DIY Fly Paper

This recipe is a simple way to make your own fly paper.  It's a good weekend project and something even the kids can get involved with!

All you need is:
1 tablespoon of brown sugar
1 tablespoon of granulated sugar
1/4 cup of maple syrup
1 brown paper bag cut into strips (8 in x 2 in)

Mix the ingredients together and coat the paper strips evenly and thoroughly with it.  Leave the strips on a cookie sheet or some wax paper until they are dry.  You can come up with many ways to hang them.  Try using a clothes pin to grasp the paper and some string to hang it from.  Hang them where they are needed. Use these right away, or store them in an air tight container because they will also attract ants! 

My New Shop!

I am proud to announce the Grand Opening of my new Etsy shop.  Here I will be selling my hand crafted scented and cooking oils among other products as they come along.  It's a tiny shop right now, but everyone's gotta start somewhere, right?  It will be improving by the day. Follow this link to check it out!

Curiouser and Curiouser: An Etsy HannonShop

Simple Recipe of the Day

I love strawberries, but often times I buy too many of them.  As anyone who has bought a package of strawberries knows, they don't last very long and once they start to turn no one wants to eat them.  So what do you do with them?  Don't throw them out!  Instead cut them up and put them in some fresh lemonade for a couple of hours.  Make sure you look at them thoroughly.  You want them at that soft stage where no one wants to eat them, but you don't want them so far gone that they are changing color or molding.  Leave them in for about an hour for a light strawberry flavor or longer based on your preference, but make sure you take them out at some point or you will end up with soggy gross strawberries that no one will want to eat in a pitcher of lemonade that no one will want to drink.

Vinegar Fruit Fly Trap

This is one I used frequently in the last apartment I lived in.  We had a dishwasher with a garbage disposer.  Yeah, it sounded great when we signed ourselves up for the place but little did I know that the dishwasher and garbage disposer were attached to each other in a righteous cluster fuck of plumbing that was broken when we moved into the place.  For the entire 4 years that I lived there the damn thing never worked right, which lead to massive infestations of fruit flies in my kitchen.  At first I went to the local garden store and bought some fruit fly traps.  They were cute and inconspicuous, but they were about $7 a piece and they didn't last very long.  So, of course I discovered a cheaper and renewable option that is very simple. 

All you need are 3 things:

A container.  (I use a jar, but you can use pretty much whatever you want which makes this recipe easy to hide in plain sight.)

Apple Cider Vinegar

Dish Soap

Take the container, and leave it open.  Some versions of this recipe call for covering the container with plastic wrap and poking little holes in it, with the same idea as the bee trap.  They can get in, but can't get out.  Not only is this step unnecessary, but it makes the trap less effective because the fruit flies are not as likely to get to enter the trap and get to the mixture inside. 

Here's how it works:

The fruit flies will be attracted to the apple cider vinegar and will attempt to land on it's surface expecting to be able to walk across the surface as they usually can.  But the dish soap disrupts this and causes them to fall into the vinegar and drown. 

Of course the best way to eliminate and prevent fruit flies is to keep your kitchen clean.  If they are originating from the drain, some bleach poured down it will help.  And this trap will take care of the remainder of them that are still hanging about.

DIY Wasp Traps: A More Attractive Alternative

Bees.  More specifically, wasps.  Yellow jackets.  Those nasty little assholes of the insect world.  Aggressive, in your face, with a painful sting.  I happen to be one of those lucky bastards who is allergic to them.  And I can't escape them.  In my house it's a constant battle because yellow jackets have made quite a home in my neighbor's shed.  In the place where I lived before this home, it was a nightmare when they bored their way into my apartment and enacted an all out assault on my family. 

Last year it was so bad that there were many days that my potted garden went dry because I could not water it amongst the swarming wasps.  Last year I found a recipe for a homemade wasp trap and I went to town with it.  It was the old plastic bottle trick, which I will be detailing in a different blog entry.  Like a crazy woman, I started to hang plastic bottles filled with simple syrup around the outside of my house.  I painted some of them in an effort to make them look somewhat decorative, but at the end of the day, they were plastic bottles.  The positive side was that I could make a million of them because I had a million plastic bottles.  (ok, maybe not a million, but you get the gist) The negative side, they are ugly. So this year I discovered an updated version of the plastic bottle bee trap.  This one involves jars.

Take one jar.  In case you live under a rock, here's the homesteader blog obligatory picture of a jar:

I painted the outside of the jar with some acrylic paint.  I researched which colors would attract bees and got conflicting results.  Some claimed that white and yellow repelled bees, and some claimed that those colors attracted bees.  I figured I would give light colors a try and see what happens. 

I filled the jar part way with simple syrup.  Simple syrup is just that.  Simple.  The ingredients are:


A cup or two of water, depending on your need
A buttload of sugar

For this wasp trap I used brown sugar because that's all I had in the house.  I don't know if this will change the result at all.  All you do is boil the water and sugar until it has a thick syrupy consistency. 
Then I took the lid of the jar and poked a hole about the size of my pinky.  You want the bees to be able to get in but have a hard time getting back out. 

The added step in this wasp trap is to take some jelly and spread it on the under side of the lid.  Leave it out and let it dry a little so it sticks to the lid.  When the wasps enter the trap they will walk on the jelly and get their feet all sticky. This will cause more of them to fumble and end up helplessly drowning in the simple syrup. 

Place this trap away from gathering points in your yard to not only kill the wasps, but to attract them to something other than you and your family.
Please keep in mind that these wasps traps are most effective after they have been sitting in the sun for a few days. So don't be discouraged if there is not much action in your traps for the first day or so.