make sure that water is getting into at least half of the the of the plant um here's a thing with uh terracotta and plastic the difference with plastic is that when plus when you remove plastic out of the the vessel let's say i have you know let's say this much water in there what happens with plastic is that unlike terracotta which allows water to breathe and evaporate from the side of the pots plastic you can't do that so the water is going to continue to uh wake up because the the water is really saturated down below so even if you take the pot out the water is going to continue to um be moving upwards over the long period of time there's just no no other way for the water to leave the pot because water is always going to move from an area of high concentration to low concentration so that's why when you bottom water a plastic potted plant for me i do it fast like i don't leave it there for too long because i know that there's going to be enough moisture in there that will continue to wake up even after i've removed it from the bottom water vessel so yeah this is turning into a full-blown bottom watering how-to video i'm sorry i hope you learned a lot from this but yeah again everybody have different methods and just use your feelings make sure that you get you know your water incorrect and you should have your fungus net probably gone in no time okay so now you know how to bottom water correctly and i'm going to share with you that in my experience actually fungal snacks disappear within two to three weeks from you know bottom ordering everything correctly especially the plant that is in trouble that you see the fungus nets around and for this one you can actually let them dry out just a little bit longer than other plants just uh you don't need to use insecticide or anything like that but they will just disappear miraculously i've done this in waves where like i would get a fungus net infestation i would start seeing a few things fly in my ear they would wake me up in my sleep oh my god they they really do wake you up that sound is like imagine you're sleeping and just like something just flies in your ear i actually have to cover my ear with the blanket when i sleep when there's a net infestation which is i would say once every three months or so so yeah the nest do come in waves and when i noticed there are some nap the last time was about i think was when i filmed this actually was about three or four weeks ago and then i just decided okay everything in my bedroom everything in this area have to be bottom water and correctly so i just do that for the for next two to three weeks and now they're gone like i don't have any more gnats around so uh just keep in mind the nest will always return especially when you over water or you give them the conditions but if you stay consistent with just bottom watering especially the problem plants like certain plants you do notice uh will have more nets will be more prone to nets than others so yeah sometimes you may be able to put this plant i would imagine like ferns may have a bit more fungus net problems because they need to stay moist so just have them live outside or elsewhere you know um but yeah they will be gone for sure so if you have success tried this method and you've succeeded please do comment down below in this video because this will be a testimony testimonial testimonial for other people watching this video so if you are now curious to see the results please do read the comments down below because other people would write about whether they have success with bottom ordering or not all right so we're going paperless today i'm gonna cheat a little bit i'm gonna look at my phone normally i have a printer that know next to me but yeah it's late it's filming at night by the way and i have a i have a glass of whiskey on me so cheers um yeah i decided to also film i forgot to mention oh my god i i have so much going on in my mind that i i i just jump around in points i'm so sorry um i decided to film at night because that's also when i do notice that the fungus nets are a bit more active or when they're bothering me or maybe it's because i'm only here more often at in at night but yeah i know so i figured they will be a pretty good ambiance to to let you guys experience what it's like at nighttime in my bedroom um yeah and a bit of spoiler alert i do want to talk about there's a lot of requests on plants that will do well in air conditioned room in a southeast asian climate or in an equate equatorial in a in a climate that is like near the equator because we do have ac on every day throughout the year so it is important for us to know what plants can thrive here so that video is coming soon i do hear you guys um yeah so just bear with me all right sorry i digress too much um so what i've tried before um i've tried neem oil soil drench and that's actually a really fantastic way so that's basically mixing you know you know how you would mix your soapy water with neem oil and then you would just spray on the leaves of plants and that would kill the pests that are on leaves do that except this time you want to drench the whole soil you can even bottom water the pot in that solution or i can water it from the top because that really damages the uh the fungus gnats but i did find that this method is smelly because neem oil is smelly and it's more troublesome so just go with bottom watering that's like a proven method and the next thing i did i do is i would sprinkle insecticide on it as well like uh i use i think fluorodone yeah it's a purple thing so it's actually a insecticide you sprinkle on the top soil and you don't want to have that around if you have kids and pets by the way so you swing on the tops on just water it normally and then as you water the plant the insecticide will get down and down and dirty into the sun and kill everything inside so that's one way i've also tried the yellow sticky paper first of all yellow sticky paper is super expensive and here the tocopidos are crazy expensive so i decided to do a hack and i saw this online i can't remember who it was from but it's just to take a yellow paper um like a like a day glow yellow paper because they're drawn to that color and just put a little bit of vaseline on it or glue and just kind of leave it there and because the insect will be drawn to the color and they'll land on it and they will get their feet stuck on the vaseline or the glue and then they wouldn't be able to leave but i noticed that my fungus nets just aren't attracted to that color so i don't know why or maybe if they did like they just glide right off like they just skate on the vaseline and fly off i don't know i i did look around a little bit they didn't seem to be attracted to the color here in my region maybe fungus nets are different in different parts of the world i'm not sure um the next step i've tried is a vinegar trap where like i have a vessel like a like a cone i have some cone beakers here and i fill it with water uh uh some vinegar apple cider vinegar as well some soap dish i'll just swirl it around and just mix it and wait for it so the nets are actually attracted they're very attracted to this uh sand because it reminds me of that rot and rot usually um it means that there's fungus around so they're really drawn to that and they would suppose to fly down there and reason you have a narrow covering set when they fly down there they won't be able to escape again that hasn't worked out for me i don't know why yeah maybe again my nets are special i don't know they're different but that's another one that i've used is diatomaceous earth and that is really fascinating actually i love the science behind it and i i'm going to share with you so diatomaceous earth is basically fossilized remains of tiny aquatic organisms called diatoms so i just put from google i'm reading straight off my notes i'm sorry um so basically there are the old fossilized plants uh remains of uh animals and and i don't know if you want to say corals uh coral and they live in the they're from the ocean they're from the the sea so they ground them to a powder so for us it's harmless in fact they you have food grade diatomaceous earth that is sprinkled in our flower or in our rice where it will keep the pets from attacking those in those ingredients um but we can also ingest it safely so for us they look like white powders they're for animal for a small tiny tiny pest they are actually a glass it's like imagine if you like you have a floor full of glass and you're forced to like roll your body through that floor so that's what the insects are like and actually i've used diatomaceous earth before i just i used a brush like a random brush and just like tap that top on the top soil and then um just to have it evenly sprinkled on the top so because that's where the nets actually meet the barrier that the nets need to go into to get to to the bottom of the to the underside of the soil so when they pass through that layer of diet emissions all right their whole body they just get caught up like oh like it's sliced and i didn't notice like i looked at them at the time and then they were just struggling they were just like limping ah from the side some of them can't even fly anymore they were just limping from side to side in the in the diatomaceous earth and it's pretty cruel i would say i don't know but yeah it was a slow painful death for them however why i don't use it anymore is because diatomaceous earth needs to be kept dry the minute it gets in touch with humidity or water any kind of water droplets it renders them completely useless so yeah and diatomaceous earth is not sexy at all it'll leave like white powders all over your plants and in the beginning of my plank journey i actually had did a lot of instagram photos of my plants and they had like this white powder on the top soil and it's just like not it's not it doesn't look so good so i stopped using it it's just one it's troublesome and it's just just not not for me but they do work yeah just so you know i've actually never tried mosquito bits before um i heard that they do work really well but they're not available in my region and also beneficial insects is something that i haven't tried again i cannot find those in indonesia maybe because i'm not searching for the key words correctly but i've seen ladybugs around so i know that the beneficial insects do exist but they don't sell them here in the same way that they do in the western world so i think that's all i need to tell you about fungus gnats um yeah again i want to stress for you guys to try out bottom watering it'll make your life better your plants will actually thrive when you give when you dry them out between watering because you don't have issues of like plants over water or rotting or getting stressed out because of over watering so do give it a try um in fact i should do a video strictly on bottom ordering because there are a lot of benefits in both motoring in fact i'm gonna walk you through some of them right now so what happens that when you you're bottom watering a plant um you're allowing moisture to be wicked up to the plant evenly this means that if you're used to top water in your plant over over a period of time the water is just going to find the fastest way through down to the bottom of the pot through the drainage hole so you're going to have pockets of dry air dry dry soil in the in the pot and when you're bottom watering it once in a while uh this means that you're allowing that soil to soak up all the moisture evenly and to redistribute itself this means that uh you know you have a more healthy root system in there that is more evenly watered however i heard that you do have to interchange between bottom watering and top watering because if you only bottom water your plants some but some people are saying that some of the salts because we do uh fertilizer plants and our plants fertilizers actually mostly salts actually they do remain in the soil and sometimes you have to top water it to just flush out the salts so i would say keep a balance do both um obviously we can bottom water all the time because they do take a bit more time and make a bit more mess but yeah just you know practice your whatever works for you whatever you're comfortable with just remember that you should try the bottom water once in a while it's good for the plant it's good for your soul it's good for your sanity and i'm just blabbering on yeah i'm gonna finish this video i'm sorry this dragged on too long i'm at botanist on instagram so feel free to dm me there if you have any questions about plant care and propagations do like this video and subscribe to my channel comment down below and all that good stuff so that youtube will recommend my video to other plant lovers who hasn't found me yet and i just wish you all the best with your fungus net problems or you know if you have any plant friends with that problem do refer them to my video and try bottom ordering seriously try it i will see you the next video thank you so much for watching guys

Channel: onlyplants

Views: 55,289

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Id: wfJUWE-wbi0

Length: 29min 35sec (1775 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2020