Indoor pests can be a real pain in the butt in the winter, like fungus gnats and aphids, but we found a really good trick for keeping them under control. We have a lot of plants that live in pots, and they go outside in the summertime. So when they're outside, they're inevitably going to come into contact with all kinds of insects. Some of those insects are pest insects, some of them are beneficial insects, and we find that usually they just really keep themselves in check. The problem arises when we bring them inside. So when you bring them inside, it's a controlled environment. There's none of those beneficial insects to control the pests. So what happens is these fungus gnats are aphids. They can start their life cycles going, and then they can really get out of control. And it happens, especially I find early when you bring them in, and then later in the winter. So this time of year when the days start to get longer, the plants start to grow. But the growth that they're growing is pretty weak and spindly. It's not thick and robust, like it would be when they're growing outside. So that's especially vulnerable to these plant pests that suck the sap out of those little bits of leaves and stems. So we use a couple of tricks to control the population. One thing that's really important is cleaning all of your pots and trays. I do this every year just to make sure I'm not bringing any more insects inside than I know, as well vacuuming out any areas where you may have had an infestation of aphids on a plant. That's really important just to make sure you're getting any eggs or any debris that's around. We use yellow sticky traps to monitor the population. So then you can tell if it's just one or two fungus gnats flying around, or if there's like a whole ton hatching out right at that moment, and you have to do something to control them. But the thing that we found works best is creating a barrier that keeps the pests in the soil, or it keeps them from laying more eggs in the soil. All of their life cycles basically involve a ten point where they're flying around, and then a point where they go into the soil and they lay eggs and then they hatch. They have a couple of like larval and pupae stages as well, depending on what kind of insects they are. But if you can create a barrier to keep them from going up and down between those two areas, then you can stop them from breeding and you can stop that population from exploding. What we do is take a fabric, we use landscape fabric, but you could use anything that was thin and permeable to water, and we cut a shape that fits directly in the pot and fits around the stem of the plant. This works best with single stemmed plants. So then what we do after we put the piece of fabric down is we put a layer that's about an inch deep of playground sand. So we just buy this at the hardware store. It's pretty cheap and it's nice and it has an attractive appearance as well. So we just scoop that on top and then smooth it out. So that creates a barrier that the bugs can't get through between the soil and the air. Both the sand and the fabric is water permeable. You can still water from the top. The sand sometimes shifts around, but the fabric really keeps it from mixing with the soil. So it stays sort of clean and tidy looking if you keep smoothing it out. You can also bottom water the plant and that works really well to make sure that it has enough moisture and to continue to build a robust root system. So it's ready when it goes outside. So it won't be long and all these plants will be going outside. But for now, we're hoping to keep them as healthy as we can in the inside. I find this sand trick really helps a lot.