It's spring! I need to start planting seeds. In the solarium, my lilac bush is leafing out, my geraniums have new leaves and even my lobelia, which I thought was dead, is blooming. It's time!

I put the fruit fly infested dirt outside to freeze. But when reflecting on fruit flies and their unwillingness to die, I decided maybe freezing them wasn't enough. So, yesterday I carefully brought in the containers of dirt with snow on top. I thawed them and then I started scooping the dirt into a nice Easter colored casserole dish. I popped the dish into the microwave like I was preparing some elegant mud pie and zapped it for 5 minutes. It came out steaming and hot, but it didn't really smell all that great.

I was sure that would do it and no new bugs could have lived, but I wasn't ready for what I found when the mud pie cooled. I started scooping that mud pie into the big, fresh dirt container. Yes, the smell. It was bad, but I assumed that's just the smell of freshly cooked dirt, or worm poop, depending on your perspective. Wanna know what I found at the bottom? Nice, big, fat red wigglers cooked to perfection. They were kinda transparent around the edges and really, really soggy worms. Somehow they had snuck through and ended up in the dirt pile instead of the worm pile.

I instantly flashed to my childhood and mom reading the book How to Eat Fried Worms. If I would have had a child near by to gross out, I might have picked it up and held it to my lips, but luckily, I was alone. I turned my head and scraped them into the fresh dirt pile. But. . .sterilizing dirt from now on, I know, will take nose plugs!

Who knew bananas would cause such a problem in our house. We were leaving town and there were two old bananas. What we do with all of our kitchen scraps is to dump them down the composter, which happens to be our toilet as well. When we came home, our house was filled with fruit flies.

Fruit flies are difficult to impossible to get rid of in a regular house, but in this house, it may just be something we living with. We've purchased fruit fly traps, sprays, left glasses of wine out, so they can drown. Almost everything.

Just when I thought things were under control, I went down to the basement to the worm farm (not the same as the toilet) to get some dirt to do some early planting. Fresh worm dirt is so nutritious for plants. Anyway, I had to sort the worms out of the dirt. A tickley, squiggly job, but kind of fun when you start finding all the stuff that worms won't eat---like the top of a pumpkin stem.

Then turning over the next section of composted dirt, I discovered hundreds of little white eggs. Yes, they were fly eggs. I'm at a loss of what to do. I don't want to throw out the dirt, but I don't want to bring dirt in the house with more fruit flies.

Right now it's outside freezing. How hardy are those little critters? I also have the idea of microwaving them. That ought to work, right?

Oh the trials and tribulations. . . . .or as son Keith would say, "The harder it is, the better the story is that you can tell!"