Ive heard they dont like coffee grounds. I dont have an ant problem so I cant help from experience.

I do use coffee grounds in my yard and flower beds and they work great. Worms love them too. See if you can get a couple bags from a local place. If you have a Starbucks they will give you some too. If you call ahead you may be able to get a lot!

Good luck

carey

With some exceptions most ants are not the problem we have been taught all our lives. Anys are part of Ma Natures recycling machine helping clean up our planet if waste material. You can easily adopt a live and let live policy for the ants around you except for fire ants and the best control methods for them are available from Texas A & M.

Here is a link that might be useful: Texas A & M on Fire Ants

I have put in a lot of native plants and created areas with diverse microhabitats

I'm curious about this statement. How did you create the area with diverse micro-inhabitants? And now that you have them, have you fed them? I'm thinking you just need to fertilize with any kind of organic fertilizer and the healthy microbes will put better controls on the ants.

Thanks all,

I will try the coffee grounds thing in the nests where ants are getting into the house. I don't drink coffee but I do have a local starbucks.

Microhabitats (different than microINhabitaNts) are created anytime you let things get a little messy. Leave a pile of leaves in place and you create a gradient of moisture (wetter in the middle and dryer on the edges)so that many kinds of bugs who prefer various conditions have a place to live. Leave a log laying in your yard and decomposers and other critters have all kinds of niches. The opposite of creating microhabitats would be to make a very manicured yard with only lawn & trees (no shrubs for the birds & no tall grasses or other plants for the insects). It really limits what will live in your yard. I do hope that my microhabitats encourage the growth of microinhabitants though :). That makes me think . . . maybe I need to introduce some of those insect unfriendly bacteria or nematodes. I know you can buy cultures and some folks use them controlling caterpillar populations.

So nobody has experience letting a yard previously exposed to a lot of pesticides revert to a more natural state?? I was hoping someone else that had experienced an ant boom would have some thoughts.

K-

You might see what Sac Co suggests...just got the flier today. Could be useful?

Good Luck! I just came here to see about cut worms. :)

Nicole

Here is a link that might be useful: pest control

That series of articles from UCDavis starts on the ants article with "Although ants are annoying when they come indoors, they can be beneficial by feeding on fleas, termites, and other pests in the garden." So why is it that Organic gardeners are always asking how to kill ants in their gardens?

Kimmsr,

Dunno, but I'm reading Kathy's request differently, possibly as asking for methods to move the population or reduce through natural predators. Not such a bad request if you have ants to the point that they start coming in the house or start walking up your legs everywhere you attempt to garden, eh?

I use used coffee grounds in the garden a lot and the ants are still there but not as bad as they used to be. We also discovered a couple of nests near the house and fed the nest UCGs and corn meal by simply sprinkling it on the nest. Also watering works - they don't like a moist environment.

I've heard that taking a shovelful of ants from one nest and placing it on another will create results as well. They'll kill each other and diminish the population. Haven't tried it but it's an interesting and plausible theory.

I do like ants and find their antics interesting, so leave them be in most places. Just not around our home since we have a log home. I will place 2 bales of straw/hay next to the compost piles so they will have a place to go to when I start using the piles in the spring (they usually move into the piles in the winter). And they do move to the bales where they will compost the straw to shreds and create nice stuff for the gardens in the fall.

I also have multitudes of nests on a gardened slope edged by wild blueberry bushes at the top. They used to be in the garden areas in the slope, but moved to the top which is fine by me. They travel to the gardens to get food - I use compost as mulch - and then go back to the nests. It's a win-win situation since they are good predators as well as Kimmsr points out.

In heavily infested areas, boiling water will "deter" them.

I've also heard cinnamon and/or tumeric are deterents - I have'em all over and don't mind them except where they present problems such as farming aphids on particular things, like my pepper plants and apple trees, so deal w/ them when/where necessary with boric acid and sugar

most insects can be of benefit in the system, but also need to be controlled in the artifcial systems we create as yards/gardens - they stay outta my area, I stay outta theirs, they get in my way, I get in theirs, and I'm bigger!

Bill

Hi Kate,

I seem to have the same problem as you with ants. I'm in a definitely suburban area and don't really know how the previous owner treated the land (we've been here about 5 years). Our situation is very similar in terms of what we are doing with native plants and microhabitats. And yes, I'm an organic gardener who doesn't use pesticides and feeds the soil with compost and lots of organic matter, but the ant populations seem to really be out of balance. Our soil tends to be very well draining, so if they like dry, they have found the right place. With each year, the ant colonies expand themselves and also pop up in new places. Seems there is hardly a place in the "tended" part of our 1 acre that doesn't have an expanding ant colony. We have put in more vegetables this year and ants are causing a more direct problem there (they have swarmed and taken down two potato plants - I've made sure that they just weren't tending other culprits - and have moved into other beds and made short work of a few squash seedlings).

I just can't figure out if the population is out of balance (as it seems) or if this is the natural state and I need to adapt (or fight back with coffee - yum!) I agree - bring on the flickers!

Good luck!

I will agree, not just because my wife insists, that ants do not belong in the house. But most of the myths about ants in nature are wrong, but very persistant. People see something and make invalid assumptions about what is happening without doing a good study. If one were to really watch the ants at work with aphids you would see that they are taking them from the plant to the nest, you would not see (or at least I have not in many years) ants taking aphids from the nest to a plant. Yes, some species of ants are somewhat destructive and may need to be controlled, fire ants for one. But for the most part as long as the ants stay outside they are not a problem, they are part of Ma Natures recycling machine.

kimmsr - ants do indeed overwinter aphids and take them out to plants in the spring, to spend the summer producing 'honeydew' for the ants to feed on - in the fall they stash the aphid eggs for use the next spring - they do not carry the aphids back to the nest to eat, but 'groom off' the honeydew constantly, which is the food - the aphids are "dairy animals" not "beef"

picture of it
and the story

Bill

Here is a link that might be useful: some ant deterrents

I heard tell that "Equal" a sugar subsitute was formulated to be an ant poison, A few folks claim that it works.

Ants won't go anywhere near "Sweet and Low" (at my place)

molasses is an ant killer i've heard

I found Ed Lawrence's ant-control recipe on CBC Radio's "Ontario Today" website: http://www.cbc.ca/ontariotoday/

1 quart water

1 cup sugar

1 tbls Boric Acid

Mix then soak cotton balls and place in plastic container with holes at the bottom edges so ants can come & go freely. Put lid on plastic container to avoid evaporation! Store left over liquid in fridge and re-moisten cotton balls as needed.

I really don't have a problem with ants, and pretty much leave them alone as long as they don't get into our house. And for some reason, that's become a problem this spring and summer. Winged ants were swarming in and around the windows of our mudroom. When I caulked all gaps in the windows, I caught them trying to bore their way through the caulk a few times. Ugh! (Last fall, we had insulation and vinyl siding installed over our existing siding, so I wonder if that's got them confused. We covered up their old pheromone trail, so they don't know what to do.)

There's an anthill that resurfaces every spring and summer near our back porch, and I'm sure that's where they're coming from. So I decided to try Ed Lawrence's recipe, placing the plastic container on top of the anthill. I just did that this week, though, so it's too early to report on its success yet.

Put up a Flicker house. They prefer ants to all other insects. (Buy one with a starling guard--it's more expensive than the plain ones, but definitely worth it.)