Frugal Friday

In these parts, September and October are harvest season. Vast amounts of fruits and vegetables are lined up on my counter waiting to be canned or frozen.

Life, however, gets busy with a toddler and an infant which means I don’t always get to processing the bounty right away. An unfortunate side effect – fruit flies.

Did you know that fruit flies can lay up to 500 eggs in one week!?!? No wonder they are so hard to get rid of!!

Instead of just swatting the flies and hoping we would get them all, I tried my hand at making a homemade fly eliminator. I was inspired by a couple of recipes in Reena Nerbas’ series of books called Household Solutions 1 and Household Solutions 2.

Here is what I did:

I placed some sliced lemon wedges (that I had used for garnish in a lemonade pitcher) in a glass jar. I added 1/4 cup of vinegar and 2 Tbsp of corn syrup to the jar. I then covered the jar with a bit of saran wrap and cut a small hole in the top. Into the hole I placed a paper funnel I had made with some scrap paper so that the flies could go in but couldn’t get out. I set it in the kitchen over night to see what would happen.

The next morning over 10 flies had met their doom in my little jar! After a couple of days, we had no more fruit flies!

Simple, easy and no more pesky flies!

What unfortunate sife effects come from your fall harvesting and how to you deal with it?