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?
I’ve tried this and the answer is no. You really just need to get rid of whatever’s attracting the gnats.
Fungus gnats are generally the result of overwatering your plants. Let the soil surface dry out between waterings, and they’ll disappear.
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.
Put ground cinnamon on your soil. It kills the larvae.
As far as carnivorous plants go, I have had more success with butterworts. Sundews are also good. Venus flytraps are considered harder to grow in general and harder to keep alive indoors without manual feeding.
Can confirm sundews, specifically the commonly found Drosera capensis is very easy to care for and should be good at catching bugs as long as they land on the tentacles
Thanks for the info! I ordered a sundew and I’m very excited for it to arrive.
Chiming in to double confirm! Sundews/ Drosera/ “Death-by-lollipop-hugging” are super fun and cute and will go to war on insects. I’ve also had great luck with growing lowland and highland Nepenthes, tropical pitcher plants, indoors. Carnivorous plants are sometimes a little picky about temperature and humidity, especially the colder-climate ones that require dormancy periods, but there are some really rewarding and fairly forgiving ones.
Fixing my neighbor’s trash can problem was what I needed to solve my fly infestation a couple summers ago, but my apartment bog ab-so-lutely racked up a ton of kills during the war.
Pro-tip: Carnivorous plants usually evolved in some nutrient-lean areas and can be pretty sensitive to the salts and minerals in tap water. A Total Dissolved Solids meter is cheap and helpful for double checking to make sure you aren’t going to run into trouble. Some people don’t have to worry about it, some do. I have a still for distilling water at home, lots of people rig up rain catchment systems, or buy reverse osmosis water at the store. There are options.
There are a few practical management steps you can take as well to help reduce the gnat load.
Sand (washed playground sand as an example) as a mulch layer over the top of the potting mix will drain quickly and removes the gnat’s preferred habitat for egg laying.
Bottom watering, while admittedly slower than pouring from the top, also helps to reduce the amount of time the top layer of soil is wet enough for them. Allowing the potting mix to dry thoroughly between waterings improves the efficacy of this practice.
No, not really. My VFT catches gnats but I don’t think it would effectively reduce them overall.
Probably not. Maybe I had a lazy flytrap growing up, but mine failed to catch a fly half of the time because they wouldn’t set off the hairs. A pitcher plant might be a better alternative if you wanted to stick with a plant based solution.
You mentioned pest control in the soil - have you tried mosquito bits? I ended up mixing some in with the soil for a Monstera and I also put a layer over the top and it does seem to make a difference. I do have to combine it with those unsightly yellow sticky traps, though. Between plants and the inverts I keep, my house is full of containers of damp dirt.
In case anyone is thinking about getting a katchy, you can read the reviews, but I give it a thumbs-down. I used it only a few times before fall and it worked okay, but when I pulled it out again in the spring I just get orange error lights and no response when I reached out to them.
I actually just worked some mosquito bits into my soil this week! Very hopeful to see how it helps
We have had good luck with our Katchy for over a year now; 1 year 8 days. It has worked great in the kitchen and in the office. Just recently a large number of small moths got into the office through a window, they were all over the ceiling. Placed the Katchy in there overnight which caught all of the moths; had to replace the sticky pad because it was so covered.
No clue on how long the device will last. We mainly use it on the 3rd speed setting (out of 5) and most often have it set to auto which turns the device on when light is low enough. We’ve likely replaced the sticky pad 4-5 times during the year we have had it.
This is the model we have: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B08TKG5M4S
I’m glad you’ve had better luck with Katchy than I did. I bought it because of a personal recommendation, but it didn’t really work long enough for me to determine if it was better than sticky traps.
Plus I’m the weirdo with a soft spot for moths, so I just generally leave them to fight it out with the spiders :). I cannot handle the fungus gnats flying up my nose, though. It doesn’t seem to matter if there is one fungus gnat or fifty - they all think there’s a party in my nostrils.
I cannot handle the fungus gnats flying up my nose
😱
