pantry Moths

[e&tsmom]

So, I have pantry moths. I have been scrubbing and vac-ing my kitchen for th last 2 days. I think they came in some flour ,since i have never seen them before but found little larve under the bag when I went to use it. I am totally grossed out. I looked it up and discovered that they can come in nearly everything that is not canned or jarred. They can even get into sealed bags. Everything I have that is not canned or jarred in now in my freezer - I read that they can be killed by freezing them for 4 days. But, what do I do with everythihng once I take the stuff from the freezer? I have chocolate, coffee, nuts, rice, barley, pasta noodles, bread crumbs, beans, raisins and other stuff in there. I read that i should store everything in airtight glass jars, which I already do (of course, after I open it, not before - though I will be now!), but what if it has been in the freezer? Wont it be all moist and cause mold on the shelf? Help!!! I hate to throw away all this food, but I am not sure how to go about thawing all this stuff. I figured I could just store everythign in there all the tim esince the thought if bugs makes me insane, but DH thinks it will make everything not taste fresh. Is there any reason to think that it would taste like it came from the freezer??

[staceychev]

I feel your pain. It's been an off-and-on battle for us since we moved into this house 2.5 years ago. I keep my flour in the freezer and don't notice a difference... but then again, I don't use a lot of flour and I'm not the biggest expert in that. My nose can tell if it's rancid, but...

I mostly freeze my grains and then bring them back out into jars (sometimes... sometimes they stay in the freezer, too_. I haven't noticed a mold problem... but they're in plastic bags when they go into the freezer, so that might keep the moisture out.

Good luck in your battles!

[Hedgehog Mtn]

I freeze everything in jars if I can, 1/2 gal and gallon jars work well. Then take them out and open as little as possible. For larger (think 25-50lb) containers I sprinkle DE on top, this works best for whole grains like wheat berries, corn etc or beans....works less for flours. I have a couple pantry moth traps in the kitchen and they collect a bunch but I doubt all of them.

If I wasn't off-grid I would buy a huge freezer and store all my stuff in there all the time but I can't power another large freezer :-(

[La Sombra]

Bane of my existence! I think we've gone through this battle two or three times now in this house...it seems just when I get lax and stop worrying about them they reappear. Indeed: they can get into EVERYTHING. I even found them in a sealed canister of steel-cut oatmeal! AND they got into my (apparently not airtight) glass jars.

I started freezing everything, too, which was a pain because now my freezer was full of flours and grains and cereal and nuts and all this stuff that takes up a ton of room. I never had a mold problem taking stuff out, never at all.

The important thing for getting rid of them, I guess, is keeping your stuff in the freezer for a GOOD LONG WHILE. Because their life-cycles are actually quite long and when you think you've killed them all by putting the food they're in in the freezer, what you will find is that they have, I don't know, a nest or something somewhere (you'll probably never find exactly where) and they were just waiting for you to bring their food out so they could repopulate. They reproduce SO quickly. You need to starve them for a good long before you can be sure that EVERY SINGLE ONE has died before you can bring your food back out.

And in the meantime, scrub and bleach every surface of the kitchen or wherever you store food. Moth traps might not be a bad idea, either--ours never caught a whole lot of them, but some.

Good luck, it's such a pain!

[JTA Mom]

Just bring out the bags on the counter for a few hours to 'thaw'. There will be condensation on the outside of the bag, but none on the inside. Then put them in airtight containers, glass or plastic.

If it helps any, divide up all my beans/grains/etc into those big gallon ziplocks to freeze in batches (I have a small freezer). I've only heard of needing to freeze for 3 days though. I hope that's right!

Ami