Whatever you do, don't spray them with fly spray. Keeping a sheet of newspaper on the top of the top tray helps also because the fruit flies cannot get down to the food. Completely burying your food in the bedding material will additionally help to discourage fruit flies.
You can try putting dry peat moss in the tray about ½ in thick and leave it dry for about three days. maybe it could be possible to co-exist with these little critters.įruit flies are a common nuisance, usually caused by food not being properly buried in the bedding material. Meanwhile, remember that earthworms are helping to fertilize your soil and make it healthy. If you know or hear of any other ways, please let us know. As it turned out, ever single farm was actually breeding E fetida and/or its very close relative E.We don’t know of any effective way to do this without the use of strong pesticides. rubellus isn’t used for composting nearly as much as some think.īack in 1988 scientists conducted a very interesting survey of numerous worm farms in Australia, Europe and the U.S., all of them claiming they were raising L. While I certainly won’t claim outright that these people are wrong, there is some evidence to indicate that L. In some cases even scientific names won’t help us out however – such as when the wrong one is being used! You can find many people claiming to be using Lumbricus rubellus (also called “Red Worms”) for composting. fetida is such a common species, there is probably a good chance that many bait stores are indeed carrying this worm (which may also be referred to as Tiger Worm, Brandling Worm, or Red Wiggler, among others), but it’s hard to say for sure without seeing the worms for yourself. The advantage of scientific names is that there is only one for each organism, and it’s universally used around the world – with the exception of cases where a former name is still in use after a new name as been declared – as is the case with the European Nightcrawler (Eisenia hortensis – formerly Dendrobaena veneta). I’m sure there are a lot of bait shops that carry ‘Red Worms’, but the question IS, how many of those shops have Eisenia fetida? That is a good question since it highlights the limitations of relying solely on ‘common names’. “Are red worms from a bait store the same as the red worms that I would order from gardening catalogs? Thanks,” ~ Sandy