AboutLong Island Gardener Expertise How to grow the Perfect Lawn? If you live in the Northeast/Atlantic Coast, I have intelligent answers on grass selection, fertilizers, soil care, weed control, and lawnmowers. Although I have degrees in related fields, a person's real gardening skills are learned from trial and error. More important, I am strict about not using chemicals in the garden. Organic gardening is not just earth friendly and healthier for you, your children and your pets. It's less expensive and easier. You read that right. Less expensive and easier.
Experience Homeowner for 15 years, 30 years of gardening for personal pleasure, college credits in horticulture and botany, volunteer docent at the local botanical gardens, and a whole library of gardening and landscaping books at home some 100 years old.
Question We recently put down sod in our yard, a few weeks later, you walk across it, and 100's of flies are in it, i have treated it with some granular stuff for lawns, that does not seem to help at all, it is almost impossible to sit on our back patio, as we are bombarded with flies, we have tried putting fans outside, tiki torches, what can i do to get rid of all these flies. We between Tucson and Phoenix AZ
Thank you so much!!!!
Answer Get out the flypaper and the hanging flypaper strips right away for fast relief. This is not just annoying, it's unhealthy.
Let's figure out what this bug is. Ever hear of a 'Frit Fly'?
Not a FRUIT Fly. A FRIT Fly.
Says the University of Arizona Extension: 'Adults are 1-2 mm long, black with yellow markings on their legs.' Here's their Frit Fly post for you:
'Larvae are maggots that feed on the terminal shoots of Grasses. Larval Frit Flies can be a serious pest of Bentgrass, because their feeding causes yellowing and death of the central leaf.'
Sod is heavily managed Soil and Grass, rolled out with all their defects onto property that may have been very healthy. Sod will ruin it. Temporarily at least. You will extend the problem with 'granular stuff for Lawns' by wiping out any natural predators out there that hunt them down. And then you're not just swimming upstream, you're up a creek w/o a paddle totally.
I would do what I can do employ the local Bird population. Their services are traded for Birdbaths and a few native flora to dine on. If this is a fly, it starts out as a larvae... somewhere. Birds can handle this trouble. Just be nice to them.
