Flies Gone in 24 Hours — The $2 Jar the Amish Keep by the Door

My name is Isaac Miller. I am Amish, and I have run my own forge in Lancaster County for thirty-one years. A blacksmith's shop in July is about the best fly laboratory God ever devised. You know the routine. You swat two and four more take their place. You spend nine dollars on a can that smells like a chemical plant caught fire, and you cannot spray it near the food, which is the only place the flies want to be. By August you have bought three cans and hung a sticky ribbon that catches your wife's hair more often than a fly. Here is what most folks have backwards. The problem is not the dozen flies in your kitchen. It is the thousands living in the trash, the compost, and the neighbor's dog run. Killing the twelve in the room is bailing a boat without plugging the hole. A spray can fights the flies you can see. A jar by the door intercepts the ones you have not met yet. A fly hunts by smelling fermentation. Cider vinegar and sugar throw off that smell stronger than anything on your counter. He lands expecting surface tension to hold him. Three drops of dish soap break that skin, and he drowns. USDA Farmers' Bulletin 734 printed plans like this in 1916. The knowledge was never hidden. It just stopped being repeated once there was a can to sell. Two dollars the first year, pennies after. Against four or five spray cans a summer at thirty-five dollars, a plug-in trap at twenty-five plus twelve a month in cartridges, or a pest man at a hundred and fifty a visit. In this video I show you the exact mix, why it must be cider vinegar and not white, how to roll the paper cone, the six-to-eight-foot placement rule nearly everyone gets wrong, the juice glass version for fruit flies, the Saturday trash can scrub, and the black walnut branch my grandfather hung in the milk house doorway. I also tell you where it falls short. The jar kills the flies that come to it, but it does not fix why they came, and it does little against biting stable flies. WHAT YOU WILL NEED Quart mason jar or old pickle jar — $2, free if you have one Apple cider vinegar, half a cup White sugar, a quarter cup Warm water, half a cup Plain dish soap, three or four drops Paper and tape for the cone White vinegar for the weekly trash can scrub A WORD OF CAUTION Mind the placement. Set the jar where you sit and you have invited the flies to dinner instead of away from it — six to eight feet off, outside the door. Do not add more than three or four drops of soap, or the soap covers the smell of the bait. And if there is an open compost pile ten feet from your door or a barn's worth of manure upwind, the jar will fill and never get ahead. Cover the source first. Subscribe if you want more of this. Every week I put up one old way of solving a problem you have been paying somebody else to solve. #amish #flytrap #naturalpestcontrol #oldways #homestead #frugalliving #diy #lancastercounty