January is the rainy season here in California, and it certainly has been living up to that description lately. All last week it rained pretty steadily, with a brief break for Saturday and most of today. Tonight the next set of storms are supposed to roll in. For the next few weeks it looks like we'll have a repeating cycle of three or four days of rain, followed by a few days off. It isn't too bad for me because I've been spending most of my time at work. I haven't been able to run, but since my run-in with the coyotes, I haven't been too keen to hit the trails :) It is probably a little rougher on Jeremy who is stuck in the house with the cats all day.
One side-effect of all of the rain, is that the ants have decided they'd rather hang out in the nice dry house than outside. We've been fighting an on-going battle with a bunch of tiny ants for the last few days. Our first idea was to try to contain the ants without resorting to chemical warfare. We looked up "natural" ant control on the Internet and found a couple of things to try.
The first suggestion was to dump black pepper on the ants to scatter them and then to follow them to their home and block them back in. Let me just say that the only thing worse than having a bunch of tiny black ants running around your floor is having a bunch of tiny black ants AND a bunch of black pepper all over your floor. After the pepper, the ants just kind of ran around in circles, so we couldn't follow them to the place they came in. Either they are really smart ants, or the pepper solution doesn't work.
The next suggestion we tried was vinegar. Supposedly vinegar contains some chemical that messes with the trails that ant leave and if you keep cleaning an area with vinegar, eventually the ants will leave. That may be true, but you clearly need to clean the area with vinegar for longer than 48 hours in order for this method to be effective. We've been mopping with vinegar four or five times a day for two days now, and I think we're about done playing nice.
Jeremy has been muttering about "stupid hippy vingegar crap" and our house is starting to smell pretty funky, so I think we're going to resort to Raid. At least we tried.
We're looking forward to getting rid of both the ants AND the rain. Of course, we keep reminding ourselves that it could be worse ... it could be snow!
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Get this stuff: http://www.terro.com/
ReplyDeleteIt's not really nice to the ants, but at a certain point they just need to go. This stuff you just put out a little on a little paper that comes with it and they take it back to the nest. When my house gets invaded in the spring I put it out and they're gone within a day or two. I like it better than spraying anything around the house with the animals and kids.
With the cats I just try to put a little bowl with a lip on it over the Terro and the cats usually leave it alone. I do watch it when I first put it out though to make sure they don't find some creative way to mess with what they of course think is a new toy for them.
Raid did the trick. No ants for a couple months now, even with the constant rain the last couple weeks.
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