The Beloved Summer Pastime of Eradicating Pantry Moths

I don't think I ever blogged about our pantry moths.

Actually, I know I didn't. Because I remember starting a post about them and then thinking, "this is just too embarrassing!" and I never posted it.

So, here I am, posting about it now. Because it's been a year and we're still dealing with them, and I don't care how gross it is, I NEED HELP.

When I advertise that we live in an urban cottage, it's pretty much true. By square footage it's bigger than a cottage, but it has a very cottagy feel with it's low ceilings, it's non-minimalist decor, and it's shabbiness. It also has a lot of flaws, and a lot of bugs. We live in a very damp area of the river valley and so we have a constant ant problem (when an area entomologist was consulted it was basically a "too bad for you, you're never getting rid of them" scenario) among other crawly things. We just have a lot of bugs, and since they aren't snakes (further up the hill in both directions there are tons of snakes!) or bats (I love bats, but not in my house,) I consider myself lucky.

Last summer I came out one night from putting the girls to bed to find Martin watching something on the wall above our little freestanding pantry in kitchen. He said, "Look at this little inchworm. It started out way down here, and now it's all the way up here!" He was really impressed by the progress of this little yellow "inchworm."

I took a look. Oh, gag. "Um, that's not an inchworm. O-M-G. Martin, that's a maggot." I was horrified. I almost threw up. I'm can take a lot of grossness, but maggots making their way up my kitchen wall is about at the limit of what I can handle. And then it got worse. We looked around the corner and saw a whole collection of them crawling along the hallway ceiling. I was ready to light a match and burn the house down right then and there.

At first I was too disgusted to even think, but after the maggots had all been flushed, I considered the problem and where it could be coming from. We didn't have flies, or any other critters that I would necessarily consider maggoty. The only thing we really had a lot of were ants and moths.

Oh, MOTHS.

Then I realized that part of our glorious summer (last summer was really a great one) had been spent admiring the moths in the pantry. Every time I'd open the pantry door a little host of moths would flutter out. Sometimes we'd catch them and release them outside the kitchen door, but mostly we just let them be because the girls and I thought they were sweet and beautiful, and what harm could a moth do, anyway?

WE KEPT THEM BECAUSE I AM THE BIGGEST IDIOT. THAT'S WHY.

You guys, I didn't know about pantry moths. I didn't know they were a thing, so when I was living in harmony with the moths in my pantry, I had no idea that they were eating and pooping and birthing in my dry goods. I HAD NO IDEA. I don't even remember what clued me into the idea of pantry moths, but Google can solve all the problems of the world and it was discovered that that was our problem. We stayed up half the night clearing out the pantry and finding little collections of webs and *more maggots* on every shelf. (Even just writing this is making my skin crawl and it was almost a year ago. You can see why I was embarrassed to talk about it!) Then we were absolute crazy people about keeping moths out of the pantry and out of our life.

Except, it's not an easy fix. The good news is, they've remained confined to what we call "the bird room," which is the bedroom next to the kitchen where we keep our parakeets. I'm pretty sure that the Bird Room is where these nasty things emerged from in the first place, in some batch of long-ago purchased birdseed. And since we don't keep any of our people food in that room, it's better that the problem be there than in our kitchen, but STILL. I would rather the problem be GONE. Almost every day I go into that room and kill between fifteen and fifty pantry moths. I kill all that I can see. And then the next day THEY'RE BACK. I have no idea where they're coming from and no idea how to stop them. Are we getting more with each new bag of birdseed we buy? Will they not be eradicated until the parakeets are all dead? And don't parakeets live for practically ever?!?

This morning when we were cheerfully getting ready for our day, Ingrid and I spied a moth outside the bird room. Then there were more--there were about six moths fluttering around in the hallway and we went into full attack mode. She had her strip of toilet paper and I had my tennis-racquet bug zapper thingy and we tackled the problem without mercy. They just kept appearing. They are worse than they've ever been and I'm losing my mind over it. While it's pretty cute to see Ingrid excitedly leaping around in her undies trying to nab moths with her tiny bit of toilet paper and her poor coordination, I really wouldn't miss giving up this summertime activity.

And so, in closing, this blog post is not offering any words of wisdom or hope for the future. IT IS BEGGING FOR YOUR HELP, MY READERS, BEFORE I TOTALLY LOSE IT OVER THESE BLASTED MOTHS. PLEASE GIVE ME ANY AND ALL TRICKS OR REMEDIES YOU HAVE EVER HEARD OF FOR RIDDING A HOUSE OF PANTRY MOTHS FOREVER!

I will be forever grateful.

P.S. You may remember last summer that I did post about our bout with lice. One of the reasons I was embarrassed to post about our moth problem was that the moths and the lice were happening at the same time. Imagine finding maggots on your ceiling and bugs living in your daughters' hair within days of each other. If my self confidence as a clean human had been low before, you can imagine how far down in the dungeon it was dwelling during those weeks of infestation. Yeesh!