On most days, I love my kitchen. Sure, it’s maybe not the best for cooking a huge dinner, but as it’s usually just Matt and I, the need for a Thanksgiving-style meal is few and far between. With a completely horizontal set-up, gas stove, and stainless steel backsplash, the kitchen fits well in our modern loft, and has plenty of room for my everyday cooking and baking needs.

However… there’s a bit of a problem with fruit flies.

Now, there are several factors that feed into this problem, including no screens on the windows paired with no AC in the apartment. Also, our apartment building is really into a small trash footprint, so we have a little food scraps bin on the counter that feeds into a building-wide compost bin in the basement. Add this to the oven, dishwasher, and garbage disposal all being in a nice, steamy row in the middle of the countertops, and fruit flies seem to love it here.

While it’s not the end of the world (it’s not like we have ants, or wasps, or roaches) I just hate fruit flies. They drive me crazy, and they make me feel like no matter what I do, somehow my house is dirty. So I’ve been waging battle on them for the past few months, and now that I’ve finally seen a significant decrease, I’m sharing my attack plans with you!

1) Compost frequently!!
Since our apartment building asks us to compost, we have a food scraps bin on the counter. But being two people, we don’t fill it up quickly - it takes a little over a week for it to fill entirely, on a good week.

Yeah, that’s bad. Fruit and veggies decomposing on the counter, concealed in a bin or not, for over a week… I was making the fruit flies feel too much at home. I’m now on a three day schedule on emptying the bin out. That probably made the largest difference, if I’m being honest. And all I had to do was suck up my dislike of dealing with smelly food scraps…

2) Find a fruit fly trap.
I have tried EVERY homemade trap, I kid you not. Anything listed online as being a good fruit fly trap, I have created in my kitchen. Apple cider vinegar, nope. Any combination of that with dish soap, or honey… yeah, they weren’t buying it. The fruit flies would sit on the edge of the containers getting high off the fumes, but never took the fatal plunge.

What did work was a piece of strawberry that was slightly overripe, in a small puddle of apple cider vinegar, in a cup, topped with a paper towel in a funnel shape. (I tried other fruit, and the strawberry was the only one they liked.) I caught 10 to 15 flies in about three hours.

However, that sitting on your counter forever just isn’t practical. So I found this great product on Amazon called Aunt Fannie’s FlyPunch! and it works pretty dang well. Just pop the lid, and “count the bodies” as it says on the label. Plus it doesn’t smell overwhelmingly bad, and it’s inconspicuous when sitting right by your sink or food scraps bin.

3) Cover up your disposal.
“If your quarry goes to ground, leave them no ground to go to.” For some reason, our sink didn’t have a drain cover or plug when we moved in. And I began noticing that the flies seemed to appear suddenly when I turned on the water. Of course they were hiding in the garbage disposal! Food scraps, yumm, plus with the stove to dishwasher heat combo right next door, I’m sure it was nice and warm and gross in there.

(For an awesome garbage disposal cleaner, check out these sink balls from Amazon - super easy to use, and they smell good too. I use the lavender, because fruit flies supposedly don’t like lavender: [link])

So, I cleaned out the disposal, and now when the sink isn’t in use I have this handy drain cover that sticks in place. Easy peasy.

4) Light some lavender.
So I read somewhere online that fruit flies don’t like the smell of lavender. This one I can’t fully say for sure, but lavender is such a nice smell, so why not burn some candles in case? (I have some lovely lavender lemongrass candles right now that I burn after I’ve cleaned the kitchen during the day.) I can say that the flies aren’t attracted to the candles, so that’s a plus.

After all this, fruit flies still appear, but more as solo travelers, rather than a massive group of annoying tourists in my home. In the end, if all else fails, my reflexes and towel-snapping skills have gotten pretty impressive. So fruit flies, be warned.