Aw, Gnats!, or When the Outside Comes In

A lot of people like summer. They want the heat, they want to wear as little in the way of clothes as possible and they want to go to the beach. They enjoy working in the garden, harvesting their vegetables and cutting flowers. 

I do that, too, but I do not like summer. I do not like heat and humidity, I stay covered to avoid skin cancer and, after once nearly drowning in a pond, I stay away from the water unless it is to stand on the shore and look for seabirds on or over it.

A fungal gnat that crawled through the screen but
could not get through the glass on the back door.
(Margo D. Beller)

Also, I don't like most insects, especially the biting kind. When I went to Troy Meadows the other week, during the waning spring migration time, I was set upon by black flies as I tried to step carefully around lakes of muddy water in the middle of the main, unpaved road. This week was no better at Great Swamp, when I took a friend there on her day off. When we weren't roasting in the sun we were waving away insects in the shade.

And I'm not even talking about mosquitos, the unofficial state bird of New Jersey. After all the rain we've had the mosquito eggs should be hatching just about now and the young will be hungry. 

But what I especially do not like is when certain insects make their way onto my enclosed porch, where I sit in my chair with my coffee and enjoy the breeze (including from a fan) without worrying about being bitten - unless something gets inside.

Mosquitos that get in are caught and killed. Large flies are shown an open door and encouraged to leave. Spiders are left alone because their webs catch the smaller bugs. Lady bugs are put outside where they can eat the aphids that bother some of my flowers. But the black blister beetle, which unlike the many other types of beetles in this state I find on the porch, are removed in one way or another. No-see-ums? Well, there's not much I can do about them except keep the fan blowing on me.

And then there are the fungal gnats.

Until last August I had never heard of these flying pests. They don't bite but they do lay eggs - a lot of eggs. I would catch a gnat and put it outside. Then I'd find more. Finally, I discovered an infestation of gnats in the bag of sunflower seeds I'd been using when I had feeders out. This caused a lot of bother. I stopped releasing the gnats and turned to smashing them. I dumped soil out of the plants I had put on the porch for the summer and repotted them before taking them into the house. (I did not do this for one unwieldy plant I put outside, then took inside, then had to decide whether to kill it, then cut it down after it put out new growth from the bottom.)

Going to extremes last year.
(Margo D. Beller)

Finally, I turned to chemical warfare. That did the trick, but I could not sit on the porch for a week.

So imagine my dismay when, a day after putting my plants on the porch earlier this month, when it was finally warm enough to do so, I started finding gnats again. How were they getting in?

When I had bought fresh bird seed I had also bought a pail with a lid that locks, so they weren't coming from there. Any pot that had even a trace of soil in it was in a corner of the porch under a tarp. Could they be squeezing through the mesh screens where I had windows open? That was likely. I closed all the windows and took the plants back into the house after spraying them with a solution to kill any possible eggs.

There is not much more I can do now except to kill what I can reach or hope they get stuck in a spider web. 

Last year's spiders helping me out with the gnats.
(Margo D. Beller)

Why are the gnats trying to come onto the porch, months ahead of when they infested my porch last year? Are they trying to get away from hungry birds like the house wrens? Has it been too hot or too wet for them this year? Is it global warming? We're not even in the heat of July yet.

When we had an infestation of carpenter ants in our bathroom in 2022, which I wrote about in September, that had been a particularly dry season and the ants were looking for water. This year we've had plenty of water, maybe too much so, and twice I've caught an ant in the bathroom. My husband has put out poisoned bait and we've had no problems since then.

With the plants safely inside I didn't feel the need to nuke the porch again. But when one of the gnats somehow came inside the house and into my den the other night I went nuclear, making sure the den doors were closed so I could kill it before it could go to where I keep the plants. I thought I was successful but a night later what I hope was the same one flew across the room, attracted by the lights. This one I know I caught, with a well-aimed paperback book. But I'll be spraying the plants and using yellow sticky tape for the rest of the summer.

How did the gnat, or gnats, get into the house? Probably hitched a ride on me. I'll have to be vigilant about that now, too.

Spruce Asks Another Question

The other morning I was putting out the bird feeders. As I shook out the large white plastic bags the feeders were in, the nearby Blue Spruce called me over. 

"Margo," said Spruce Bringsgreen, "I have a question."

"Again?" I said, smiling.

The porch plant, with Spruce watching from
around the corner (Margo D. Beller)

"I've been watching you putting feeders on those poles for years. Why are you now bringing them out in bags?"

"You are very observant," I said.

"Well, I am very tall and I can see quite a lot," he said modestly.

So I explained about the gnats I had been removing from the enclosed porch in one way or another since early August, how I had found the containers of sunflower seed to be infested with them, prompting me to put the seed outside in a trash bag, which squirrels soon discovered. So I bought a large plastic pail with a lid that locks to put the seed. My plan had been to keep it outside until all the seed was gone. Then I went out one morning to find it on its side - my guess is a raccoon could smell the seed and knocked the pail around to get the lid to pop off. (At least it wasn't a bear.) Since then I've kept the seed pail indoors.

I bring the feeders in nightly because of that possibility of a bear passing through the yard. But I knew from taking the lid off the pail that those gnats I had seen had laid hundreds, if not thousands, of eggs, and now the worm-like larvae were on the move. Every time I unlocked the lid I'd find them crawling on its underside as well as up the sides of the pail - where I also found spiders helping me out with webs that trapped them. I would wipe out the larvae and the webs but find more of both the next time I took off the lid a day or two later.

Gnat larvae on the underside of the seed pail lid, some of
them in spider webs. (Margo D. Beller)

But that also meant there were likely larvae in the seed in the feeders. Hence the bags to keep larvae that get out of the feeders from crawling around the porch and getting into the one source of soil still available - the big plant.

"Yes, I can see Brother Tree from here," Spruce said, referring to the plant that had started life small and I allowed to grow so tall it needs an upside-down tomato cage and support poles to stand. "I hadn't seen him for a while."

Well, I told him, I had to make a decision on what to do with the plant because it was too big and unwieldy to take it from its pot and replant it in fresh soil. So my husband (MH) and I used the hand truck to put it outside on the patio, leaning against the house. It was there when I bombed the porch with insecticide. It was there when the overnight temperatures dipped into the 40s. 

Finally, realizing I could not bring myself to kill it, and once the smell of the spray had dissipated, MH and I brought the plant back inside. It now stands in the far corner of the porch where it can get two hours of morning sun, which is how Spruce sees it.

"And what about when winter comes?" he asked.

Well, I said, MH and I are getting too old to deal with bringing the plant over the step from porch to house, then rolling it to the sunny front room and then up three steps to put it into position, all with the plant falling back like a ragdoll onto my shoulder and back. The porch will keep the plant sheltered and a few degrees warmer than the outside air but it won't keep it warm when the temperatures fall below freezing. 

(Margo D. Beller)

So it either lives or it doesn't, I said. I still find the occasional gnat on the porch, most of which come in when I go out. The yellow sticky tapes have trapped gnats and I spray the soil with hydrogen peroxide to kill any eggs. But I can do no more for this plant.

"That's a shame," said Spruce. "At least it's alive."

"Yes," I said. "We'll see what happens to it - and the gnats - once winter comes."

Beneficial Friends

It is a great help to have friends in the garden, even if I am the only one working here.

One such friend I rediscovered during the worst of the fungus gnat invasion was spiders. I've always known their webs catch all sorts of flies and other unwanted insects that get onto my enclosed porch, but many of the gnats were also caught. Unfortunately, I did have to eventually spray and I hope I didn't kill the spiders at the same time. 

But there will be more spiders as long as there are bugs, so I know they will be back.

More recently I found another friend - an American toad.

Usually I find one of these on the patio, hiding behind the cover of the charcoal grill or behind the large composter. That is how I found this recent one, when I moved the grill to make room for the large container I bought to protect the bird seed that didn't get invested by gnats.

American toad (Margo D. Beller)

The toad didn't seem to be in a hurry to leave. After being scared away from the grill it sat behind the composter for a long time, probably making sure I wasn't going to bother it. Then It came out, which is when I photographed it. It was facing the netted garden and I wondered if it was heading back there. I thought I knew why.

Every so often I'd see shiny lines on the paving stones. Then one day, after I'd run the sprinkler overnight, I found what seemed like a parade of slugs - think snails without shells -  slowly making their way from the lawn to the netted garden. Some of them were very large. Slugs will do a lot of damage to leafy plants such as hostas, two of which I keep in the back of this area so the deer can't see them.

In two days I must've caught nine of them, scraping them off the paving stones with a plastic container and then dumping them down the sewer. Then we had the lawn mowed and I didn't see them again - until last week when I saw more trails. And suddenly here is a toad - which eats, among other things, slugs.

Enjoy the feast, friend.

Garter snake (Margo D. Beller)

I'm still waiting for another old friend, Mr. Slither the garter snake, to come by and keep the chipmunks away. At this time of year chipmunks and the squirrels are looking for places to store nuts. Chipmunks can easily get behind the deer netting and the big pots of plants I have there are particularly inviting. They dig and the plants get uprooted. (Chipmunks will also dig up my plants in the spring, looking for the nuts they stored.)

Like the toad, snakes aren't the prettiest creatures and we humans are taught to fear or abhor them. Yes, they also eat bird eggs and can be a menace to the creatures I like. But if they eat the pests in my garden they are more than welcome to hang around a while.