Fruit Flies--How to Avoid Them

Culture, Media, General
1

I know how to get rid of fruit flies (eventually), but is there some way to avoid bringing them into the house in the first place? I suppose I could stop buying produce at farm stands, but I was hoping I could still get good produce without fruit flies colonizing my house. :frowning:

2

I imagine washing produce as soon as you get it home would do the trick. Try dish soap, since it, plus water and vinegar, are the trap ingredients.

3

Keep fruits/produce in the fridge, only take them out an hour or two before consuming.

Place certain scented herbs around the room or add a few drops of essential oils to a diffuser. Try using lavender, mint, rosemary, basil, eucalyptus, clove, or lemongrass.

4

The CDC (and others) recommend against washing produce with dish soap.

5

I wash all produce. Hard skins that are not edible get washed with a bit of dishsoap. Leafies and the rest get a good rinse in a mildly acidulated water I keep in an old vinegar jug. Then rinsed in plain old tap water. Items labeled ‘prewashed’ get the full wash treatment regardless of their ‘prewashed’ label.

6

Household fruit flies don’t bother me. They seem to disappear as fast as they arrive. I understand Santa Clara county in California is having a problem with the agricultural ones. I remember the days of BT Collins and the malathion helicopters in the Bay Area.

7

Are you doing that specifically for fruit flies, or are you mostly concerned about pesticides?

1 Like
8

I wash the produce for food borne illness reasons, but pesticides are a concern, too. I just read that Contra Costa county is now on fruit fly watch.

1 Like
9

More important than all of it is to keep your drains and trash can clean.

They will breed in the drain and especially in any residue in the disposal.

A lidded trash can will keep them away from apple cores and banana skins.

2 Likes
10

This is me, too. One downside I find with locally grown produce, which hasn’t been through a supply chain, is that it’s more alive. Literally, LOL. Especially when the farmer uses no or minimal pesticides. The local stuff offers us better flavor and variety so we stick with it as much as possible.

11

I have a lidded trash can, but it’s not hermetically sealed. :frowning_face: I do put wet garbage that doesn’t go through the disposal into sealed plastic bags.

12

Stop buying bananas :woman_shrugging:t2:

“Fruit flies are built to find fermenting fruit. Though small, they can detect the smell of ripe fruits and vegetables from a good distance away; if there’s a bowl of fruit on your kitchen counter, there’s probably a fruit fly or two looking for a way into your home to get to it.”

https://www.thoughtco.com/where-do-fruit-flies-come-from-1968433#:~:text=Fruit%20Flies%20Follow%20Fermenting%20Fruit&text=Fruit%20flies%20are%20built%20to,home%20to%20get%20to%20it.

13

Our city has mandated food waste disposal in bins supplied by our trash company. During the extreme heat here in SoCal the container they supplied to keep in your kitchen drew tons of tiny gnats/flies, most of which I think are fruit flies. We can’t use even biodegradable plastic bags (trash company won’t allow them) so we keep brown paper bags in the indoor bin and transfer to the pickup bin that has to be kept in our garage. We also use a blue-light plug-in sticky trapper near where the inside bin is kept. Now that it’s cooler the problem is minor, but it was really annoying when it was 90°+ every day.

14

I definitely suspected the bananas (rather than the tomatoes, which were the only other unrefrigerated items). I’m not sure what the supermarket does to their bananas, but we don’t seem to get fruit flies from them, only from “farmers’ markets”–though I don’t think the farmers around here actually grow bananas).

1 Like
15

Online articles recommend the wash in mild vinegar solution for preservation. My guess is that this should deter or get rid of possible fruit flies too. I have a home compost machine, so after a few days that thing sometimes attracts fruit flies too. I find anything moist often has that problem - tomatoes, and usually the discarded parts of fruits.

1 Like
16

It doesnt matter where your produce comes from, fruit flies will come if you let the fruit spoil and ferment. Just the least brown or soft spot on a tomato or apple at room temp and you will see fruit flies start to develop/appear.
Also, unless fruit (including tomatoes) is fully ripe it should not be refrigerated since it will not complete its ripening in the frig. Once its ripe sure refrigerate it, but the issue really a housekeeping and aesthetic issue, with fruitbowls, trash and drain maintenancebeing essential .

17

But I wonder if they are just attracted to ethylene gas from ripening? Not necessarily rotting.

1 Like
18

^^ This is the hypothesis I have too.

Fruit (including tomatoes) only have to be ripe, not even overly soft, for fruit flies to appear on occasion with my non-refrigerated summer CSA produce. The grocery store stuff I can buy is never ideally ripe and I don’t know for sure about pesticide use. Bananas—you mentioned upthread—are the only supermarket produce on which fruit flies have hitched a ride into my kitchen (that I can detect).

19

epicurious’ word on this

somewhere between “ripe” and spoiling
I dont feel I have problems until my fruit starts to get soft or brown spots. I guess that is overripe (or else bruised which speeds up the decay process.

1 Like
20

I noticed several spots of friut flies in my grocer’s produce section the other day. Grapes, pineapple and thr peaches and nectarines all were landing spots.