earwig juice

We have a pretty big grapevine growing on our fence. Grapes are one of Olsen's favorite fruits, but these homegrown grapes have 3 or 4 seeds each in them. The last two years our friend has juiced the grapes for us, but sadly, she has moved away. This year it looked like we had an even larger abundance of grapes than usual. Luckily our neighbors have a fancy juicer that we could borrow. Adrian spent hours cutting the grapes off the vine, battling numerous bugs, but we didn't think much of it...until we started to wash them to get them ready for the juicer.

Tons of earwigs kept crawling out of the grapes. The grape bunches were so tightly compacted that earwigs would crawl out when we tried to pick the grapes off individually. We thought about letting the grapes soak to drown out the earwigs, but we had people coming to see the house and we didn't think a sink full of drowned earwigs would be a good selling point. Our friends' juicer is pretty magical and can somehow differentiate between the parts that make juice and the parts that don't, but we were too afraid to inadvertently drink earwig juice, so we sadly threw the grapes away. Instead, we bought a pineapple and papaya and made pineapple, papaya, grape (from the store), and apple juice. We're not sure how to avoid earwig infested grapes in the future. We don't want to poison the grapes, but our earwig scare does help explain why grapes are on the dirty dozen list. Anyone have any tips on how to keep our grapes both chemical and earwig free?


Our grapes growing on the vine.


Our bounty of grapes!


Earwigs! How many can you count?