How to make an earwig trap

I seem to be getting a lot of earwigs in what passes for my garden, and while I wasn't aware they caused damage, I've since learned that they chew leaves, and can also be a problem on citrus trees.

My lemon tree is looking a bit battle scarred, partly because of a hail storm we had a while back that gave it a pummeling, but I have a feeling there's some new scarring too, and I've seen earwigs on the tree.

And some flowers I planted with the boys have also been given the once over by a chewing insect, some leaves are down to the midribs, and I have seen earwigs sometimes when I move potted plants.

A remedy for earwigs was presented to me when I was watching Gavin from The Greening Of Gavin.

Gavin was giving a tour of his garden for a local gardening show, when he mentioned his home made earwig traps.

After leaving Gavin a comment and getting the info straight from the man himself, I set to and made a few traps myself.

How to make an earwig trap

Take a small glass jar and pour about an inch of water in the bottom.

Next, pour about a bit less than an inch of olive oil on top of the water.

Like so:

The theory is they are attracted to the olive oil, then they get coated in it and drown

This is an old baby food jar, back from the days of my first babe before I knew better. These work perfectly, salsa jars or small jam jars would work well too.

Bury your jar so that the top lip is level with the ground and leave it alone.

Send the kids to check it every couple of days, mine love to do it.

There ya go, easy.

So far, we've caught earwigs, cockroaches (YUCK, my least favourite bug, so I'm pretty happy to be snaring them, that means there's less to come inside), a few millipedes, the odd slater and what looked like a couple of house flies.

We reset the traps today, after a weekends worth of rain overflowed one of them and put a new one right underneath the lemon tree.

Can't wait to see what we catch.

Zero Food Waste Challenge: soaked granola

Over at Penniless Parenting, Penny has set a Zero Food Waste Challenge and has given out an invite to everyone to join in.

She recently made a good looking banana peel chutney....wow....that to me is the epitome of non-wastage of food.

It made me think about what I do with leftovers and the throw away bits, apart from feed them to my worm farm of course.

One thing I have figured out what to with is left-over breakfasts.

I don't give my kids processed breakfast cereals, I'm more of a give 'em eggs, fruit, nuts, smoothies, yoghurt type of gal.

BUT, they do like cereal, in a bowl, covered with milk (because I did used to give them this sometimes....the less sugared varieties...but you'd be darn surprised to find out how much sugar the less-sugared varieties actually contain, among other undesirable things. Or maybe not so surprised).

So now, when they want cereal, I've got them used to eating plain oats.

Well, soaked oats actually, as per Weston A. Price. Sometimes they eat them soaked and cold, sometimes they request porridge.

Now, I'm not such a fan of eating cold soaked oats, or porridge for that matter but the kids think they're just fine, and that's what matters at breakfast time here.

As for the leftovers, I'm loath to throw them out as I buy organic oats in bulk and organic raw milk, and those little suckers are just a wee bit exxcy. To make myself feel like I'm getting the most bang from my buck, I scrap any left over porridge and pour any left over oats-in-milk into small containers and stash them in the freezer.

Like this.

Looks good, right? Kinda like pre-digested, um, oats. Erk.

When I have a decent amount (or when I need to free up some freezer space or containers) I make this soaked granola. I won't write it out here, because CheeseSlave has written it up beautifully, instructions and all.

I do make a couple of changes though and over all, the recipe is very forgiving with exact quantities.

One change is the amount of sweetener.....1/4 cup honey or maple syrup PLUS 1/4 cup rapadura is rather sweet. But folks have different levels of enjoyment when it comes to sweetening, so go with what you prefer. I use the honey/maple syrup with maybe a tablespoon or so of rapadura, and really only because I enjoy the brown sugar taste of rapadura.

I don't usually have that much in the way of soaked seeds and nuts so I never put in two cups, I just up the amount of oats and maybe throw in some flax seeds.

Also, because of the fact I'm using un-measured left over amounts of oats (and milk, which is not in the recipe) mine is sometimes wetter so I'll stir in more coconut or oats. I did say the recipe is forgiving of changes, right?

Mmm mmmm, here it is, the picture courtesy of CheeseSlave:

It's good for snacking on, as well as dousing in milk and scooping up with a spoon.

Yum yum!

Another free cycle score

Say hello to our swing set, courtesy of a lovely family in our 'burb who no longer wanted it.

My boys are more than happy to give it some love!

Summer's nearly here

And that brings its own set of challenges, living with a hubby and two small energetic boys in a small house on a small peice of land in the middle of the 'burbs.

No creeks to paddle in and they're not allowed to run through sprinklers in these days of water restrictions.

What to do to keep us (me and the kids really as hubby gets the luxury of working in an airconditioned office, well, it's a luxury when it's stinking hot outside, otherwise not perhaps) coolish and entertained-ish? I'm all for the boys entertaining themselves but for the sake of sanity, I sometimes need an activity that doesn't involve the words "it's MINE!/I had it!/I want it/he did it first/go away!/RRRAAAAHHHH!". (I'm hoping that's just a stage)

So, yesterday afternoon....hottest day so far..... saw us having a water fight.

Not a really wet and annoying type of water fight, but an everyone-has-a-squirty-bottle type water fight. The kids stripped down to as little as I'd let them get away with (considering we're playing out the front so passers-by are inadvertently entertained) and we all ran round like mad, hot things.

This is an ideal type of water fight as the possibility to get really drenched is very slim, the bottles don't shoot all that far, they don't fire a lot of water at once and even my 2 yr old could join in....no air-pump action required.

And they don't break down.

And they're cheap to purchase.

In my books, squirty bottles (do they have an official name?) are an essential part of your thrifty, summer, keep-the-kids-out-of-mischief outdoor equipment stash.

The other thing that I plan to do a lot of this summer is make...and eat...lots of healthy-ish, home made icypoles/popsicles.

I started off with a mango sorbet made in my beloved thermomix the day before...

And the leftovers went into the molds I purchased last summer for this express purpose.

Ahh, what more could you ask for on a hot day?

Well, apart from a creek to splash in or a sprinkler to run through perhaps, but we're making sure to love what we DO have, not pine for what what we don't.

Roll on summer!

More wormies on the way....or...Free nutrition for your garden!

The worm farm I bought a few months back is in full production, I have both trays going and the worms are doing a great job. I get worm juice from it regularly to put on my plants and I've been digging out some of the castings lately to add to plants I'm potting up.

I love the fact that I'm not having to purchase fertiliser (organic or otherwise) and I also LOVE the fact that there is less green foody type waste going out in our bin.

But I haven't been able to put all our fruit and veg scraps in there, solely because we produce a lot more of them than my two trays of worms can get through in a reasonable time.

And, I would like more castings. I have been potting up a lot of plants (all fruit trees are going in pots so I can take them with me when we move, hopefully in the next year or two. The moving deadline has been put waaaaay back.) and have been having to purchase soil to do this. I have added castings to some pots which pads out the soil I've bought, as well as adding more nutrition to the pots. But I would like to increase this.

So, very exciting hehe, I've just taken receipt of these babies today:

Two more trays to add to my worm farm!

I am ridiculously happy that they've arrived (not sure what that says about my place in life, that I'm jumping for joy at two plastic trays) and can't wait to set them up.

And the kids are getting a lot of mileage out of the large cardboard box they came in, so we're all happy.

Wanna see my pets?

I think I promised a picture of all my molding, worm chewed kitchen scraps a while back, so here it is/they are....

You may want to enlarge it to see properly.

Or maybe not.

Those bright stripes are sunlight, and the worms disappear into the muck pretty darn quickly once they're exposed to it. I may have to relocate the whole shebang during the summer, I'm not quite sure how much sun this particular corner gets.

Very cool, huh?

Or is it just me..........

Non-pumpkiny glass jar Jack-o-lantern (yes late, I know)

This craft was not meant to look like it does, it was meant to look like this... (oops, just noticed that blog has been made invite only, sorry, ignore the link)

which is an Autumn leaf lantern. Although being spring, I was going to try it with the new spring growth leaves, hoping they would have the translucency needed.

However, it looks like this:

which I actually think is rather cool too.

One nasty, Jack-o-lantern type thingy.

This was entirely Mr 5's idea: as I was trying to drag him outside on a leaf hunt, he was dead set on creating his own piece of Halloween.

Seeing as we don't celebrate Halloween AT ALL.

Although I did whip up a batch of cupcakes for pre-school and pipe spider webs onto them.

And made a few of these bats too, just for fun.

But really, we don't celebrate it widely here in Australia, which I'm glad for, just to avoid the candy overload that seems to occur.

However, Mr 5 very much likes the idea of Jack-o-lanterns, whereas I have absolutely NO desire to go round carving evil faces in pumpkins.

So we got the jars ready for our leaves, then he dragged out the crepe paper, got dad to cut out a suitably ugly countenance, glued it on, found a candle, stuck it onto the bottom of the jar, got dad to light it, drew all the curtains and called me to come and see.

Cool, huh?

I might be able to stretch to Jack-o-lanterns every year if we follow this formula.

No icky pumpkin covered hands required.

Boo!