Ants be gone!

A few months ago we had some uninvited, teeny-tiny house pests. These little sugar ants appeared out of nowhere and were in no hurry to leave. We tried to kill them all, wipe down all the counter tops, clean out the baking cabinet etc and yet reinforcement troops appeared again overnight. It was getting ridiculous and so frustrating and we were desperate to get rid of them for good. I did some research and found all sorts of natural remedies that claimed to annihilate the pesky ants and I tried a good handful of those tips (most of them all at once!) Like I said, we were desperate to regain control of our kitchen.


One method that helped curb the ants' enthusiasm was to use mint tea bags. Did you know that ants dislike the smell of mint? I steeped a bunch of mint tea bags, squeezed out the excess liquid, and hung them around the kitchen where the ants liked to march. By outlets, behind the 'fridge, along the baseboard to the pantry, around the dishwasher, behind the sink, etc. Yep, my kitchen was adorned with used teabags throughout the course of a week. But it helped! And I was happy to have a non-toxic method to use when my children were awake and running around. Sure, they thought mom was a little crazy to be taping old tea bags around the kitchen but they were polite and didn't make a big deal about it.

Other ideas I found were to draw a line of chalk, tumeric, pepper, red chili powder, paprika, or anything citrus near their pathway especially where they're entering your home. The presence of any of these causes them to rethink their travel plans and they'll often choose to abort mission.

The method that ultimately worked the best for us in ridding our kitchen of ants was good ole trusty Borax.
I followed the "recipe" and directions below and within 4-7 days we were completely free of our pesky house pests!

Sugar and Borax Ant Bait

Ingredients:

1 cup sugar
3 tablespoons Borax

3 cups warm water

Directions:
1. Mix the sugar and Borax.
2. Slowly add the warm water, mixing well.
3. Store in a jar.
4. When ready to use, soak cotton balls or wadded up paper towels in the mixture and place in small baby food jars. (I used the lids from take-out coffee cups, Gatorades and 2-Liter Coke bottles.)

5. Place the traps where the ants will find them.
6. When the ants find the traps, leave them alone. They'll drink the poison and take it back to their nest and eventually they'll all die off.

7. Replenish the liquid as needed. (I topped them off once every day or two.)

*If you have little ones or pets running around, you'll want to put these bait traps out of their reach.

It helped that I placed the traps at night (so that my children wouldn't get a hold of them) because it was hard not to kill ants whenever I saw them. But it's worth it to ignore them. Within a week we were finally ant-free.

I may or may not have left the mint tea bags up for a week or two later to deter any future scout ants from trying to invade our kitchen again!