A couple of years ago we found ants hanging around so we went looking for their home. We found it and treated it with a home gardening tip we had received from a friend. The home remedy was a 50/50 mixture of Borax and icing sugar that should have gotten rid of the colony.

We thought we had stopped them. Guess I didn’t do a great job and only destroy part of the colony, now they are back and the ant hill is even biggers. Time for another treatment, but I will have to wait for it to stop raining.

The strange thing is we didn’t see any ants running around yet. They were hiding in pots we had planted things in last fall, so we could transplant them elsewhere in the yard where they will get more sunlight.

I couldn’t have just found them myself when I transplanted things, oh no, instead I had to give someone a pot with strawberry plants in it. What a way to find out we still have an ant problem.

Jenny took a pot to work with the strawberry plant and after a couple of hours inside the ants decided to go for a walk. How embarrassing.

I guess from now on I will be sure to transplant anything I plan to give away into a new pot with new top soil so I now I am not giving more than I expected.

So once it stops raining and dries up a bit I am out there to invade their home so they don’t invade our home or anyone elses for that matter. We will make a 50/50 mixture of Borax and Icing Sugar to sprinkle around the ant hill.

Then, after a week or so of seeing no ants around the ant hill I will dig it up a replace it with top soil.

After putting my video camera on the anthill we thought we had cleared of ants I see that not a single ant is moving so the only thing I can come up with for where the ants are coming from would have to be our raised bed strawberry patch.

So I will be treating the raised bed as an anthill, even though I can’t find their hill, with the home gardening remedy for killing ants.

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That’s the thing about ants and their anthills. Just when it looks like you have conquered the problem another pops up where you least expect it and that’s exactly what happened to us.

We went the entire summer and never saw the pretty good size anthill because it was under the shrubs that cover our property fence.

Time to get out the magnifying glass again, oh wait that was a memory of being a kid on the farm. I used to love to fry those little pests. I can still remember how much it hurt when one of them bit me.

Now, 50 years later, we don’t use those tactics, plus it takes to long to fry them all. Instead I use a combination of Borax and Icing Sugar.

The little pests like the sweet icing sugar and in the process of taking it back to their hideout in my yard they take the Borax as well which spells disaster for them and their queen.

Thanks to Jamie for that little tip for getting rid of ants.

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