Kitchen

The kitchen is by far the most interesting room in the house, simply because it has windows that face the back yard and it has a door, often left open, that opens to the breezeway. On late spring and summer nights, the kitchen becomes a photo studio for insects, who come inside because they are attracted to the light.

On October 4, 2013, I found a darkling beetle in the kitchen sink.

Click the photo to see it bigger!

On October 12, 2013, a green lacewing was resting on on of my cabinets.

I had an old square plastic tub that I used for my kitchen scraps. However, the tub lacked a lid, so when the weather got warmer in late spring, fruit flies would swarm around it. Here are some fruit flies on the scraps on May 7, 2014. I didn't get a scrap tub with a lid until spring 2017.

[More to come here...]

In the evening of March 24, 2017, I found a wall spider on top of the molding above my kitchen door and set up lights and a step stool to take its picture.

Click to see it bigger!

The kitchen is the route I usually take to the back yard. I try to leave my gardening shoes in the breezeway, but I often bring in dirt and leaves when I come inside. I sweep the floor every few days, resulting in a small pile of dust, leaves, and other back yard detritus.  This goes into my compost tub along with my veggie and fruit scraps.

The compost tub I have been using doesn't have a lid. As the weather gets warmer, crawl on scraps and fly above the tub until I empty it into my compost pile in the back yard.

When I bring in greens or lettuce from the garden, I often put them in a plastic bag unwashed and store them in the fridge. If I intend to eat or cook with them soon, I wash them before storing. I usually wash these greens in a large pot that I fill high enough for the greens to be covered, pour in some cheap white vinegar and swish the greens around in the water to remove dirt. I then take out the greens and dry them in a lettuce spinner. The washing water goes down the drain.

The greens I bring in often have spiders hiding in them. When one appears on my kitchen counter, I take its picture if it's a new species and gently take it back outside.

The Pantries

The kitchen has a two small pantries, one on top of the other. The top pantry stores mostly non-food items, but it does have various flours and meals in their original paper bags, which are sealed in plastic bags inside an old pot I no longer use for cooking. A couple years ago, I had a cockroach infestation, either of American cockroaches or smokybrown cockroaches. I put poison traps in the top pantry, and this seemed to kill all the roaches.

The bottom pantry stores my non-perishable food. I buy very little processed dry food, so the panty mostly has bottled vinegars and oils, along with bulk grains like rice, buckwheat, and barley. I keep cat food and my big pot at the bottom.

The Kitchen Windows

The kitchen windows are a place where a lot of insects stay. At night, moths and other insects who are attracted to light are prevented from entering the kitchen there and just stop there.  I have taken many photos of insects there, but it is hard to use autofocus because the camera wants to focus inside the kitchen. If I turn out the kitchen lights, the insects leave.

 The vent hole

In the cabinet above the range and microwave oven, a circular hole was once cut, presumably to put a vent pipe into the attic and through the roof. That was never done, so now there is a direct path between the kitchen and the attic. Dirt falls down into the cabinet, but I have never, as of June 2017, seen evidence of animals passing through there.