Combating gnats are like a trying to solve a vulture problem.. You can scare them away, shoot them dead, but the best fix is to stop the corpses from stacking up. If there's no tasty meal, then they wouldn't bother you.
I've been advising gardeners for over a decade now, and this seems to be one of the hardest concepts to grasp for a lot of people.
Gnats are a symptom, a result, not a cause. It's quite literally in the name 'fungus' gnats. They pop up when there's dead stuff decaying. Some plants do well in decaying matter, most do not.
A friend of mine has been dealing with gnats for over a year now. She calls me a shitty gardener, a poor plants-person. Because I can't fix her issue for her.
When I keep her plants in my house, the gnats disappear within a week or two. No issues whatsoever.
When she gets them back, the gnats come back within 10 days. She asked me a hundred times what kind of killer stuff I use..
The answer is always "Less water, more air, better soil".
She doesn't believe it. When her plants die, she blames the gnats because their larvae have invaded every part of the plant.
She found maggots in a corpse and blames the maggots..
