Water...water heavily and they will disappear.

jerry

One thing you should NOT do is put any ant-bait near your garden if they're nesting there. They take the poison back to the nest, and though it may kill all the ants in the nest, the poison is then in your garden.

You can try several things. Flooding them as ruthie suggests sometimes works quite well. I know that direct contact with orange oil kills them (and lots of other GOOD soil critters) and they'll avoid it like the plague. You might come up with other creative ways to either drive or lead them out of the space.

I hate those things. They hurt so BAD when they bite.

I had fireants in my containers, Peggy on the organic forum
suggested diatomaceous earth. I spread it under my plants
and 2 days later few fireants and no new mounding. I don't
know if it kills them or they just leave but it appears to be working.
mike

I actually posted a question here almost identical to yours and a member suggested that ant's are not all bad...and encouraged me to try and live with them...what I didn't understand at the time is that they are good at cleaning up things like aphid eggs ...We now live in harmony. I flood any mound that comes up in my beds but I just try to avoid them otherwise...and I have been pretty much aphid free since.

i put some 20% vinegar on them and can't find any, who knows

I have been harvesting a 4'x16' compost pile and they're throughout the thing. I fill a 5 gal bucket and carry to my 18 gallon tub to shift the big chunks out--I have bites all over my body from the d#$% things! I have about 4' left to do, hoping I can manage to finish it off without more bites!

There is no way I can put down enough diatomaceous earth to get rid of them. In our hard clay soil the fire ants just mound when it rains which is very seldom. I often dig into their nest without even realizing they are there until I'm suddenly under attack.

There is a red ant bed under our driveway that I need to treat with the DE. It must be huge...they travel to the yards on both sides of us where there are large beds. We finally got rid of a very large bed in our alleyway. Our poor dog had lots of bites from that bed.

I usually am understanding about God's creatures but the fire ants are something I can live without!

Peggy

Peggy

Me, too! Several years ago, my son, who was alone, was bitten by several of them all at the same time and went into shock. He really thought he was going to die with no help, weakness, blurred vision, and a pounding heart.

People HAVE died from the toxins they inject into the second bite (that's the one that causes the pustules), and I have a small grandson who likes to run around barefoot in the summer. My tolerance for them is zero.

I've found that fire ant appearance is really transitory. They come, they go. Irritating them with feet and watering seems to be enough.

If I got really over-run I would hit them with some sevin, which would be safe for your veggies. It has to get on them, so I water it into the hill a bit when I use it. Never actually used it in the garden, but have used it in the yard when I ran out of ant bait and it seems to work well.

I hit the ones a safe distance from the garden with the granules.

I have heard that if you have more than one mound, that if you transfer a shovel of one piles ants to the other, they will kill each other? I had the opportunity to try this and although there was no scientific way to measure the outcome, the ants from both mounds are now gone. It could have been simply the disturbance that moved them out, but I prefer to think my method had some merit :)

When we lived in East TX we had fireants really bad.We used the mix the beds up method too and it seemed to work.
One reason we moved to the Ozarks was the fire ants. So far they have'nt made it up here. When we first moved here i was paranoid enough to go and punch every ant hill i found with a stick to see if ants would come pouring out.

Here's a neat trick I saw on a show; scientist wanted to study a fire ant hill without being attacked, so...

Step 1: bury a fairly large glass jar up to the lip, leaving it open.

Step 2: catch 1 soldier and trap it in the jar.

Step 3: wait.

The soldier sends off a chemical alarm, and all the soldiers charge out to attack. Right into the jar. Since it's glass, they can't climb out, they set off more chemicals, more soldiers come and get trapped. After an hour, every soldier in the colony is in the jar. Workers don't fight.

Then you can dispose of the soldiers in any amusing way you please (got a fish pond?)

wippit

All sounds fine until you get to the part about a fish pond. The fire ants would HAVE to be devoured by fish very quickly or it would be for naught. Otherwise, they make incredible floating rafts if they're caught in water. There can be thousands of ants clinging together and floating out of harm's way to set up housekeeping as soon as they reach some kind of landing.

Also the toxins from fish eating so many fire ants is enough to kill the fish. It happens often on the Guadalupe River (Texas) in the springtime when the fireants end up in floating rafts. Kills the trout.

Try soapy water or just plain dry grits. The soapy water washes off their waxy coating and they die almost as soon as they are coated with the soapy water. I don't want to work in a garden with them in it anytime. I had them get all over me once and knew if I would kill one they all would bit at once so I used my garden hose and soaked myself and they left to drier area. They do make people quite sick when they are bitten and stung. When we have very heavy rains you can see them floating down the river stacked on top of one another and understand that even those that are under the water have enough air to stay alive until they get to dry ground again. There are ants and there are fire ants, which will kill off the brown or black ants
medcave I never knew there were Trout this far south.

Just tried the "bury a jar/imprison a soldier trick. Used a clean, fresh washed jar......Ants in Alabama can climb out of a glass jar.