How to Get Rid of Ants Safely
My wife and I started composted this year and one thing we learned was that ants love our compost. We keep an old 3 lb. coffee can (the same Folgers can in this post) with kitchen compost waste and ants seem to love the chopped up fruits we toss inside. We fill up that can and then empty it about every other week. It really reduces the amount of trash we discard and it will make for some good fuel for our garden next year. But, it’s also a nice little buffet for ants.
The Traditional Advice
The traditional advice is to use ant traps and keep a cleaner kitchen. Talk to anyone who has actually had an ant problem and cleanliness, while important, isn’t the final solution. As clean as you get it, ants will find something they enjoy in your kitchen. It could be a speck of something that fell between the range and the counter and they’ll make it back there to get it. Cleanliness is important but it’s not the solution.
Ant traps themselves are often relatively effective but I don’t like the idea of using poisons. While we don’t have a dog, we learned that dogs love chewing on ant traps when we were watching my in-law’s pair of Scottish Terriers. Fortunately we only saw one going for the trap, he didn’t chew through anything so that was good. They’re also fun little toys for children, since they’re octagonal in shape and black so they look like toys, and while we don’t have kids and most visitors don’t, we’d still like a solution that’s safe for people.
Finally, the traps do lose their effectiveness after a while. Maybe our ants are smarter than most because I think I hear them laugh as they run around them, flicking me off as they go on their merry way. My response was to crack open the traps and mix in some Nutella (I didn’t have peanut butter at the time) and that seemed to work last year, but I would rather eat Nutella than bait a trap with it. So I went out on the internet to find a better solution.
The Best Way To Get Rid of Ants
To my surprise, I found my good friend Nickel writing about how to get rid of ants. His solution was to mix boric acid powder and table sugar 50-50 in with some water to make a slurry. Then put that slurry in the path of the ants and watch them eat it up. Eventually they take this awesome sweet boric acid concoction back to their evil dungeon lair, share it with friends, and then take a nice long nap. Boric acid is toxic to ants but safe, in low quantities, for people and pets.
I have to admit I was apprehensive when I tried it but I saw Nickel’s advice replicated on a number of sites (Wikipedia has lots of uses for boric acid, though they recommend a more diluted mixture to be used in cotton balls) so I gave it a shot.
To date, we haven’t had an ant problem in out kitchen and we’ve been happily composting away!
(Photo: squinza)
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Tags: 2008 Garden Project, Frugal Living, Gardening
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There are 7 comments, add your thoughts now!
Also a very safe alternative is to sprinkle pepper in areas ants are known to frequent. I don’t know why but they won’t go near the stuff
I’ve heard that corn meal works too. They eat it but can’t digest it and die. Safe for toddlers too.
Any advice for getting rid of Scorpions? lol ..Ants don’t bother me too much
You don’t get a lot of ants then… or too many scorpions.
I was interested to see this post since I had a small ant problem about two months ago. I first tried killing them with ant spray, which has a terrible smell and is highly toxic. Second was the use of bait traps, which are still in place, but kept away from food or where our cats go and have seem to do a wonderful job. Just like the boric acid mix, they take the bait back to the hive and it kills them all (or most of them).
However, the most useful thing I found was that the household cleaning product “Simple Green” is actually a VERY effect ant spray that is also non-toxic! If you have ants in the immediate area, for instance, all over a chair that you sit in frequently, spray them with that stuff and they’ll die right away. Bait them to keep them from coming back! Make sure to look outside the home to find out where they are coming in and bait those areas too. When they are gone, seal those entry ways with caulk or expanding foam if the hole is large enough.
Hope that helps!
A good way to prevent pests (ants and flies) from getting to the compost in the first place is to use a smaller container and keep it in your fridge. I use a large tupperware box, and then empty it every two or three days.
Hmmm… my problem is more carpenter ants than this kind of ant - they’re more interested in devouring the remains of the shingle siding that’s underneath my aluminum siding than they are in the compost bucket.
And, unfortunately, I think boric acid, cornmeal, planting mint around the house, Simple Green, etc are pretty ineffective against them *sigh*
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