Dealing With Fungus Gnats

The Beet: A Podcast For Plant Lovers

Epic Gardening

Home & Garden, Education, Leisure, How To

4.8 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 10 May 2018

⏱️ 7 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the most frustrating pests in many indoor gardens is the dreaded fungus gnat and its young, the fungus gnat larvae. These little buggers can absolutely destroy your plants if you’re not vigilant — and they can do it quickly. The primary way that fungus gnats affect your plants is through their larvae. They lay eggs in your growing medium. Once they hatch, the larvae will attach to the roots of your plants and drain them of nutrients. Although the larvae are the main negative actors, adult fungus gnats can carry disease, especially fungal diseases. These can be deadly on their own, but that’s not all. They also lay hundreds of eggs fast, which will devour plant roots! It’s absolutely essential that you stop these pests before they can take hold, whether indoors or out. The last thing you need is for your plants to succumb to a horrible fate. I’ll help you to overcome your fungus gnat woes, though. Let’s go into detail about fungus gnats and their larvae, and learn how to demolish them before they can take over! Learn More: Fungus Gnat Larvae: How To Kill Them Off Quickly Keep Growing, Kevin Follow Epic Gardening Everywhere: YouTube Instagram Pinterest Facebook Facebook Group Twitter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's up everyone? Welcome back. Today we're talking about some pests specifically
0:06.2	Fungus gnats. These are really annoying and they can absolutely destroy your plants if you're not vigilant and they can do it really quickly.
0:14.4	So the primary way that a fungus gnat is going to affect your plants is actually through their
0:19.6	larva like many other pests in the garden.
0:22.2	They're going to lay eggs in your growing
0:23.2	medium and then they hatch and then those larva are going to attach actually
0:26.9	to the roots of your plants and then drain them of nutrients and then eventually
0:31.6	kill the plants.
0:34.1	So they're called fungus gnats because the adult gnats
0:37.2	carry fungal diseases, which will also harm your plants.
0:41.4	So it's kind of like a double whammy. The adults are
0:43.7	going to be dropping diseases all over your plants and then they're also going to
0:46.7	be dropping eggs which create larva which start to destroy your plants.
0:50.3	And so really not the best little bugger to have in the garden so let's talk about
0:55.1	how to get rid of them first of all as with most of these pest guides that I like
1:01.7	to put out we like to talk about the life cycle because if you
1:04.8	can disrupt the life cycle and there's various ways to disrupt in each stage of the life cycle,
1:11.0	then of course you are destroying that pest's ability to reproduce and that's what we're trying to do.
1:16.0	So, what is the life cycle of a fungus gnat?
1:19.0	Well, there are four stages. There's the egg stage, the larva stage, the pupa stage, and the adult stage.
1:25.8	So an adult fungus gnat is going to lay probably around 300 eggs.
1:30.5	It doesn't live that long.
	...

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