Garden Pests and Diseases: Friend or Foe #6, 1 by Night_Bloom

Night_Bloom wrote:
cheryl11 - Generally house fly larvae need "moist" organic matter to eat/survive. Unless the house flies are coming from somewhere else close by, the dog refuse and or leftover wet dog food, etc could be the only thing I could think of that would give you lots of fies. They can travel though, so if you have neighbors with cows, horses, or other animals, they might be the source of the flies. Flies can also breed in compost piles sometimes too, though my composte pile seems to be dominated by worms in drier weather and soldier flies in wet weather. Normally that would be good stuff for flies (rotting veggies, etc), but the other critters seem to outcompete them. Soldier flies especially will eat other flies.

I wish I had more advice to give you, but I think forst you'll have to track down the source of the house fly larvae, and if they aren't coming from your proerty, controlling them might be difficult.


soulgardenlove - Are Angel trumpets related to passion vines (Maypops)? I ask this, because even though I can't be positive from the pictures, these look almost like Gulf Fritilary caterpillars. After a really slow start, I finally got a pretty good crop of these this year. They weren't fast enough to eat all of the passion vines, so there was a little bit of passion vine overflow, but I think there should be a good bunch of the critters next year. I'll post a picture at the end of this post, and you can see if that's what you've got.

If so, you may want to consider planting a passion flower or two (be careful though, they can get out of control if you don't have the caterpillars to eat them). I think they'd probably prefer to eat the passion vines to your Angel trumpets if they had them available.

bluekat - that looks like a young Marbled orb weaver to me (family Araneidae, genus Araneus). It looks like she got herself an Acanalonidae leaf hopper perhaps.