We all need to do what we can
It's been so dry that 1) I got no mulberries from my tree, 2) I got bigger apples than ever from my tree (no, NOT from the mulberry tree, from the APPLE tree), and 3) I wasn't reminded of the public service announcement aspect of these posts. All three of these may have been the result of other factors but don't let me get distracted from my mission. I know it is waayyy out of chronological order but this is a public safety issue.
When you leave a spoon in the sink,
prop it on its edge so it won't
hold water, which will keep the
mosquitoes from developing
4 comments:
Ladies Home Journal would be wise to take note of your household tip - compile enough of them and you could single-handedly outpublish them.
Your suggestion, however, creates a dilemma. I have been known to leave a small amount of water in the sink at night to round-up crickets that have made their way into the house - I don't know why, but it works. The mosquitoes bite, but the chirping from the crickets is grating at 4:00 in the morning. Choices, choices.
Enjoy your blog - please tell Baggy to stop monopolizing all your time so the rest of us have something to read.
Thanks, Driving With the Brakes On. This brings up an important issue about household safety. Many environmental factors have a bearing on how useful a tip is in any particular setting. Except when I'm asking people to blindly implement my suggestions, I'm not asking people to blindly implement my suggestions. I usually just offer my tips as being just widely, not necessarily universally, applicable. Let's take your common example of also wanting to attract crickets to the sink to see how a more complicated situation leads to a weighing of factors that may lead in turn to alternate safety measures in light of priorities/risks.
First let's look at some environmental factors that could affect the weight one might apply to the mosquito abatement tip, Is your sink indoors or outdoors? If outdoors, is your sink portable? If so, it might be better to just move the sink to a consistently breezy area where mosquitoes are less likely to congregate and take advantage of the standing water in spoons for breeding. If not, you can do as I sometimes do and use a "kitchen spritzer" (available from Pampered Chef) to spray a mist of olive oil into the sink, which will leave a thin oil sheen on the standing water in spoons and other items, which is sufficient to prevent mosquito eggs from getting into the water or larvae that hatch from getting out.
If your sink is indoors, (as your example implies) how confident are you that your use of doors/windows/screens is effectively preventing the unwanted ingress of wild mosquitoes? If confidence is low, do you keep domesticated mosquitoes indoors? If you do, especially, those new "menthol" mosquitoes that give cool refreshing bites, remember that they are sterile and the odds of a wild mosquito mating with another wild mosquito in the face of the much larger number of domesticated mosquitoes is very small, and you can leave standing water almost indiscriminately. Even so, if you are cautious, you might experiment with applying the light oil sheen, to guard against the lone, wild, already mated mosquito, and see if you can still attract the crickets. Then again, do you live with things that are likely to carry West Nile virus, malaria, dengue fever, etc (such as wild birds or old retired people who travel a lot)? If not, it may be another reason to maximize the cricket measure at the expense of a calculated low risk of mosquito transmitted disease problems.
Starting on a whole different tack, how big are the spoons you are leaving in the sink (whether indoors or outdoors)? Big enough to support a tiny fish of some sort? The point is that we don't want the mosquito larvae that hatch to emerge from the water and a hungry fish can take care of that, plus you have fresh fish on hand all the time for use as toppings on ice cream or as reminders to any of your pet fish that are being mean to you that they are "this close" to being replaced by fish that pull their weight when it comes to household chores.
It goes on and on--and that's just looking at the mosquito side of the issue. After an equally rigorous look at the cricket side, if you are still in a virtual tie with offsetting factors, consider this. At some point, we must all pick our poison--something's going to get us. You may simply need to decide whether you'd rather take the low risk of an agonizing but relatively quick death, courtesy of a mosquito, or being slowly driven insane, over time, by chirping crickets.
whoa. I'll have to schedule "read Glenn's comments to other people" for my day tomorrow.
"After an equally rigorous look at the cricket side" ... Well? Can't you do that? You did such a great job with the mosquito side of the issue.
I do have to say that the fish in spoon thought is a really good one. Although I think I would only use it to scare my other fish into behaving.
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