Yes, that is soap in my plant

I'm trying to get rid of these stupid little flies that live in some of my plants. They are called Fungus gnats.


My plant teacher said they live off the organic matter in the soil, so one way to kill them is to put soapy water in the plant. (She said the Ivory dish soap is safe, but not all soaps are safe though so be careful if you do this.) I also got some bug death spray, and I've tried both of those methods to get rid of the flies. The soap kills the fly larvae in the soil, and the spray kills whatever it touches, but you can't get all those little specks flying around in the air when you move the plant. I feel like walking around the house with a running vacuum cleaner so I can suck up all the little flies as I see them. Sometimes they appear right in front of my eye (seriously, it was probably trying to land on my eyelash) and of course it just looks like a big black blurry thing so I jump. Then I get mad when I realize it was just another one of those dumb little flies. Grrrr!

These pictures look really disgusting, but that's what it looks like up close. When I look in the plant I can hardly see the little tiny yellow specks, and since I've been putting soap in the plants I haven't seen any more.


The flies are so small you can hardly make out the details of their wings like you can in this picture. If you have them in your plant you might not even notice until you disturb the plant. It will just look like little specks of dirt moving around in the soil. Yuck!


I spent all day working on homework stuff and now I am happy to run around cleaning the whole house like mad. I feel like if I can clean every surface then maybe I will catch some more fly specks. I also want to sanitize everything because it grosses me out to think of little flies crawling on all my stuff and especially the surfaces in the kitchen and bathroom. Luckily they don't seem to be in our bedroom at all. I still feel like I'm going to breathe one in as I fall asleep at night. I want to put the blanket over my head to cover my face.

Do you have any suggestions? I'm thinking if they don't disappear in the next week I might just bug bomb the house when we leave for Thanksgiving. From what I've read, they naturally live outside in your garden or lawn or a tree--pretty much anywhere, so it's very likely that they will come back again. They get in the house by jumping on your clothes and taking a free ride to the house. They also travel when you get a new plant from some place and bring them home in the soil. I think that's what happened here, because they are mainly in the areas of the three plants I got from a friend last spring. A safety precaution is to put you new plants in isolation for a few weeks to make sure they are clean. I didn't know that before, but I will definitely do that from now on!