How To Keep Your Kitchen Free From Pests

Your kitchen is your favorite spot in the house. It is where you express your creativity in your cooking and feed your family. It’s your family’s gathering place and where much of your home life is lived.

Unfortunately, pests also love to spend their time in your kitchen. After all, this is where they have easy access to the food they need to survive. Cockroaches, fruit flies, rodents and more will be attracted to the food and cooking residue and can ruin your otherwise perfect kitchen.

It’s not only a nuisance, it is also unsafe. Many of the creatures bring disease with them and can spoil your food before you even get a chance to eat it.

In this article, I will go over how you can get rid of pests from your kitchen and keep it pest free going forward.

1 – Get it professionally treated

Sure, you can go to the supermarket and pick up some bug spray and feel like you’ve solved the problem. The reality is that there is more going on behind the scenes that you may not see and your home remedy might not work effectively.

If you want to be 100% sure then you should hire a professional to come and take a look at the situation. An exterminator Tampa or wherever you live can come and use their tools and expertise to identify how bad your infestation is and take measures to eradicate it.

They will be able to give you advice on how to create a pest free kitchen afterwards too.

2 – Preventative measures

The best way to deal with pests is to ensure they don’t get in to begin with. Prevention is always the best way to solve a problem even before it happens.

There are a few ways that you can make sure that your kitchen is not a welcoming area for bugs and rodents.

First, start by making sure they can’t enter your house. And not just the kitchen as they will make a beeline for the kitchen as soon as they get in. This is where they will find the food so it doesn’t matter where they enter the house.

Go around the perimeter of the house and look for any cracks. You can usually find some spots where bugs and rodents can get in where the foundation meets the walls. Also around any electrical boxes and the eaves and around gutters.

Also, check around the roof as there could be spots around the chimney and vents where bugs and even squirrels can get inside your home.

Seal up these cracks and you should be able to keep them out.

3 – Protect your food

Make sure to keep all of your food sealed in airtight containers. This is an ideal way to keep your flour moth free and your pasta from getting eaten by cockroaches.

Never keep anything in the box either. Things like cereal or snacks will get eaten through by eager mice with sharp teeth. You may not even realize that they are being eaten either until you take the box out of the cupboard.

Put fruit in the fridge to prevent fruit flies from getting them. And seal up your trash can so they can’t find a way to eat what’s left in there. A tight fitting lid will work.

4 – Keep it clean

I am sure that you keep your kitchen surfaces clean and spotless, but I also guarantee that there are spots that are not nearly as clean as you think.

Behind your stove, it is surely very greasy and there is some residue of things that escaped while you were cooking. You may not have even noticed that any food managed to make it behind there, but if you move things around you will see it is not as clean as you had suspected.

Also look behind your fridge and pull any counters away from the wall if possible and you will find some easy snacks for pests that need to be removed.

5 – Use some traps

If your place is clean and you don’t feel the need for a professional, then by all means see if some traps or poison will do the trick. The best kinds of traps are the ones that allow the offending bug to pass through and go back to the rest of the bugs. Then he passes the poison onto everybody and kills the whole lot.

This is a better solution than laying poison out that can be eaten by pets or children by accident.