Sometime in the past I know I wrote something about our ridiculous ant issues. I hate ants because they are wrecking havoc on my yard. When we were going to lay down mulch for our swing set, we noticed a little ant hill by the leg of the set. We were trying to figure out how to get rid of it without the use of chemicals. We took the handle of a shovel and poked deep holes in the mound. Then we filled it half way with baking soda, and the rest with vinegar. I think it killed some of the ants, but not all. In the past I have used boiling water on the hills, and that has worked really well, but you need a lot of water and you need to make it outside without sloshing water on yourself. My other trick has been cinnamon. Cinnamon doesn't kill the ants, but the don't like it, so they should leave the yard. I did this in my front yard, and they left, but my neighbor treats his yard with something, so they didn't go there. Guess where the went? That's right, my backyard. Now I have been trying to get rid of these annoying creatures ever since.
They haven't bothered me too much in the last couple of years because I wasn't spending a lot of time in the backyard, but now we are going outside every day and I refuse to have these pesky things crawling all over my family. I remembered reading something about ants not liking citrus, so I had a new plan of action.
I bought some oranges the other day and since they are no longer in season, the inside tasted just about as delicious as the peel. So I thought I'd go ahead and give this citrus thing a try. Instead of just using orange peel, I decided to add some cinnamon too...why not?
After I grated two oranges, I sprinkled it over the area that saw all of those nasty buggers. It actually covered a pretty large area for just two oranges. I wish that I had gotten a video of the ants trying to get away. There were so many ants, the mulch looked like it was moving. Within about 10 minutes, there wasn't an ant to be seen. AMAZING!
After realizing I missed the opportunity to capture the power of citrus and cinnamon on camera, I was on the lookout for ants. I finally found one on the slide. I didn't have enough oranges to spread over the entire area of mulch, but I did have enough cinnamon, so it got sprinkled everywhere. I think this ant was trying to escape the cinnamon, so he decided to use the slide as his escape route.
Here he is...happy as a clam.
So I did the first thing that came to mind...I sprinkled him with cinnamon. He didn't know what to do!
In this picture he thought he had it figured out. When I originally sprinkled the slide with cinnamon, he just went up the side to try to climb over. That's when I did a mega sprinkle which created this awesome border of cinnamon. Look at how he's looking at it. This ant went back and forth, around and around. He never figured out how to escape. Finally a strong gust of wind came along and blew him off, only for him to land in more cinnamon on the ground.
I have to say I was pretty happy to see these horrible critters running away because that is what I have been doing with these stupid ant hills that I keep finding.
Now I'm going to go to the store and buy up all of their oranges and take turns with my mom and my husband grating up the biggest batch of ant repellant ever. I'm also going to buy more cinnamon, and sprinkle that stuff everywhere, and let the ants know they are no longer welcome. As an added bonus, my yard will smell awesome!
I am going to have to put down ant traps too, because there are just too many ants. They take the stuff back to the queen and it kills them. But after that, I'm hoping my homemade concotion keeps them away. We'll see...
No comments:
Post a Comment