In alt.home.repair, on Fri, 28 May 2021 12:02:11 -0500, Jim Joyce
wrote:

On Fri, 28 May 2021 10:01:13 -0400, Ed Pawlowski wrote:

On 5/28/2021 5:53 AM, micky wrote:
Do I have to wash fruit and vegetables I grow myself if I haven't used
pesticide? Haven't used anything.

Right now it's cherries.

I used to have two apple trees but they were killed by cedar apple rush.

Some ugly bushes are dying so I may plant something else too, but now
I'm mostly concerned about cherries.


Washing gets the soot and bird **** off of them.

As a kid, I didn't wash anything. Bird **** and spider webs would warrant a
quick rub across the thigh of my dirty jeans or the front of my even
dirtier t-shirt. Stuff that came out of the ground, like carrots, radishes,
and horseradish, just got a few rubs to remove most of the dirt. On
multiple occasions, I bit into an apple and found a live worm at the core.
Once I bit into an apple and found half of a worm, writhing in pain because
the other half of his body just got cut off. I still finished eating the
apple.

You're my kind of guy.

The other day I opened one of those little boxes of raisins and it was
alive with little worms. Hundreds of them. I googled it and G said
essentially all raisins have the eggs, so it's just a matter of time
whether they hatch or not. You can soak the raisins in a bowl of water,
slightly salted is even better, to encourage the worms to swim for safety.
Strawberries have the same problem and the same solution - a bowl of salt
water.

I used to eat raisins all the time, an 12oz. box every day. Never sow
worms. I wouldn't have thought to use water. I would have spread them
out and blown on the worms to get them to leave. That works with gnats
on bananas when you leave them partly eaten for a few hours.


How come as kids we didn't need to wash anything before sticking it in our
mouth but as adults we do? Is it mostly social conditioning?

Absolutely. If you dont' associate with other people, you can avoid
most of it.