Indoor flowers are an important decor item for many apartments and houses. With a huge variety of shapes and colors, ornamental plants can blend harmoniously with home decor, furniture design, curtains and even wallpaper.
Moreover, indoor flowers are an additional source of pleasant experiences for their owner. They are pleasing to the eye, inspire positive emotions, help to escape from a hard day's work.
Caring for indoor flowers is often easy and pleasant. However, sometimes home plants can get sick and wither, depressing their owners with their appearance. Why might this happen?
The first thing that comes to mind for experienced flowers is that midges have appeared in the flowers. How to get rid of these uninvited guests and return your pets to their lovely, original appearance? This article will be devoted to this issue.
Reason for appearance
Blackflies in flowers. What to do? Before going into detail about all the various methods and tips, let's first understand why this problem occurs.
There are severalreasons why midges appear on the plant. You need to know them in order to care for flowers, observing all precautions.
The first reason is that the soil was infested with midge larvae from the very beginning. Of course, you can’t change the past, but next time you need to remember that before planting plants in the ground, it must be disinfected. In addition, regular preventive tillage against pests will prevent the occurrence of parasitic colonies.
The next reason why midges started growing in indoor flowers may be excessive waterlogging of the soil. This may be due to frequent and heavy watering. If the weather is dry and hot, there is a temptation to moisten the flowers more than they need. This can cause water in the pot to stagnate and encourage unwanted insects.
Also, midges in home flowers can appear due to a constantly open window through which they can fly in and settle in moist soil, or because of crumbled leaves that begin to rot in the pot itself, thereby creating a favorable sphere for the appearance of harmful insects.
As you can see, if you follow all the rules for growing indoor plants and regularly disinfect the soil, then you will never face the question: how to get midges out of flowers in a pot?
What are pests?
Before we think about how to get midges out of flowers, let's take a quick look at the insects themselves.
The most frequent guests of indoor plants are poreds - small white midges, no larger than one millimeter in size. They can be seen on the surface of freshly watered soil or at the foot of a flower pot. The pores, which appear mainly in the cool season, actively fly from leaf to leaf, and their larvae, which are in the ground, have a negative effect on the root system of the entire plant.
Sciarids are small black insects, similar to mosquitoes, flying abundantly not only around the flower itself, but throughout the entire living space. The larvae of these pests are translucent worms up to half a centimeter long. They make the soil dense, inaccessible to life-giving oxygen, and also affect the root of the plant itself. Sciarids can appear as a result of the use of home organic fertilizers (tea brewing, humus, etc.).
Drosophila - small red midges, very similar to flies, can also cause irreparable harm to your green pet.
Which plants are most susceptible to pests?
The most "delicious" flowers
Here it also depends on the type of pests. For example, fuchsias and begonias are very fond of rocks, as their leaves are soft and tender to the touch. Sciarids, on the other hand, prefer plants with denser leaves - violets, ficuses, azaleas.
Chemical Methods
So, how to remove midges from flowers in a pot? First, let's briefly discuss the chemicalpest control products, and then we'll talk about drugs that are more harmless to humans, formulated using improvised ingredients.
The main chemical remedy for midges in flowers is ordinary dichlorvos. It can be "Raptor", "Raid" or others.
You can also use special solutions, such as Grom-2, Agravertin, Bazudin, Mukhoed, Karbofos, Aktara and so on.
When using these drugs, one should not forget about personal safety - use rubber gloves, goggles, a respirator. Also, before use, you should read the instructions in order to carefully follow the recommendations and tips contained in it.
But how to get midges out of flowers in a pot with folk remedies? More on that below.
Recommended Ingredients
What do you need to take in order to prepare a powerful remedy for harmful insects? First of all, you will need:
- garlic;
- potassium permanganate;
- soap;
- wood ash;
- tobacco;
- dill;
- matches;
- and even oranges.
All of these ingredients are part of effective recipes for getting gnats out of potted flowers. How to use them?
The first way. Garlic
According to reviews, the most effective remedy is an infusion of garlic. How to cook it? To do this, take three to four medium cloves,peel them, cut in half and put on top of the soil, you can even deepen it a little. Sometimes it is recommended to prepare a saturated garlic solution. To do this, take a few heads of garlic (two or three), peel, cut into small slices and pour a liter of boiling water. After a few hours, the solution is ready. It should be filtered, poured into a spray bottle and irrigated with the entire affected plant, as well as poured over the ground with the prepared composition.
Blackflies in flowers. Folk remedies and recipes
As the next means of dealing with midges, you can use a weak solution of potassium permanganate, which is recommended to water the soil as it dries.
An interesting recipe for getting rid of midges in home flowers is to use orange peels. They must be cut into wide strips, dried and stuck in the ground.
What else can be used to control unwanted insects? According to the reviews of experienced flower growers, pests are afraid of laundry soap. To do this, twenty grams of detergent should be finely chopped or grated on a coarse grater, pour a liter of warm water and dissolve. Spray both the flowers themselves and the soil in which they grow with the resulting composition.
Ash is also considered an effective method for annoying midges and their larvae. Just sprinkle it on the ground in a flowerpot, slightly fluff the top layer and wait. The pests will be gone in a few days.
What else can help? Tobacco. Pour twenty grams of smoky potion with a half-liter jar of water, givebrew for a couple of days, and then add another liter of water. The resulting solution is recommended to spray the ground part of the plant.
Dill is also an effective method against flying insects. It should be laid out on top of the ground and left for two days. Then change to a new one. This should be done until the midges disappear.
Matches. What is the essence of this method? Uninvited guests are very afraid of sulfur. Therefore, matches should be deepened into the soil head down, poured with water and left for two or three days, then pulled out and stuck in new ones. According to numerous reviews, midges and their larvae should die in seven days.
Benefits of folk remedies
As you can see, there are many effective and effective folk recipes that can help in the fight against unwanted insects. They are affordable, easy to prepare, easy to use, and most importantly, practically safe for people and animals. Which of the methods you apply is up to you, based on your own experience, views and preferences.
We have spent enough time on what should be done to get rid of midges in flower pots. Let's talk briefly about how to avoid this difficulty.
Correct fit
Since it is easier to prevent a problem than to fix it, below we will analyze the basic tips and tricks for the correct and error-free care of your green pets.
First of all, remember that before you start caring for a flower purchased in a store, it should be transplanted into a new soil, treated anddisinfected with special means. To do this, you can use purchased or prepared fertilizers yourself, or ignite the earth in the oven at one hundred degrees.
Before planting any plant (even seeds) they should be thoroughly treated with soapy water.
Correct care
It is recommended to regularly loosen the earth in flowerpots so that it breathes.
Be careful with watering. As mentioned above, flowers do not like excessive moisture. To prevent water from accumulating in the pot, drainage should be installed. If you water the plant from below, it will take only the amount of moisture that it needs.
For the quality of growing beautiful and he althy flowers, the room in which they are located should be regularly ventilated.
An important factor is the prevention of midges in the form of a weak solution of manganese. They can water the plant once every two weeks.
And most importantly. Different flowers grow on window sills and living corners, differing from each other not only in color and shape, but also in the way they grow and feed. So, care for them will also be different. Therefore, before planting a particular type of flowering plant, information about it should be studied in detail: how often to water, what to fertilize, whether to prune, and so on.
Summarize
As you can see, midges are a very unpleasant, pathogenic phenomenon both for the roots of the plant and for the flower itself. Therefore, with them it is necessary to purposefully and seriouslyfight. How? This is what we talked about in this article.
There are several ways to get rid of uninvited guests and their larvae. You can use pesticides, or you can use inexpensive and low-dangerous folk remedies for humans. According to the reviews of experienced flower growers, they are as effective and efficient as purchased drugs.
We also discussed how to prevent midges and what are the best preventive measures to use.
As you can see, there are many ways to deal with midges and other pests. Which one you choose is up to you!
