Comments | gardening: fire ants in garden

llama4u448 in gardening

fire ants in garden

Apr 28, 2009 10:42

I treated my whole yard and garden with bug be gone a few months ago and everything is starting to come back. It says it treats for three months and I was just wondering if it would be a good idea to treat my garden with a combination of bug be gone and spinosad. I tried spinosad before and and it was ok. It did kill some of the smaller,newer ( Read more... )

Comments 8

doodlemaier April 28 2009, 15:08:37 UTC

I mix a teaspoon of boric acid in a pint of warm water and all the sugar that I can dissolve into suspension. Then I'll take dryer lint and soak up my boric acid solution and drop that where the kittehs can't reach, not that they mess with it anyway. Outdoors you could probably just pour a couple ounces of the boric acid solution into a soda pop can and leave that, tipped on its side near their hive. They'll take the "sugar" back and in a couple days the whole hive's a goner.

liminalia April 28 2009, 15:18:37 UTC

This article contains some tips and recipes for natural fire ant control:
http://74.125.47.132/search?q=cache:Bj13ty92kXoJ:fireant.tamu.edu/materials/factsheets_pubs/pdf/FAPFS012.2002rev.pdf+natural+fire+ant+repellent&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a

oxymoron02 April 28 2009, 19:05:50 UTC

I had a fire ant mound last year, and everything I found on ways to kill them without lots of chemicals required you to get up-close and personal with the mound, which I wasn't terribly willing to do.

You didn't mention where you are, but if it's still relatively cool I seem to recall that digging out their mound and scattering it in cool weather will do a fair amount of damage to them. The ants are more lazy when it's cool so many won't return and die, and let's not forget that even if every ant you scatter returns to the mound they still have a lot of rebuilding to do.

Other recommendations I read were to force something like dry ice down into the mound with a piece of pipe so that it's in there at least 6-8 inches. The cold will kill many of the ants, and with luck the queen. I suspect a large quantity of liquid nitrogen, if you don't mind getting within pouring distance of the mound, could work in a similar fashion.

Best of luck to you.

llama4u448 April 28 2009, 19:20:59 UTC

I live in Charlotte, North Carolina. Its been unusually warm for the past few weeks, like into the 80's so if I take care of them one at a time 5 more will pop up by the next day.

Diatomaceous Earth - Home Depot or Lowe's both carry this missfine April 28 2009, 20:40:36 UTC

What is Diatomaceous Earth ( ... )

Re: Diatomaceous Earth - Home Depot or Lowe's both carry this theanonymous1 April 28 2009, 22:47:52 UTC

I've never seen DE in Rochester NY in Home Depot. FYI. I'd be using it if I could find it easily.

Re: Diatomaceous Earth - Home Depot or Lowe's both carry this missfine April 28 2009, 23:37:26 UTC

WOW, really! Down here in TX it is easy to find!
I wonder if you could ask Home Depot to get some?

Re: Diatomaceous Earth - Home Depot or Lowe's both carry this theanonymous1 April 28 2009, 23:57:22 UTC

I used to work at Depot. I asked them to bring it in along with Terro ant killer. They did neither. I'll have to check Lowes again and if they don't have it hopefully some small garden center will - or at least they would be more likely to order it for me than big boxes.