My Fruit Flies

We have had some banana bunches from our local produce co-op that do not like to ripen.

It seemed that for several weeks in a row, we had received green bananas that never yellowed, and we eventually had to toss them.

Sometime in late June, I had decided to place the latest bunch in a large paper sack with an apple, and set it on top of our chest freezer in the kitchen, where the warm sun shines through the windows.

When we went away on vacation in early July, I cleared out most of our perishables from the refrigerator, and looked around to see if anything else needed to be addressed. I looked briefly to see where the banana bag was, but not seeing it on the chest freezer, assumed that the bananas had met the same fate of their predecessors: tossed.

A few weeks after returning from vacation, we started to find fruit flies around the kitchen. First a few, then more, then finally, a swarm. A swarm, yes, which arose when Colin accidentally dropped something behind the chest freezer.

Eeeew.

I gagged as I cleaned up not only the mushed banana and rotten apple, but also the maggots that had gathered on the bottom of the bread flour sack, which had become wet with fruity rot.

Then I endeavored to create complicated "fail-safe" traps in order to catch and rid the kitchen of fruit flies, by several methods researched online:

~red wine vinegar in a jar with pierced plastic wrap over it

~red wine vinegar and sliced fruit in a bowl with pierced plastic wrap over it

~red wine vinegar in a bottle with a funnel leading into the mouth ... then with pierced plastic over it.

I finally discovered, much to my dismay, that the fruit flies were very fond of my kombucha, brewing in a large glass jug in my cupboard. Reluctantly, I pulled down the container and placed it atop the chest freezer, stretched some plastic wrap over the top, and pierced tiny holes in the wrap. The result was the most successful of all fruit fly trap attempts.

Of course, my children were watching all of my crazy designs and experiments. They're always watching.

Tiernan confided to his father, this evening during their bedtime chat, "Dadoo, Mama WEEwy yikes tatchin’ fwuit fwies."