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I have two basil plants and both are infested with the same tiny flies. I have tried everything I could think of and nothing seemed to get rid of them:

  • Changed the soil to one appropriate for aromatic plants
  • Sprayed them with a pesticide
  • Tried vinager and other homemade concoctions (put on the plants to repel or in a cup next to them to atract and kill)
  • Separated them from other house plants (they are both inside)

Nothing worked. I had never seen flies like this before. They are black and much smaller than fruit flies.

Any ideia what they could be and how to get rid of them (I really don't enjoy spraying my basils continuously when I'm supposed to eat them)?

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  • You sprayed pesticide on a culinary plant? If the flies seem to live on or near the soil, then they're possibly fungus gnats, which won't hurt the basil. Letting the soil dry out once in a while will keep them under control.
    – Jurp
    Commented Jun 19 at 16:44
  • @Jurp Yes, let's just say I was getting quite desperate... Not one of my best moments. To be quite frank they are all over the plants. I do notice that each time they reappear my basil leafs get small lighter dots on their leafs. Is that correlated?
    – LauNR13
    Commented Jun 20 at 9:17

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I'm going to assume that you have a nasty fungus gnat infestation, although the holes in the leaves you mention are not associated with them (the gnat larvae eat fungus in the soil and, if there's fungus on the roots, they also eat plant roots).

To get rid of the infestation, you have to kill the larvae and adults. There are more than a few ways to do this, but these two may be the easiest:

To kill the larvae, create a drench from 3% hydrogrn peroxide. From this site:

  1. Allow the top two inches (5 cm) of potting soil in your houseplant to dry out.
  2. Mix one-part hydrogen peroxide (3%) with four parts of water.
  3. Thoroughly water plants with the hydrogen peroxide solution to kill bugs in soil and allow all the liquid to drain.

To kill the adults, you can use neem oil on the leaves or purchase yellow sticky traps or cider apple vinegar traps (see site link below).

Of course I could be wrong with my ID, so check out this site for way to identify whether your problem is indeed fungus gnats. That site also discusses ways you can prevent fungus gnats from returning once you've eliminated them.

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  • Thanks! I will try that since, after researching it does look like the flies are fungus gnats.
    – LauNR13
    Commented Jun 20 at 13:46

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