The tiniest little flies that multiply in the blink of an eye!  

Fruit Flies, agh!  They manage to get right in your face or buzz loudly by your ear and you clap at them to try and kill them and they elude you. 

It's as if they appeared out of thin air, but they sniffed their way to your fruit bowl or hitched a ride from the grocery store bin.  Fruit flies grow from larvae to adult in 8 days.  They could have been in a tiny imperfection on a piece of fruit you recently bought since they are attracted to over ripened and rotting fruit.  These tiny pests can smell it from miles away.  So if something is picked a little too late, it could already have fly larvae somewhere on it.  

To avoid them, be sure to wash your fruit and veggies as soon as you bring them home.  In the summer, wash them outside if you can for added safeguard.  Also, storing your produce in a closed container, or refrigerating it is supposed to prevent fruit fly invasions.

But if you have been swarmed, you can make traps with apple cider vinegar using a bowl or a small water bottle and a baggie.  Pour an inch of apple cider vinegar in the bottom of the container you want to use, snip a tiny corner off the baggie and place over top the container with the corner you snipped off on top.  Push the corner down to create a funnel, that way the flies can go in but not get out.  Place the trap where you notice the majority of the flies congregating and you should soon be trapping them!

With the cold weather here there is a lot more time to read!  A good book, magazines, tons of web pages dedicated to VINEGAR.  I was going to do a short piece for de-icing your windshield with ease, and in my research I found vinegar to be the main ingredient for a homemade de-icer.  They say to mix 3 parts vinegar to one part water in a spray bottle, spray all the glass on the outside of the car with the mixture and then squeegee or use a rag to wipe it off the night before.  This is supposed to if not totally eliminate the forming of the frost, make it so that it is not as thick, and easier to melt away once you start the car.  Another way to avoid a frosty windshield, is to park with the windshield facing east...  Hope your compasses are handy.  

So back to vinegar.  Vinegar was a happy accident, something discovered over 10,000 years ago in France.  Vinegar is an acidic liquid formed by a 2 step fermentation process of sugary substances.  The first vinegar discovered was an old cask of wine that had fermented into a different type of liquid that was found to be incredibly versatile, and in turn was one of the earliest remedies used.  

There are literally thousands of uses for vinegar.  Vinegar is used for food preparation, as a natural cleaning product, it is a great deodorizer and even a hair and skin product, oh and a de-icing agent!  

I know I have piqued your interest.  Go ahead, look up VINEGAR!  Have fun.

-Nicole