Not One Fruit Fly in My Kitchen in 48 Years - The Old Lunch Lady Trick the Health Inspector Swore By

A plastic fruit fly trap shaped like a little apple runs about five dollars at Kroger, and by October half of them sit in the trash while the flies keep circling the kitchen. For thirty-five years I cooked for four hundred children a day in a Scioto County, Ohio, school kitchen: four hundred cups of fruit and four hundred cartons of milk every day, and a floor drain the health inspector got down on one knee with a flashlight to look into. We never had a cloud of fruit flies, and neither has my kitchen at home since 1978. Here is the whole trick in one sentence: nothing sweet sleeps wet. THE CLOSING WALK, THREE STOPS, FIVE MINUTES A NIGHT 🍑 STOP ONE, THE FRUIT: ripe goes cold, soft goes in the pan, split goes out. The refrigerator is my walk-in cooler. In the garden, pick up windfall apples and split tomatoes, and bury scraps under leaves on the compost pile, well away from the back door. STOP TWO, THE SWEET TRASH: a carton with a spoonful of chocolate milk in it smells like an orchard to a fly. Rinse anything sweet before recycling, take the kitchen trash out at night, and empty the scrap bucket every evening. STOP THREE, THE DRAIN: hot water alone runs over the film inside the pipe. A bottle brush breaks it. Scrub the underside of the garbage disposal flaps, too. THE STRIP OF TAPE: lay clear packing tape across the sink drain before bed. If flies are stuck to it in the morning, they are coming up out of the pipe, and the fruit bowl is not your problem. THE HONEST WORD ON TRAPS: a shallow dish of apple cider vinegar with one drop of Dawn catches the grown flies, and that is all it does. It counts them; it does not stop the nursery. Plug-in lights and the little apples from the store do no better. Fuzzy gray flies on the bathroom wall are drain flies, and the fix is the same brush in a different drain. Flies rising out of a houseplant are fungus gnats, which is another fight. 🎒 THE PLACE NOBODY LOOKS: lunch boxes, gym bags, the recycling bin in the garage, the drip pan under the refrigerator, and the cup holder in the car. Fruit flies hang on until the first hard frost. Walk your kitchen tonight before the light goes off, and lay one strip of tape across the drain. Then tell me in the comments: fruit bowl or drain? And put your county after it. I am a retired school cook, not a pest professional. If the flies will not quit after two weeks of the closing walk, call a good, honest one. #FruitFlies #KitchenTips #OldFashioned