Remedy For Ant Hills In Gardens And Lawns
- Image via Wikipedia
Ants can be a real pain but ant hills are just plain ugly and destructive. They need to be taken care of ASAP. They only get bigger that longer we leave them. I’ve never had one just disappear on it’s own.
Back in the mid 90s I talked my wife into buying a duplex, strictly for the income. We won’t talk about that, but we didn’t realize that at the time the front lawn on one side was just a big ant hill. The previous owners went to great lengths to deceive us on more than just the lawn.
When we bought the place the yard looked great because they had laid new sod and planted lots of flowers. All of this was done to cover up the nightmare just below the sod. Ants and Earwigs enough for an entire neighbourhood.
We tried using salt on the ant hills when they started to appear in the lawn, killed more grass than ants I’m sure. We even tried boiling water. Those may have done something if the ant hill wasn’t so established, we just didn’t realize how big it really was, so we were only hurt a small amount. Perhaps we should have used boiling salt water.
As for the earwigs we tried using soapy water around anywhere we found them. We also sprayed around the windows to the basement as they just gross me out and I didn’t want them close to getting in.
After poor results doing what friends told us to do we decided to head over to the local nursery and ask a few questions. The first person we asked directed us to the one who had been there the longest.
We were given real advice from a someone that had some experience, not just something someone over heard someone telling someone, and in just a few weeks they stopped coming around and now our lawn and the slope to the side walk is all landscaping and not a big ant hill.
We were also surprised that the nursery worker didn’t try to sell us on pesticides or poisons. Very refreshing to see people putting the environment first.
They told us to just try borax and confectioners sugar mix in equal parts. You just need to keep it from getting wet. We put the mixture in all the places we saw ants and hoped it wouldn’t rain for a day or so. We did that a couple of times, ‘Murphy’s Law’ I guess, but it did work.
Once we got rid of the ants and didn’t see them for a while we dug up the ant hill and replaced it with topsoil and peat moss and re-seeded that area.
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Hi Itzel
We had a problem with anthills when we bought this property. Once we killed off the ants we were left with a huge anthill. We just dug up the anthill to about a foot or two below the ground level and filled it with top soil.
We did that with each anthill and now have most of our yard back. We still have a couple of anthills that we missed so we will have to treat them and then dig them up and fill them with top soil.
It took some work but it certainly looks less hilly now.