Pesky Pests
I make often trips to Target for necessities, if not just for something to do on a Thursday afternoon in Waco. We can discuss my Hobby Lobby obsession later. Target strategically places multiple bins of dollar items right as you enter the door. It’s their sneaky way of getting me to purchase something, and it usually works. It’s only later that I find out whatever I bought was a total piece of crap when it falls apart, or in the case of the nail polish, peels off the next day. However, one thing they do carry in these bins is Buzzy Seeds grow kits for a dollar each. Thus, I have attempted to grow strawberries, lavender, clover, sunflowers, petunias, green peppers, Christmas trees, a rose plant, and sensitive plants. The rose plant has taken over a year to grow to be six inches tall, two of the Christmas trees survived and are an inch tall each, and I have eight sensitive plants that refuse to die. Everything else either didn’t spout, sprouted and died, or became a breeding ground for fruit flies. Since I do eat a considerable amount of fruit and do not have a functional disposal, the fruit fly problem became exponentially problematic.
The internet provided me with a variety of ways to exterminate fruit flies so I could stop picking them out of whatever drink they chose to dive-bomb. One website suggested that I place a piece of fruit in my oven and leave it for a few hours to collect a hoard of flies. Then, shut the oven, turn it on, and watch the fireworks. This option sounded extremely gratifying, even though I kept imagining the inside of my oven looking like my windshield after a long trip at night. I totally wouldn’t eat off of that.
I found another option on eHow that involved pouring some fruit juice in a cup, placing saran wrap on top, poking holes in the wrap, and then waiting. Because fruit flies are not the most intelligent insects (established by their suicide dive-bombing of my drinks), they can’t find their way out of the cup and then you can either let them go outside, or swish the cup to drown them as payback for inhaling them with your dinner.
I’ll let you guess which option I chose, but I will say this: they definitely don’t have the guts to go through that again.