There is nothing more annoying than sharing your home with uninvited guests. When you walk into a room and see a few little ants crawling around, it just triggers a feeling of disgust. I don’t mind using ant spray but where did I put it?

You know there can never be just one ant, there are always relatives lurking in the cracks somewhere. I’m always amazed at how they get inside and why they come inside. I keep a very clean and tidy home, so it isn’t like I have crumbs laying all over the floors. However, they decided to move in despite my cleanliness.

I would get rid of a few and more would appear. To me, there was nothing worse than knowing that there were little insects crawling around my home at all hours of the day.

Knowing that there are ants around always makes me feel like they are crawling on my, even if it’s just a breeze that moves a hair over my forehead or neck. I immediately swat at it like it was alive.

I set out to get some ant spray or traps so that I could eliminate the problem before they moved all of the neighborhood ants into my home. With some advice from individuals at the pest control and local hardware store, I bought two kinds of ant spray.

One ant spray was for inside my house and the other one was for outside. They told me that using ant spray inside of the home might not be as effective as what I was hoping it would be. It might just make them seek out other areas of my home to make their nest instead. The ant spray for outside was supposedly very effective. I was supposed to spray it all around my home’s foundation, going out a few extra feet to ensure that the ants would be deterred from even nearing my house to make a dash for it. I also sprayed about a foot up the house, in case they decided to attack from that direction. I was definitely launching a war both inside and outside of my home.

The pest control company told me about several baiting traps to place inside of my house. Once the ants would find them and drink or feed from them, they will be poisoned. I purchased a few of those as well. I was also told to eliminate any anthills that I might find in my flowerbeds or yard that could be a mansion for ants. By destroying those homes, I would be preventing ants from breeding and frolicking around my home.

The pest control professionals told me of not only an ant spray to use on the hills, but a few other powders and such. I was weary of using them because of other wildlife getting into the powders and being harmed. Ever so kindly, they took a few moments to tell me what kinds of prevention I could use outside that would not be harmful to the environment.

One week later, I was once again living alone. No uninvited guests had shown up for days. Right now, I consider myself safe. At least for the time being.

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.