I Never Had A Roach In That School Kitchen In 40 Years

Four hundred children ate lunch in that building every day. Ninety gallons of milk a week, a walk-in cooler, a dish room that ran wet from six in the morning, and a dock where the bread truck backed in every Tuesday. In forty years I never wrote the word roach on a report to that district. And for sixteen of those years I was doing the wrong thing about it anyway, which I own up to about two thirds of the way through this one. Here is what the film covers, in order. Water first, not crumbs. Everybody starts with crumbs and that is why everybody loses. Texas A&M's school program puts water ahead of food on its own list, and the one nobody thinks of is the drain you never use. The little bit of water in that trap is the only thing between your floor and the sewer line, and it evaporates. A pitcher of water down every unused drain, once a month, is free and it closes a door. Then the plate, and I want to say plainly that a roach in your kitchen is not a verdict on your housekeeping. Every extension service that studies this says clean houses get them and cleaning alone will not get rid of them. Then the cardboard standing by your back door, and a study out in 2022 that surprised me. A roach does not merely like a tight crack, he needs one. Take the tight shelters away and survival drops, the young take about twenty more days to grow up, and breeding falls from eighty percent down to nineteen. A tube of caulk is not tidiness. Then the can and the bomb, which is the reason I made this. North Carolina State ran four brands of total release fogger through twenty infested homes. Two weeks later, no reduction. A month later, no reduction. Meanwhile insecticide on the kitchen surfaces went as high as six hundred times what it had been, and a third of those surfaces still carried more a month later. A 2024 study sprayed roaches directly, left them on the treated surface a full half hour, and fewer than one in five died. And number five is the one I would do if I did nothing else. Stop trying to kill anything and go find out where they live. Penn State says ten sticky traps for one week. Then you read the cards, and one thing on them tells you which problem you have. I was never an exterminator. The district paid a man to do that. What I had was one building, four hundred children and forty years of watching what actually kept them out. #HomeMaintenance #Cockroaches #pestcontrol