Food as Pesticide

Just a reminder: you've got three perfect pesticides in your kitchen.

Cinnamon repels sweet ants, the ones that like your kitchen and other wet areas best. A crucially placed stick will make them retreat. Ground cinnamon will too but it's a mess to clean up when you're done. The logic of this trick is simple: cinnamon is actually tropical tree bark, and as we now know, plants will secrete chemicals to protect themselves from predators, in this case crawling ants.


Chili pepper flakes sprinkled all over your flower garden will keep voles, groundhogs and other four legged munchers out once they got a hot bite.
And the good news is the chili pepper flakes won't hurt the plants or the critters.
Again the logic is simple: that heat in those chili peppers, stored in its seeds, contain a powerful chemical developed by the plant to protect itself from predators.

And finally, what to do with that little sip of leftover red wine from last night: put it in a shallow bowl or cup and leave it out on the kitchen counter for 24 hours. It will trap and drown all those annoying fruit flies you can't seem to get rid of just when you want to leave all those luscious fruits and tomatoes on the counter and not have to put them in the fridge to kill their ripening and flavoring. The logic: wine is from fruit and it's sugary and that's what attracts those little buggers.