From The Old Farmer's Almanac.
We scored a whole bag of mandarins from some friends last weekend, only to find that they were riddled with fruit flies - well, baby maggots to be precise. My daughter had picked them directly from the tree and there was not even a hint of disturbance to these gorgeous citrus. To the untrained eye, they even looked better than the shop-bought varieties.
Peel away the skin and the flesh began moving more than the ceiling after a hard night. Fly larvae - maggots - were wriggling through the fruit intent on devouring as much as they could. Instantly the adage "Don't judge a book by it's cover" flooded my memory as I disappointedly began checking the rest.
One or two were free of the infestation but the majority were write-offs. Given another week or two these fruit would begin rotting on the tree providing a glorious dwelling and upbringing for the next generation of these pests.
I should have taken the cue "We didn't get the tree sprayed this year!" as a major hint that fruit flies may have been a problem in the area. Instead I thought, "Great, these people grow their fruit organically". Doh, Doh!
How can you stop flies from infesting your fruit?
Prevention is obviously the first place to start. Traditionally most people have used chemical sprays once the fruit has set and before it begins to mature. Fruit bought from retail outlets usually undergoes two sprays - pre-harvest and post-harvest. The post-harvest pesticide is to combat infestations that may occur while in transit and before the consumer eventually eats it.
While most pesticides used to treat fruit fly are fairly sedate they work by inhibiting cholinesterase - an enzyme required by the animal kingdom for proper nerve functioning. While these inhibitors work wonders on fruit fly in minute amounts if the dosage were increased it could cause nausea, stomach cramps, blurred vision and even an increase in your heart rate. Hardly something you might consider as you begin munching into your mandarin.
While spraying may be the easiest method of fly control the side effects and health concerns for parents are obvious. Therefore, organic eradication is slightly more attractive.
The best way to start is with a trap of some description. Some use jars suspended from the fruit tree while others have more elaborate traps
The trick with making these work is as follows;
These are the basics of any organic fruit fly control. It's quite simple in its manufacture and easy to maintain though you can see why some people prefer pesticides as the set-and-forget method.
What to do with fly-ridden fruit?
Definitely don't throw it in the garbage or on the compost heap. These are both perfect breeding conditions for fruit fly and instead they should be destroyed.
One method offered by various government websites is to soak them in kerosene. The problem with that is kerosene is hardly an organic resource. So I tried two different methods with our spoilt fruit. The first was in a bucket of water and while the fruit had to be kept from floating it did eventually do the job - it took two days though.
The second method was using oil - the plain old cooking variety. The maggots were dead within 12 hours (it may have been sooner but I didn't check them for half a day). The obvious problem with this method was what to do with the fruit once the maggots had been killed. The only option was to put them in the garbage while the fruit covered with water could then either be put in a hole in the garden or added to your compost.
Oh anne, that was absolutley beautiful. I love the hens and chicks in the driftwood. Also that firepit is very cool! I cant think of anthing to add to it, but Ill keep it rumbling through my head for a while 
It looks like your family had a wonderful sunday. Its nice to get outside to eat!
The “stranded isle” test shows surprising results. Alas, only fifty will fit in my tiny hut, from classics to ephemera. Gone are the thrillers, breakthroughs, manifestos, philosophy and feuilletons; they don’t compare to identity, “imago”, the rough outline and telling detail. However, I include a few strays. Here is what’s left of a gaudy life.
After an unusually frenetic sales season, a desert island would be a relief. No computer, radio, television, public—Dorothy Parker’s “fresh hell”. Just a pair of reading glasses and a deep well.
Here’s the cream off a house full of books, in no order:
| Jan Valtin | “Out of the Night” |
| Various authors | “The Dartmouth Bible” |
| Homer | “The Iliad and The Odyssey”, Lattimore |
| translations | |
| William | “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” |
| Shakespeare | “Richard II” |
| “Othello” | |
| “King Lear” | |
| F. Scott | “The Great Gatsby” |
| Fitzgerald | |
| Ernest | “The Sun Also Rises” |
| Hemingway | “For Whom the Bell Tolls” |
| H.G. Wells | “War of the Worlds” |
| Karl Capek | “Three Novels” |
| Paul Bowles | “The Sheltering Sky” |
| “Up Above the World” | |
| Franz Kafka | “Collected Works” |
| Louis Ferdinand | “Journey to the End |
| Celine | of the Night” |
| George Sessions | “Walls Rise Up” |
| Perry | |
| Robert Flaherty | “My Eskimo Friends” |
| Frederick Manfred | “Lord Grizzly” |
| Herman Melville | “Moby Dick” |
| Joseph Conrad | “Lord Jim” |
| Jerome K. | “Three Men In |
| Jerome | A Boat” |
| Jean Shepherd | “In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash” |
| “Wanda Hickey’s Night of Golden Memories | |
| and Other Disasters” | |
| Calvin Trillin | “American Fried” |
| E. M. Forster | “Where Angels Fear to Tread” |
| Nikolai Gogol | “Taras Bulba” |
| Fyodor | “The Brothers Karamazov” |
| Dostoevsky | |
| Leo Tolstoy | “Anna Karenina” |
| Gustave Flaubert | “Salammbo” |
| Arthur Conan Doyle | “The Lost World” |
| Maxim Gorky | “Mother” |
| Czeslaw Milosz | “Native Realm” |
| Charles Peguy | “Basic Verities” |
| Tom Clark | “When Things Get Tough On Easy Street” |
| Florence Cohen | “The Monkey Puzzle Tree” |
| Erdoes and Ortiz, | “American Indian Myths |
| eds. | and Legends” |
| Edwin Muir | “An Autobiography” |
| Alice Munro | “The Beggar Maid” |
| Christopher Dawson | “The Making of Europe” |
| Gilbert Murray | “The Five Stages of Greek Religion” |
| Stuart Dybek | “Childhood and Other Stories” |
| Ryszard Kapuscinski | “Imperium” |
| William Blake | “Songs of Innocence and of Experience” |
| John Keats | “The Odes” |
| Gary Paul | “Songbirds, Truffles |
| Nabhan | and Wolves” |
| Alvaro Nunez | “Journals” (unabridged) |
| John L. Stephens | “Travels in Central America” (unabridged) |
| Robert D. Kaplan | “The Ends of the Earth” |
