Ants enjoy taken over my courtyard! HELP? I am growing a garden in my yard so I dont want...
I am growing a garden in my yard so I dont want to use an exterminator because it willl poison my garden. Anyhow my entire meadow has ants on it. They came from the neighbors grassland mostly and now they live on my lawn. Cant gain the neighbor to get rid of them but I want them gone out of my yard back they ruin my garden and come in my home. They hollowed out my first grown strawberries! ARGH.anyhow looking for organic or intuitive way of killing the ants and keeping them out of my garden
gratefulness!
Answers: Ants go where the food is. Plain and simple. If you cannot decimate them at the source, your only solution is to place some kind of hedge between them and what you want them to stay away from, OR give them something more attractive than your garden as a decoy... or a bit of both.
My personal favourite is diatomaceous floor. Made of the microscopic bodies of fossilized plankton, it is 100% organic. It is like broken cup to small insects. When they get it on their bodies, they try to rub it off. They downfall up rubbing so hard that it takes bad the coating that prevents them from dehydrating. So, they die of dehydration essentially. It does have a few drawbacks:
1 - It needs to be reapplied after a precipitation or watering, so it can get expensive.
2 - Being abrasive contained by nature, and also fine like powder, aid need be used in its application. While applying it, wear a camouflage so that you do not inhale it. It is very irritating to the airway and lungs.
3 - It makes NO distinction between perfect bugs and bad bugs. It kills anything touches it.
My second recommendation would work longer, but would take some time to put surrounded by place. If your garden is not too large, place a "fence" of sorts around it using 4 x 4's. Then, on the top of the 4 x 4, spread a product called "Tanglefoot." It's really ment to prevent crawling insects from climbing your first choice trees, but the principle applies to gardens too. Again, it may not be practicle if your garden is too large, or if the ants go beneath the 4 x 4 to get at the goodies!
Now, this last tip is one that I've literary over the years, but I should have known after one single summer. I have ants in my house, and could not seem to receive rid of them. Then, one nice sunny day, I decided to NOT be in motion to the bottle and can redemption center... and the same thing happen the next day, and the subsequent... the ants disappeared from my house! When I finally got around to taking my cans and bottles surrounded by, I found the ants... inside the bags I put the cans and bottles surrounded by! It made sense. Ants LOVE sugar. They seem to be able to find every hummingbird feeder I put out surrounded by the yard. So, if you have a problem beside ants in one location, why not simply give them a honourable reason to go somewhere else? Place some sugar sea out in a suitable container at the corner of your yard differing your garden. The ants WILL find it. It may not keep all the ants out, but I'm prepared to bet that it'll draw a good number away from it!
Lastly, you could try a liquid ant assassin containing borax. There are several kinds on the market. Most are to some extent benign as far as being poisonous goes. They work because ants enjoy a special stomach that they store food in for other ants that may come along that are hungry. One ant feeds another from this stomach, sharing anything it may have eaten. The borax is a soapy bits and pieces that gives the ants terminal diaharrea. Again, an unpleasant death from dehydration, but hey, doesn`t matter what works! Read the label to make sure in attendance is no actual poison in the product. In any case, you don't enjoy to apply it to your plants. It usually contains an attractant, probably sugar! It would also have the advantage that the ants would bring it back to their nest and (hopefully) do away with the nests short even involving your neighbour in the process.
I hope you find this information useful. Good luck near your garden!
Ants do not like the scent of peppermint. Grow some peppermint plants (you can get starter plants at your local garden shop; I know Home Depot will recurrently have them) near the nouns you don't want to ants to go. They are easy to grow surrounded by full sun with moist soil.
Ants also won't cross a greasy or a chalky barrier. I habitually put petroleum jelly on the top of my hummingbird feeder so the ants can't crawl down to the feeder ports. There is a type of chalk that comes in a small rectangular orange box bid insecticide chalk that I use on the ground or near doorways, windows etc.
Anyway, I hope this help. Good luck :)