They say a picture is worth a thousand words.
In this case, most of those words would look something like this: “@#*$!”
😆
So, yeah…it seems my mellow ways have landed me in hot water…UhhhhGAIN! This time with a different little annoying pest. The day after I added the “1.39 lb” of food waste (see “Worm Factory 360 | 12-01-11“), I noticed lots and lots of fruit flies (more than usual – haha) down in the room where I keep the wf-360 – and, sure enough, plenty of them seemed to be hanging out around the bin!
Obviously, I shouldn’t be too surprised! Raising fruit flies on purpose is bound to land you in trouble eventually, right? lol
OK – joking aside, I should explain that the situation isn’t quite as bad as it looks. My Worm Factory 360 isn’t actually sitting out on my deck in sub-freezing weather – well, at least not anymore! I put the bin out there for a period of time yesterday (perhaps a couple of hours) to see if I could kill off the resident fruit flies. I also worked hard to vacuum up as many fruit flies in the house as I could find (LOTS).
All of this has certainly helped, but I think the main problem was that there were still plenty of fruit flies inside the house, and yes – now that the bin is inside and warm again, it seems they have decided to move in….UhhhhGAIN!
Thankfully my wife is used to my shenanigans (and the critters that seem to follow) by now, so it doesn’t look like I’ll sleeping on the deck myself quite yet – but, I do think it’s time to start focusing a bit harder on getting rid of the FFs! Unfortunately, the nematodes just don’t seem to be up to the task of really keeping them under control (hope to write more about this soon) – especially not in an active worm bin – so it’s back to my “multi-pronged” approach I go.
Needless to say, I won’t be adding more food these week! In their defense, the worms have actually done a great job with the food materials in the bin – so the potential fruit fly real estate has certainly been reduced – but nevertheless, I don’t want to push my luck any farther than it’s been pushed.
Will keep everyone posted.
8)
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Don’t forget about this month’s WF-360 contest! Less than 6 days left!
Fruit flies are the worst! Seems like once they get going, there’s no stopping’em. Just wanted to let your readers know that we started a forum, and I just published a post on a couple of relatively easy methods for dealing with this nuisance. Thanks for the update, Bentley!
http://naturesfootprintinc.com/community/natures-forum?vasthtmlaction=viewtopic&t=21.0
I guess I am glad to hear that I am not the only one who has had fruit fly issues lately. As with you, my wife is generally tolerant, but she was getting annoyed at the flies circling her wine glass. I hope you get some resolution soon.
Haha – yeah the wine glass critter crowd doesn’t help AT ALL!
Thankfully, the overall numbers of FFs in the house seems to be dropping, so I think I’m past the worst of it…for now.
8)
Hi Bently,
Thank you for sharing your expieriences so that we can make informed decisions. It really bothered me to have to throw my scraps out in the woods and take a chance on ‘calling in the critters’ or just letting them be wasted by throwing them in the trash. Thanks to you and Paula I had decided on the Worm Factory 360. I just received it and have been saving scraps for a while, now they are all nice and nasty. I have not ordered my worms yet because I wanted to wait the wo weeks.
I have about 17# of scraps already mixed up with a bit of cardboard (it was quite juicy). It’s been outside in the cold.
-Since my food is already decomposing and I won’t be getting worms for at least two weeks, should I put the food in now or wait? It’s in my kitchen and I don’t want it to start smelling bad.
-Can I just leave the rest outside and use it as needed if I keep it stirred? Hopefully it won’t freeze!
-Some of the stuff was getting moldy but I mixed it in anyway, is that ok?
Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks again for the work you do!
Julie
Re: Worm Factory Articles: I came to your site because I am not happy with the progress I have made with my Worm Factory. I have had it for 2 years. Everything seems to progress swimmingly until I try to add a third tray to the stack. At that point, I have had problems getting the worms to migrate upwards to the new food, even though most of the contents of the two lower trays are pure castings.
I think the problem is that it is very difficult to keep the top tray properly moistened without over saturating the lower trays. I’m very interested to see how you progress with your system. Maybe I can get some ideas, if I haven’t switched to a plastic bin system by then.
I’m trying to develop a system that will consume all of our vegetable waste, not just a small portion of it.
fruit flies breed in your kitchen drains so no matter what you do with the worm farm that is just their food you need to poor bleach down you drains and cover with the plugs and if possible scrub the opening to the sick and drain with a tooth brush or use baking soda dump down drain and then pour vinegar down this will help kill the eggs and larva i got that from a exterminator we had a really bad fruit fly problem and they told us we needed to clean our drains because thats where they breed