TY for sharing this. Ants will kill potted plants. Their tunneling/nesting ruins the drainage, makes hydrophobic zones, and if they can manage to find some pests to farm on the leaves, they will. If your plant does die, they'll enjoy eating its' carcass.

When I bring plants inside for winter, ant eviction is usually part of the process. Putting a plant completely under water is one method that sometimes works, but did I tell you about the ants that were still alive after being under water for over 24 hrs? They were crawling around, over a foot under water, like nothing unusual was going on.

Make no mistake, ants are ruling the planet. We are lucky they continue to tolerate us. Oh, and every time I've managed to follow marching ants to what looks like a den, it's at a stump.

Knock wood, I haven't had any fire ants in our yard or in my pots! And LOL @ your 1st sentence, though I know this isn't a laughing matter. There are sooo many diff kinds of ants, but the ones I get are little brown ones, DH calls them pi$$ ants. Maybe u know which I mean from living down here before. They bite, but not like a fire ant. They are probably the fire ants' pets.

Yes, pouring boiling water on ants is a blast! Floating on a sea of ants - man, u said it!

Do you think you brought them in inside pots in the fall? Seems like they're always going from one place to another, from their main hangout by a stump to...? It can be hard to track them. (I lose them in the grass usually, but that wouldn't apply inside.) Can you find the other place they're hiding out?

A lot of things kill ants, as you've probably discovered, if you get bored/frustrated enough to battle the stragglers outside of the pots, like Windex, 409, Fantastic... it's scary-close to cleaning though, killing them like that, 'cuz then u gotta wipe 'em up.

Lemon juice is a common "home remedy" but the acidity would make me nervous, for use in pots.

Good luck getting rid of them! I feel bad that taking the battle outside isn't an option yet. Warm vibes too!

Boron is an essential trace element for plants, but as with all trace elements an over supply becomes toxic. It can be a fine balancing act. But it isn't just necessarily the presence of boron in the soil that makes it toxic, it has to be in an excessive amount in a soluble form. A few years back I had a soil test done and the results showed a deficiency of boron. What was there was bound up and not soluble. I had to add more to the soil. This isn't unusual in high rainfall areas. So of course the solution to excessively high levels of soluble boron is heavy leaching. What isn't leached out isn't a problem to plants.

As far as getting rid of ants goes I use the boiling water treatment where practical, or else Amdro which isn't boron based. Only use it for Tropical Fire Ants, Solenopsis geminata. We don't get the 'ordinary' Fire Ants which are much worse from what I've been told. But the TF Ants are bad enough. They're straight from the hell-fires when they sting.

So far,my guess indeed IS that I brought them in last year,and that they've somehow stayed out of sight...though my gut tells me that I should have seen something before now. IDK...it's weird.

OH and good point about the farming aspect of it all. I've noticed some honeydew so yep...I'm pretty sure there's some scale hiding somewhere in there. Somehow it never fails that after managing to get through the winter pest free,scale somehow appear a few weeks before it's warm enough to put the plants out. No serious damage yet,so I'm guessing that like the last few years anyone who's infected will hold it together long enough for mother nature to work her magic and send predators. As a person who steers clear of poisons,it's the only thing that works for me so far.

Hey Tropic,..would you think that if the ants brought boric acid into the potting medium,it would be a quantity that was relatively safe? Right now I'm way too scared to try it. My benjamina is pretty dear to me. It was grown from cuttings and I've watched it develop for a few years now. Would really hate to lose it.

Asleep, I don't know just how soluble that boric acid is, but acids generally are very soluble. The way it works apparently is the ants consume it, in the stomach it swells up and sort of turns the ants inside out. You could give a little bit a try and then flush the pot out after a day or two.

"turns the ants inside out."

Well, that'd be interesting to see

Good luck on eradicating the ants

Thanks MrBlubs! Luck is definitely something I could use right about now!

Yasee,Tropic,...that's the thing...I won't really have too much control over how much of the bait they take back into the potting mix with them,so there's no telling how concentrated it will get in there. Just to be on the safe side,something tells me I should err on the side of caution here.

Back when I was on the coast,something I didn't expect when killing those nests of fire ants with the boiling water was what they did next. After my first application,I checked on things the following morning and there was a pile of dead ants next to what was left of the nest. The survivors had collected their dead and taken them topside. Had no idea that they'd do that!

Thanks for the warm vibes,Purp. Can really use 'em right about now. Just got up from a nap,and....it's snowing out there again. In all seriousness,I really am considering moving back down south. I'd take fire ants over snow any day.

I've read that if you sprinkle cinnamon on an ant's path, they lose the trail because they rely on scent. I've never tried it, but maybe if you put a bit on top of the medium?

It does have fungicidal properties as well,so a sprinkle wouldn't hurt(may in fact help)my plants. If they are nesting under it they would eventually find their way out though. Maybe for a few minutes they'd go up top and get confused,but without anywhere else to go I'm imagining they'd eventually figure it out. No harm in trying though so I'll give it a spin just to see what happens.

Thanks Ashley! :)