I tried 'instant' kitchen item hack to get rid of flies on strawberry and tomato plants

It’s been an ongoing war I’ve waged in my greenhouse for the past two years - but with this kitchen hack I finally got the better of white flies and greenflies on my strawberry plants.

It started out as just a patch of a handful of white flies on a single strawberry plant, but being the hands-off eco-gardener I am, I decided to let them live.

That was a huge mistake. Within a few weeks every single strawberry plant and the nearby tomato plants I had were inundated with clouds of white fly under every leaf, sucking the life out of my fruit plants and stopping them being able to produce proper fruit as a result.

I tried everything, from washing them off the leaves to using a bug spray - which I hate, because even though it’s inside a greenhouse I don’t want a bee to wander in and die, nor do I want to kill off useful beasts like spiders.

It didn’t work anyway, the white fly were maddeningly resistant to everything I threw at them and my strawberry crops wilted away.

Then I tried a kitchen item hack that cost me nothing - and the results were instant.

I’d read that you can mix a little bit of soap - like hand soap - with water, so I grabbed an empty Dettol bottle and washed it out thoroughly. I then mixed in about 100ml of hand soap with some tap water. I read that washing up liquid also works.

I marched down to the greenhouse and sprayed every strawberry plant, blasting the soap water mix into the clouds of flies.

This works in two ways: on direct contact, the soap solution stops the flies from being able to breathe because it blocks their pores and they suffocate.

Indirectly, the soap coats the stem and the leaves with a slippy substance which makes it difficult for the fly to land and feed.

The results were instant. The next day I had a lot fewer flies, and I repeated the spray daily for a week. Now my strawberry plants are almost entirely bug free - and I’m getting fruit again.