"A SHIFT OF THOUGHT"

Fruit is full of nutrients and very healthy to eat.

We eat a lot of fruit. I was keeping the fruit in baskets on my kitchen bench on a small shelf I had made with nails for legs. I put each leg in a lid of talcum powder. The dry talcum powder works well as the ants can't walk in the powder, so it stops them from getting onto the fruit in the baskets. I kept the ants off the fruit, but this wet season we were swamped with vinegar flies looking for a feed.

The vinegar flies sat on the walls, benches, sink, lights, fridge, just everywhere and they kept dirtying my kitchen windows.

Photo of hanging fruit baskets.

Well, I didn't want to spray. I even shooed them out the window with the paper, but with a blink of an eye they were back. Then the cockroaches decided to move in. We'd come home at night and spend half an hour being nice to cockroaches. Well, this was not working too well. I still would not resort to poison.

I thought a bit, and guess what? A brainwave: "Shift the fruit, veges, the lot out on to the patio".

How can I keep the furry animals etc. from getting at the fruit?

Rosie had given me some macrame which I hung in the tree with a plate instead of a pot to feed the birds. I decided to make up something similar with rope. I measured, doubled the rope and doubled the rope again, tied a few overhead knots, hung the rope on nails and put the baskets in places, filled the baskets with fruit and covered the fruit with food covers to stop the birds eating the fruit. I greased the top of the rope with vaseline to stop the ants crawling down the rope.

So far, the fruit being out in the open air on the patio has kept the vinegar flies from annoying me! The little animals have not found the fruit! The ants are going other places and the birds are behaving themselves and only eating out of their food bowl!

Photo of Christine Gray.

It is really nice to pick out a fruit from the hanging baskets!

To start a day in a healthy way, we always have breakfast on the patio while we feed the birds. I don't have to carry the fruit very far to the patio table and there are no more vinegar flies in the house, and the cockroaches are being eaten at night by the bat. The bat - well, he sleeps in the storeroom. I have to change his mat every morning. He has been sleeping there 15 years now - but at least he is tidy!

Christine Gray

DATE: May 1991

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