Cleanliness is a great start. We can all be in a hurry and, sometimes, leave a counter with crumbs– but that isn’t the best practice. Clean up counters and table-tops after meals and snacks. Sweep the kitchen floor, as well. Don’t give them things to feed on.

• They threw out expired food.
• Checked the current food for freshness. Stale? It went in the trash, too.
• Washed the cupboards: shelves, sides, ceilings. Yes. ALL of it.
• Put down shelf paper.   What’s that? Shelf paper is literally paper that lays on the shelf and looks pretty. But it’s functional, too. It can be thrown away with the next cleaning or if there is a spill.
• And, finally, replaced the old food with new food, in air-tight containers.

Another tip: your kitchen cupboards, themselves, may be making it all-too-easy for the moths to stay. If the cupboards are not flush to the wall, or do not go up to the ceiling, then there are a lot of hiding places that you’ll never get at no matter how well you clean.

First: get busy and do the “spring or fall cleaning” routine. Forget waiting for the right time of year. Do it now. Empty the cupboards and toss all the infested food out. Play it safe. Don’t try to hang onto anything questionable. You can get more food.

Unless it’s canned soup or tuna, most things will probably have to go. Cereal, mashed potatoes, pancake mix, rice, pasta, packaged mixes like cake mix, tea bags.  Say “goodbye” to it all.

The only thing that I have found to work, and work FABULOUSLY, is a moth trap.

Desperate, having been under siege for well over a month, I stopped trying home remedies and began to search the internet. The chats and forums all were saying that moth traps were the only thing that actually works.

So, I found a highly recommended brand — Catchmaster –– and called the local home improvement store. They did not have any in stock. I knew that Amazon shipped quickly, so found them online and I placed my order for two packs immediately.  Till then, I kept on squirting the little varmints out of the air with glass cleaner until, to my relief,  the order arrived.

The traps are easy to assemble and non-toxic. They are small little tents. I was skeptical that just one trap could do much but I was utterly amazed to watch it work. Literally 30 seconds after I had the trap assembled, the first moth flew into it and got stuck. Then two more arrived. Whoosh. They were gone, caught in its proverbial jaws.