Dealing with soil born pests and fungus gnats in container gardens, For beginners or professionals

Many people who have been gardening indoors for any length of time know the scourge of soil pests. They are some of the worst kind of pests as well as the hardest to eliminate without any kind of damage to the plant root structure. In this article I will explain to you an extremely simple and very cheap way to keep these buggers out of your soil.
Specifically I am talking about fungus gnats but this method will keep a majority of these pests out of your critical medium of choice. So I will start out by saying that recently I had a very bad problem with fungus gnats in my indoor plants. Fungus gnats can lay as many as 200 eggs at a time and will rapidly take over your soil. The larvae generally feed on any kind of mold or organic material that is present in your medium including rotting wood chips. If there is no rotting material present they will go after something much more serious. Your roots. The larvae will target any roots that are dying as well as the feeder hairs that grow on your root mass. These hairs are important for your plant to be able to catch the food in the soil and uptake it for use. Without them your plant will stunt its growth and eventually even die.
The solution you ask? Sand. Sand is sharp on a microscopic level and it contains no organic material for the larvae to feed on and is therefore unattractive to the adult gnats. The existing larvae that are inside the container cannot escape as they will be shredded as they try to do so and will die before maturity. On the other side of the coin the adults cannot lay the eggs in such a medium and will not even try. For the application simply go to your local home depot and pick up some play sand or quickcrete also makes a sterile, washed fine sand that works very well. Once you get it home place about 2 inches on top of your existing medium and your problem should be solved within a month as that is the general life cycle of a fungus gnat. If you have a very bad infestation then you can consider scraping off the first 2 inches of soil before application because that is where most of the larvae will be concentrated as well as mixing in dimaceous earth with the sand. Thanks for reading and I hope this information has helped you deal with these nasty pests. Have a wonderful day!