Okay. I thought long and hard about whether or not to blog about this. I mean, some of you may never eat another thing produced in my kitchen after seeing these pictures.

In the end, though, I decided that I really do want this blog to be an honest portrayal of life on our little plot of land, so here it goes. . .

I was gone pretty much from Wednesday to Sunday of last week. That doesn't happen often. Anyway, when I got home Sunday night, the compost pail looked like this.

Fruit flies everywhere!

Okay. Before you pass judgment and decide that I'm a terrible housekeeper to allow my home to get completely overrun like this, I offer a few pieces of info in my defense:

1. I left the house in great haste. So, I didn't empty the compost pail before I left.

2. I do my best to keep our kitchen clean, but our kitchen is a REAL, working kitchen. If yours is too, then you know what I mean. The fruit on the counter is real, not fake, and sometimes it attracts flying insects. I cook 3 meals a day, almost everyday, so there's almost always something in process to attract critters. Try though I might to keep it clean, there's just nearly always something happening in there, and it seems the flying fellas have caught on.

3. We juice fresh fruit and veggies every morning. When I left on Wednesday, I'd planned to be home by Thursday afternoon. I'd left a bowlful of pears sitting out so that they would ripen to perfection in time for Friday morning's juice. But, then things got crazy and Friday turned into Sunday, and one pear was rotting in the bowl and serving as a veritable fruit fly breeding ground. Yuck!

Anyway, something had to be done, and since we're talking about the kitchen, a nasty pesticide spray was not the way to go. A quick Google search turned up lots of all-natural ways to kill off fruit flies. I decided to try these two:

1. Add apple cider vinegar to a small bowl and drip a few drops of dish soap on top. Apparently, the vinegar attracts the fruit flies and the soap keeps them from being able to escape.

2. A bit more complicated, this one uses apple cider vinegar as an attractant as well. I'm not going to go into great detail here about how to construct it because overnight, it caught only 2 fruit flies.

Meanwhile, the vinegar/soap trap looked like this in the morning light. Wow! I'd say this one worked.