A Word on Fungus Gnats

House plants are an essential addition to the home. They give a room a finished look. A healthy vibrant plant can be the perfect centerpiece or accent to the kitchen, living room, bedroom, or bathroom. It seems simple enough. Just add water - right? if only. The prudent plant owner must regularly inspect his plants for signs of fungus, bacteria, insects, and soil maladies. He must fertilize them regularly. He must know which plants can be fussed with and which one's can't. In short, being a plant owner requires a great deal of research and dedication. A fungus gnat outbreak, however, requires no careful examination. There will be gnats floating in the coffee cup you walked away from. there will be gnats floating in your bedside water leaving you to wonder how many of them you swallowed in the darkness. You will see them hovering around your plants in swarms. The fungus gnat is a close relative of the fruit fly. They feed on fungus in the soil, and they are not an uncommon insect in the great outdoors. Management of them seems easy in theory, but I have come to the conclusion that a plant owner can only hope to keep their population at manageable numbers. At first sight of a fungus gnat, I recommend the use of sticky traps. Tanglefoot is a great brand. sticky traps are pieces of bright yellow cardboard covered with an impossibly sticky substance that imobilizes the gnats immediately. you can trap hundreds of them this way. Spraying the soil with Neem oil, a Pyrethren based insecticide, or an organic fungicide/insecticide will kill the adults. However, such treatments must be repeated every week or so because the eggs in the soil are unaffected. A fungicide can be helpful since fungal matter is the fungus gnats food source. After a few weeks of treatment, sticky traps can be helpful in alerting you to future hatches. The quicker you get to the adults, the less time they will have to reproduce. I understand there is a variety of BT (Bacillus Therengensis) that will attack fungus gnats as well. However, I have yet to find a supplier. (BT is bacteria used in organic gardening to control certain insects.) Good luck. you will need it.

I Love my Plants to Death

I feel bad for my houseplants. Most of them aren't really houseplants at all but rather tender perennials from the yard-those I could not bear to part with. In fact the only plants that look healthy are those that really are houseplants. There are exactly 6 of them. The other 24 of them look positively pathetic. I don't have an extremely sunny window anywhere on the south side of the house. The two south facing windows are crowded with plants large and small all reaching in unison in a graceful arc towards the sun. They look depressed but I'm not sure if it's the fact that the current death toll is 11 or if they miss the feeling of the sun on their leaves like I do. This morning I added the 11th pot to the growing pile in the garage representative of my failings as a plant parent. My Dracaena finally croaked despite my efforts to keep it alive. Yes. I managed to kill a Dracaena. Shocking isn't it? Even more shocking is the tale of that little plant's life. That 'spike plant' was planted as a centerpiece in a color pot in the summer of 2007. At the end of the season I dumped all of my annual color pots in the compost pile. In the spring the compost pile was turned and the Dracaena tumbled out and landed on the ground, rooted, and tripled in size over the course of the summer. (Note: tropical plant. grows in places like Florida.) It was not watered. It was never properly planted. It just survived there next to the compost pile all summer. At the end of the summer I determined the Dracaena should be properly potted, brought inside, and adored for the entirety of the winter. I feel awful. Perhaps I should have just tossed it back in the compost pile. Apparently my adoration was a harsher sentence than the frigid winter.