Eco-Saturday: Fruit-fly trap

Score one for Pinterest: After an infestation of caffeine-junkie fruit flies this summer, I ran a search for organic solutions to the problem. This one, courtesy of Suburban Turmoil, kept coming up.

For any method to work on a long-term basis, you have to start by finding the source of your bugs. In our case, the flies came in with some dodgy bananas, invaded the compost bucket in search of coffee grounds (apparently a great favorite of fruit flies — not that I blame them) and decided the filter on the underside of the lid was an ideal place to raise kids.

To eradicate the larvae and eggs, we replaced the filter, and to kill the adults, I used Suburban Turmoil’s technique:

Get a Mason jar with a lid. Fill it about halfway with apple-cider vinegar. Add a couple of drops of dish soap, put the lid on the jar, and shake until it’s good and sudsy. Open the jar, add enough water to bring the bubbles up to the top, and leave it out overnight.

Your fruit-fly trap should look like cheap beer with a nice head. Try to suppress the urge to drink it.

The bugs will smell the vinegar, think you’ve got rotten apples for them to snack on, and become trapped in the suds when they try to check it out.

Gross.

I caught the better end of 30 flies the first night, and over the next few days, this sneaky little trap killed at least 100 more. Every time the suds died down, I closed the jar and shook it up again, adding soap or vinegar as necessary and replacing the solution a time or two until I stopped finding bugs in it, which took maybe three or four days.

I don’t know the blogger over at Suburban Turmoil, but I definitely owe her a beer for this excellent solution to a really annoying problem.

Emily

Back to basics (and feeling awesome)

We closed on the House of the Lifted Lorax on Monday (congratulations to new owner Josh, who is way amped about the solar panels and the woodstove, and whose young niece is way amped about the Lorax mural on the side of the garage), which means we have just enough money in the bank to pay off our moving expenses and put a privacy fence around the backyard.

You can’t fully appreciate the value of a good fence until you’ve spent six months putting out a pair of hyperactive dogs on short cables umpteen times a day. Yeesh.

In addition to affording us the convenience of opening the back door and letting Song and Riggy take themselves out, this fence will free us up to establish a new beehive, adopt some chooks, install a pond, start a compost pile, and — if I’m feeling really ambitious — maybe set up a small warren of rabbits without interference from curious neighbors of either the two- or four-footed variety.

I put in an experimental, totally halfassed garden this spring and learned enough about my new yard to feel pretty confident taking my usual “Darwin Garden” approach: Coddle the tomatoes and leave everything else to natural selection. So far, I’ve determined that California poppies won’t do a damn thing; cucumbers, strawberries, arugula and most herbs will thrive with absolutely no attention; green beans should do well with minimal attention; and tomatoes should perform fairly well if we choose a variety that’s tolerant of partial shade and try to protect it from the local wildlife.

After meeting the new owner of the old house Monday and giving him some pointers on living the eco-hippie life to its fullest, I’m in full-on DIY mode, so this afternoon, I mixed up a batch of homemade laundry detergent and am currently trolling for dishwasher detergent recipes, since I’ve got plenty of washing soda and borax left over.

Also on the to-do list for this afternoon: Get a new set of shelves for the basement, join a gym, stock up on soup and chili ingredients, find the source of the smell coming from the kitchen drain, and work on the coupon books I’m making the kids for Christmas.

Life is good.

Emily

Sunflower sutra

“We’re not our skin of grime, we’re not our dread/bleak dusty imageless locomotive, we’re all/beautiful golden sunflowers inside…”
— Allen Ginsberg

Saturday adventures

I generally judge the quality of any given Saturday by how tired, sunburned, and dirty I am at the end of it. The best weekends involve beekeeping, power tools, Route 66, or a trip to the hardware store. This weekend involved all of the above.

It started with a Friday evening hardware-store run to pick up dirt, hypertufa ingredients, and sweet potato vines for my new-and-improved dragon project.

Here’s what I did Saturday morning:

I was pretty tired after spending the entire morning and most of the afternoon hanging drywall in the souvenir shack at the Blue Whale, but I decided I had just about enough energy left to spend an evening on the berm at OneOK Field.

The bees had other ideas.

Energy

I have no idea why, but I am absolutely wired today. I’ve got a long list of things to accomplish, and for once, I feel as if I can get through the entire list and quite a bit more besides. Maybe it’s got something to do with the fact that I have purple crocus blooming in the front yard. Hooray for spring!

Stay tuned. God only knows what I’ll wind up doing on a pretty day when I’m feeling like this….

Emily

… and I’m OK …

(Photo by Ron) 

After a good breakfast (two sausage rolls with cheese, two warm doughnuts, and a carton of orange juice from Brown’s Donuts on north Yale), I spent part of the morning helping Ron chop fallen limbs into firewood.

I dug it, obviously.

Of course, you had to know this was coming:

Have a good weekend….

Emily