Gnat this Time!

Last week we found ourselved infested by friut flies. It started as a few, but suddenly turned into dozens of the little bastards buzzing around the apartment. You can probably figure out how Lib felt about the whole ordeal based on the picuture above that she drew on her Monday night note that she wrote while I was teaching the GED. Tuesday we looked up some strategies for getting rid of them. Before the website listed how to kill them though, it gave a list of preventitive measures to take to make sure they stay gone once you have killed the little buggers. Some were reasonable:

Store trash in a covered bin. (Reasonable)
Do not toss food garbage into waste-paper baskets (Duh, but it happens.)
Cover your fruit bowl or store fruit you wish to keep in the refrigerator. Also, raisins, dates and prunes are favorite attractants (It happens to the best of us).
Use or discard all overripe fruit. (again, duh, but OK). Clean the seals of your refrigerator door, the top and under the fridge, especially clean the evaporation pan if it has one (believe it or not, I acutually do this when I clean).

As understandable as all of these little pitfalls are, we were not guilty of any of them.

Sadly, because some people are just complete slobs, the website felt it necessary to state the obvious--also, anyone who knows me knows that I am kind of a slob, so coming from me, this must be pretty bad.

• Clean opened containers of fruit juice, fermented or vinegar products, for example ketchup, siracha or cooking wine. Seal them well. Keep these in the refrigerator if possible. (Do people really leave open fruit containers and ketchup sitting out?)


• Wipe up crumbs and spills from your cabinets, counter and floor. (Crumbs maybe, but who leaves things spilled?)


• Take out all trash--do not re-use the plastic liner garbage bags. (WHO DOES THIS?)


• Dump mop water, clean the pail, launder the mop rag. (Maybe if you live in a janitor's closet.)


• Take out your compost and keep your collection bin covered and food additions to your pile buried beneath yard waste. (Who leaves their compost inside?)


• Do not use manure, beer or rank water for fertilizer near the house (I don't even understand this).

It turns out all you have to do is put some apple cider or balsamic vinegar in a cup with some dish soap. The vinegar smells like rotting fruit and attracts the flies, while the soap reduces the cohesion so the gnats, thinking they will be able to use the surface tension, sink to a vinegary death. We filled three with apple cider vinegar and I did a test cup with balsamic. It works pretty damn well, as you can tell from Lib's drawing from my Wednesday night note.