Big ants? Small ones? We are out in the country and always have ants, so I mostly just ignore them and that works fine in all but the wettest years. Unfortunately, this was the wettest year ever from Jan-early July, so we have had ants all over the place in huge numbers.

We have big red harvester ants in two huge beds just outside the fenced front garden. They are great garden helpers....hauling away the bodies of dead insects whenever they find them. They also collect bits of plants, fruits and veggies when they find them and haul those home as well. I am careful not to stand in their path because they'll climb right up your foot or leg and bite you. I try to peacefully coexist with them because overall they are very helpful. I feel like my garden might be ankle deep in dead bug bodies if the harvester ants weren't in there harvesting their carcasses and dragging them out of the garden.

We have all kinds of little ants....native fire ants, imported fire ants, small carpenter ants, big carpenter ants, velvet (cowkiller) ants and the tiny sugar ants. Their population ebbs and flows and I just leave them alone except for when the imported fire ants are in a raised bed in the garden where I need to dig. It isn't pleasant, for example, to dig potatoes with fire ants climbing all over you....and that was one of the big challenges this year because the fire ants and carpenter ants invaded all the raised beds when we were getting flooding rainfall. I try to avoid treating areas with native fire ants because the native fire ants do prey upon the imported fire ants, but I am sure that sometimes the organic fire ant baits kill the native ants in the same way they kill the imported fire ants.

I used two different kinds of organic ant baits to combat the ants in the raised beds. For the fire ants, I used the standard Spinosad fire ant bait that I've used for 8 or 9 years now. There are different brands available that use Spinosad as their active ingredient. It works well, but is slow-acting and it takes a few days for it to really clear the ants out of a raised bed. I do see a decrease in the ant activity in the treated areas within a few hours though.

For the carpenter ants, I used a different bait (it was called Advance) which has abamectin as its active ingredient, and I ordered it online rather than drive 80 or 90 miles to a store in the DFW metro area that I knew carried abamectin products. I used it to treat the carpenter ants that were eating/destroying the lumber sidewalls around the raised bed that contains the asparagus bed. I've never really had them in there before, though they certainly exist in our woodland, so suspect the 25.5" of May rainfall drove them up out of the woodland and into the asparagus bed, which is on the side of the garden nearest the woodland. The abamectin-based bait did seem very slow-acting, but eventually the bed no longer had carpenter ants in it. Occasionally I see them scurrying around the garden, but haven't found them living in it since I used that bait.

We also had a huge problem with fire ants climbing up the side of the house and trying to find their way into our house to escape the spring and early summer flooding. Because we had just painted the exterior of our house last fall and we caulked every little crack, crevice or opening we found, they didn't get into our house itself much, except coming in through a kitchen window somehow. I mostly treated them by spraying them with Medina orange oil (1 or 2 T. per gallon of water....a stronger concentration will strip paint, so you have to dilute it carefully) which literally dissolves their exoskeleton. It works great. They hate it and they even avoid walking over an area sprayed with it for a few days. We also had trouble with them coming in the sunroom windows, so I guess we need to search for tiny cracks or crevices between the windows and exterior siding this fall (when it finally cools down) and caulks them. It took the use of orange oil spray almost daily to put a halt to their daily incursions, largely because it rained every day and washed away the orange oil sprayed the previous day. Once the fire ants made it into the sunroom, though, which is a room we added on to the house a few years after moving here, they never found their way from the sunroom into the house, so at least that was one bright spot in the onslaught of the fire ants.

Finally, there is something in peppermint soap that messes up the ants' ability to follow the chemical scent trail left by other ants from their colony. So, when ants have made a little pathway that cuts across the yard or garden and is in a spot where we are continually stepping into their pathway and getting bitten by ants, I spray the whole trail with Dr. Bronner's Peppermint soap....at a rate of 1 T. per quart of water. The scent of the soap impedes their ability to follow the trail, so they get confused and blaze new trails. If I keep spraying each new trail with peppermint soap, they give up and go somewhere else eventually. I am careful to avoid spraying orange oil sprays or peppermint soap sprays on living plants (I don't mind if I spray it on bermuda grass because I hate bermuda grass) because it can kill them, so I don't use it to spray ants on plants.

When you have ants climbing on plants and feeding on either plant parts or on insects (like thrips, mites or aphids) on the plants, you often can make the ants go away by spraying the plants daily with a sharp and forceful stream of water that knocks the other insects and the ants off the plants. Ants, for example, will farm aphids on your plants, so getting rid of the aphids often gets rid of those farmer ants. I've always had ants all over okra plants and I just ignore them. They seem to be eating the okra flowers or something, but it doesn't interfere with the flowers' ability to form okra pods. I feel like I have a fairly high tolerance for ants and ignore them for as long as it is possible to do so, but if they're damaging beds like the carpenter ants were or if they're fire ants in areas where I need to weed, dig or plant, I'll treat that area. I only use organic baits.

The velvet ants have been all over the place this year, and most years I rarely see more than 1 or 2, so I am assuming the flooding rain drove them up out of the river bottom lands to the higher ground nearby where we live, but they don't bother me, so I don't bother them.

If I had ants nesting in mulch like you do, I'd use one of the spinosad-based fire ant killers. You just sprinkle the granules around the ant nesting areas. Green Sense is one fire ant bait containing Spinosad that I've used in the past, but I couldn't find that one this year, so I used one called Come And Get It that I've also used in some past years, most notably 2007, which also was a year with a lot of spring and early summer flooding. It's hard to find it in nurseries in a year when the ants are bad, so I just Googled, found it online and ordered it at the same time I ordered the Advance for the carpenter ants. Back in 2007 we did have fire ants coming into the house constantly during the flooding rains, and that year we bought a chemical ant barrier product and Tim sprayed it around the foundation of the house and the ground adjacent to the foundation and that stuff worked well. I also used the boric acid-based fire ant traps in the kitchen and laundry room that year.

Oh, Dawn. What an amazingly helpful post! You made me shudder more than a few times as you described all your ants. Yikes! You are really a country girl.

I just have small ants, but I don't want them to hurt my roses. I am going to research your products and get some immediately.

Thank you so much.

Sammy

Sammy, You're welcome. I'm always happy to help.

Honestly, ants are the least of our problems here. We have everything I ever expected to have, in terms of wildlife, and a few things I never thought we'd have (ringtailed cats which I didn't expect to see, but was happy to learn lived here) , the occasional rare (unwelcome) cougar, and every now and then a herd of feral pigs running through the back 40, and once or twice up close to the house.

I've told Tim that if alligators or bears ever show up here, I may lose it and decide to move back to Texas. (grin) He knows I don't mean it and never would leave the country though. I think I'd never leave.

Dawn