[pinkdaisychain]

Hey

We don't have a garden we only have a balcony and as it is high up it can be quite windy so we are keeping some of our veg indoors (herbs and a massive pot with our courgette plant in it!) We have a large window so we keep them in front of that so they get a lot of light.

For a few weeks now we have noticed a lot of annoying litte black flies flying around the plants - particularly around the courgette) and they seem to particularly like it if the plants have just been watered and they fly about erratically or if you disturb the soil a whole load seem to appear to be crawling about in it! They seem to only really go on the soil and not all that often on the plants. We have tried spraying them with organic bug killer but it doesn't seem to make a difference really, the only thing that does seem to make a slight difference is not watering for a while so the soil dries out but of course the plants themselves don't like that much!

Any ideas what this bug is and any good ideas on how to get rid of it? I'm a bit worried about how far down in the soil it goes and that it might be after the roots 

[mumofstig]

what you have are sciarid fly  There are nemotodes you can water on to control these  or use the yellow sticky fly traps near where they are. Watering from the bottom only also seems to help deter them.
some research suggests that these have become more of a problem than they were in peat based composts