Shoo Fruit Fly, Don't Bother me.

This past weekend, the family and I went to the farmer's market in Cheyenne. It was amazing. You could smell the melons from blocks away and hear the hatch chiles popping in the fire. They had everything you could imagine, and boy were there tons of people.

So we stocked up on some delicious blueberries, blackberries, washington peaches, cantaloupe, and sweet corn.

We also stocked up on fruit flies.



We have dealt with our fair share of fruit flies in our old house. I'm not sure why, but we had fruit flies and gnats year round. What a relief it was to move to our new home, and realize there were no fruit flies. Oh, thank goodnes....oh crap!

We were never able to solve this problem at the old house. But I'll be darned if we are going to live with this massive amount of fruit flies that we brought home! So we are going to test if all those "home remedies" that you find online actually work, and which one works best.

The first step is to clean up the fruit, and of course, it won't go to waste.

So I attempted to eat the tomatoes for lunch with some reduced balsamic vinegar (which the fruit flies were swarming as it cooked). I burned the balsamic vinegar as I got side-tracked, and this meal ended up in the trash. I made banana bread muffins, cut up the cantaloupe and put it in the fridge as it was just perfectly ripe, and then I put the peaches and the oranges in the fridge as well. I really don't like storing fruit in the fridge. Whenever we purchase fruit it is usually days away from being even edible, so on the counter it goes. Fruit does not ripen in the fridge for me. But I digress. The fruit is now picked up, though I haven't found a spot to move the potatoes. At this point, I took out the trash. I quickly noticed that the fruit flies seemed to dissipate and I thought I got lucky. A couple of hours later I found them swarming my freshly baked, now cooling, banana bread muffins. So on to the testing part of our journey here.

There are several different "home remedies" to get rid of fruit flies, and they are posted all over the internet. But as the saying goes, just because it says it on the internet, it's true it doesn't mean it's true.

Here are three of the suggestions that I found.

In the first jar, I have drank placed some wine. It's a German Riesling (homemade), I think that these fruit flies have quite refined tastes. In the second jar, some Apple Cider Vinegar. In the third jar is half of a pretty ripe mandarin orange. I also put a drop of dish soap in each one of the jars to break the surface tension. According to all the sources I have found on the internet, one must break the surface tension of the liquid so the fruit fly cannot land on the water, but will instead sink.

The next step is to provide a way in, but not a way out.

I placed some plastic wrap over each jar and punctured several holes. Hopefully the fruit flies go in, and don't come back out. So, we shall check over the next couple of days to see which remedies actually work, which ones don't, and which ones do best. 

'Til next time

-Sue

Oh, and here is a link to the banana bread muffins that I made today. I used 4 bananas and oil instead of butter. They turned out pretty yummy!