The Fruit Fly Solution

For the last few days I’ve been trying to rid my kitchen of a minor infestation of fruit-fly, the result of a rotting potato hidden at the back of a kitchen cupboard.

The infestation started on Friday morning with just a few flying around the kitchen, which I thought would quickly disappear. I remembered something from high school biology about how fruit-fly have short life-spans, or something like that. “Great”, I thought to myself. “Short life-spans. Go to work, come home, and they’ll be gone”, I thought to myself. Wrong.

When I arrived home on Friday night there were even more fruit-fly. The fly-swat didn’t work. My wild hand-whooshes and screams of “get out, get out you horrible things”, as I opened the kitchen window, also failed to work. But I didn’t want to go down the path of chemicals, as I’m all a bit “enviro-friendly”.

So on Friday night, I hunted around on the internet for a chemical-free solution. Shannon Lush must surely have something, I thought to myself? The collective wisdom of the internet told me apple-cider vinegar was effective. You pour some apple-cider vinegar into a jar, put some plastic wrap over the top. And then you prick the plastic so the fruit flies can get in, but can’t get out. Brilliant, I thought to myself, and so I went to the supermarket yesterday in search of some apple-cider vinegar.

As I wandered up and down the vinegar shelves I was perplexed, as I normally don’t buy apple-cider vinegar. “Shall I get the home brand or should I get the expensive one”?, I asked myself. And that’s when a little voice inside my head reminded me I wasn’t preparing a gourmet dinner, I was trying to kill fruit-flies. Sadly, it seems the fruit-flies of Surry Hills have expensive tastes in apple-cider vinegar, as they showed themselves not to be even the slightest bit interested in the bottle I bought to tempt them into my little traps. Maybe I should have gone to one of our local gourmet grocers instead of Coles?

And so this morning I went back to the supermarket with “pest control” firmly in mind. I’d given up feeling guilty about putting even more chemicals into the environment.

My conclusion – Coles brand flying inspect spray is better than Cornwell’s apple cider vinegar in dealing with a fruit fly problem in the kitchen.