Ants

A war happened this week in our house! No, not a spectacular marital dispute, not even another stand off with my very stubborn 3 year old - but we had an invasion and I simply had to act. Wednesday morning we came down to the kitchen to find ants crawling everywhere! I was not amused, I have a serious dislike to ants inside the house. It might have to do with growing up in a house with regular ant infestations despite my parents' never ending attempts at keeping the little black creatures outside, but whatever the reason for my dislike I knew these ants had to get out of my kitchen asap.

Not long ago I had read that bicarbonate of soda is a deterrent for ants, so I straight away grabbed a tub from the cleaning cupboard and sprinkled everywhere. It doesn't work! the ants were happily walking all over it!

So I turned to my trusted friend in a crisis: google. As always I ended up with a wealth of information and an uncertainty about how much of it was actually true. Unfortunately one fact seem to be popping up again and again: never kill individual ants inside the house, the ant will release a scent that the fellow ants will pick up and they will all come to the funeral. This was worrying not least because I had frantically been killing ants all morning, what else was I supposed to do, ask them politely to leave? It is concerning that ants apparently have this built in kamikaze instinct - 'my pal just died, so I should definitely head to the same place'. In a war situation that is a frightening enemy.

Anyway I also got a list of various stuff that is supposed to keep ants away, incl. cinnamon, red chili powder, black pepper, vinegar, vaseline, chalk and baby powder. Some of them I quickly dismissed, e.g. the black pepper. I sneeze when I put pepper in to cooking, so sprinkling it all over the kitchen in the middle of hay fever season seemed a bad idea. Chalk didn't seem very convincing either, apparently you can draw a line with chalk and the ants won't cross it - but frankly I found that hard to believe unless it was a really, really thick line.

Vaseline however seemed worth a try, I kind of imagined that to an ant it wouldn't be pleasant to walk in, so I smeared vaseline round the door, on skirting boards, the edge of the floor - more or less everywhere and then I sat down to watch. Somehow I had imagined that the ants would just vanish, but they kept reappearing from other places. So I decided to try something else and chose chili pepper. A few minutes later I had a rather sticky red substance around the kitchen door consisting of vaseline topped with chili. Surely this would do the trick.

I watched the gaps in the door where the ants originally seemed to come in and the numbers there definitely diminished, but every time I looked at the end of the kitchen counter, there were hordes of them there. Where were they coming from?
I looked in all the cupboards under the counter, but no black creepies. I checked for gaps in the floor or the walls, still no success. So when my husband phoned the poor man got a long rant about these mysterious ants appearing out of nowhere.

I spent a long time that day watching the same corner of the kitchen, I even sprayed some vinegar solution in case that worked, but despite my efforts ants were still appearing and I had no idea where from. Desperation was therefore setting in, when my husband appeared with a tub of ant kill. I am sure the prospect of me ranting all night about ants made him think that on this occasion chemicals were needed. I am not proud of it, but I grabbed the small container and sprinkled away.

And then I realised a place I hadn't checked: my 2 tomato plants on the kitchen counter. I lifted them up... and hordes of ants came crawling. I am now guessing that all my mysterious ants probably came from the plant - they were already in the house before I started my vaseline/chili campaign. Hmm - this kind of leaves me with a dilemma, because I am now not sure if that sticky red stuff actually did work to keep ants outs, after all the steady stream of newcomers did slow down dramatically after putting it on, or if it was only thanks to my chemical warfare that the kitchen was ant free the next morning??!

So what have I learned. Well, besides from the fact that Bicarbonate of soda definitely doesn't work as an ant deterrent the main lesson is probably that I need to calm down. To be truly green I cannot run around becoming obsessed with getting rid of ants (or anything else for that matter) instantly - it leads to bad decisions. So next step on the green path: learn to chill!