November 3, 2015 - 5:36pm
Dealing with bugs
Okay, one bug. One little larvae of an insect that came out of my beautiful flour mill. I heeded the instruction to plug a tea bag up the shoot to prevent this very situation. I clean out the shoot each time I use the mill.
The instructions state not to use liquids, so boiling water and strong chemicals cannot be used. I read in this forum to scrub the mill or grind some rice to get rid of whatever is inside the mill.
Are tea bags sufficient? Should I use bay leaves?
Wisdom requested. I do not want to get rid of my lovely flour mill.
Next issue - buying wheat berries and storing them, preferably not in the freezer. They take up too much space. Seems like there is plenty of advice on this forum.
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what your mill looks like or how big it is, I must qualify this advice as questionable at best….but if you are going to throw out your grain mill over ONE bug….or lots of bugs for that matter….I will send you my address and the postage! : )
OK…so the one bug is gone and I assume you can open up the mill and look for more. Vacuum it out perhaps with a crevice tool or small brush that will be kept for this purpose only. Or use a can of compressed air like one would use on a keyboard. One bug is not worth boiling water or "strong chemicals" especially when you consider that so many bug parts per million are allowed in flour by health inspectors. Trust me….your wheat berries have a few bug bits as well.
After you clean the unit and it is bug-free, can you slip it into a large plastic bag and seal it away from small creatures looking for a suitable home? If the mill sits out on your countertop, you can cover the plastic bag with some cute fabric appliance cover. If you store it away, perhaps you can find an airtight plastic bin that would protect it from uninvited guests.
Storing the grains….well, a 5 gallon plastic bucket with an airtight "twist on" lid would be fine if kept in a cool and dry location in your house. The whole grains keep for a long time and don't require freezing. Wheatmontana.com sells wheat berries, buckets and bucket covers. Good luck!
A plastic bag isn't going to keep bugs out, they can easily eat through the plastic bag.
will gnaw through plastic, but the insect larvae I am familiar with probably would not. However, I am up north where bugs die or become dormant part of the year. I'm sure that in places where they can live year round they get smarter and tougher. Once when on vacation on Barbados, I tried to kill a cockroach with a shoe. It took several hits while the monstrous creature scoffed at my efforts.
I re-visited wheatmontana.com since it has been awhile, and found that they no longer sell storage buckets and such. They do sell wheat berries. Embth
Breadtopia does sell the food-grade storage buckets and twist-on lids that they recommend for storing wheat berries and the like.
- Eric
Hi 108 breads
It would be very helpful to know what mill you have, but lacking that info I would say...
So no liquids means no rubbing alcohol or hydrogen peroxide.
Bay leaves can be a deterant, but won't kill anything.
Tea bags, I never heard of.
Wrapping the mill up tight in a plastic bag, with no means of getting in or out, might solve the problem at that point.
But what would worry me is that if you found one, there are probably others. I would give the kitchen and your stores a good looking over. They can even live, breed and thrive under canned goods labels.
If this is the common flour moth, they do sell pherome attractant sticky pad traps at most hardware stores that seem to work pretty well at reducing the population.
My only other suggestion would be diatomaceous earth which you can get at most garden centers. It won't kill the eggs, but it will kill the hatchlings and adults. It is not a poison, but an abrasive irritant that cuts them up and leads them to become dehydrated, thus dead. Very effective stuff. Not very expensive and effective on ants, roaches, bedbugs, spiders, etc. But it will also kill beneficial insects, so be carefull (particularly in the garden).
And if you make sure it is food safe (which I guess it all would be, but call the manufacturer to be sure), you can run it thru your mill (in fact, you can stir it into your tea and drink it, it will not harm you), only any intestinal parasites you (or your pet) might have.
dobie
For storing wheat berries I use food grade plastic buckets with gamma lids and leave the grain in the bag they came in, inside the bucket.
As far as bugs, I haven't had any in mine, but would not get rid of my mill over it, I'd run a small amount of grain through and toss it before milling my flour. I don't use a tea bag.
After many encounters with bugs brought home in bulk foods from the health food store, I store nearly everything in canning jars so the inevitable bugs in one thing can't contaminate everything else. Ball jars come in up to half-gallon sizes (holding about 3 lbs bulk grain or beans), and you can use use a food saver with a special attachment to put the food under vacuum (I haven't had the food sealer long enough to be able to verify that things really do keep longer this way, but I think it helps). Grains, beans, seeds, miscellaneous sugars and starches, dried foods, etc. Larger quantities go into 5 gallon-sized food buckets as have already been mentioned, with no worries about vacuum--those are things that I use enough to have a reasonable turnover.
Place like Wheat Montana sell grains in #10 tin cans. That will keep your grain fresh for a long time and certainly will turn the bugs and mice away.