While We Are on The Subject of Solenopsis

Solenopsis is the scientific name for the fire ant.  Solenopsis is too nice of a name for those cursed ants that inhabit almost every square yard of our soil.  Last night I posted about how I took great joy in boiling a colony of ants alive with water left over from processing pickled beets.  I looked on with glee as the pile of ant carcasses sat atop their once thriving colony.  Boiling water is a cheap and effective way of killing ants if you don't mind killing the grass around the ant pile.

While boiling water works in eradicating most every ant in the mound, you can't use it in the garden as the boiling water will also boil your plants.  I wanted to show you an experiment I tried using Starbucks Coffee coffee grounds.  Starbucks has a program called "Grounds for Your Garden" in which they will give you (FOR FREE!!) used coffee grounds for use in your garden.  All you have to do is go pick them up.

Below you can see a huge ant colony that has built their sprawling estate on my pepper row.  If I sprayed poison to kill the ants, some of that poison would undoubtedly end up in my peppers.  It is not a wise idea to eat ant-killer flavored peppers.

But that is where my experiment comes into play.  Rather than use poison, I'll use coffee grounds from Starbucks.  I poured out the bags of coffee-drenched coffee grounds along with the drenched paper filters and spread them liberally on the fire ant mound.

Did the Starbucks Coffee coffee grounds kill the fire ants??  No, sadly, it did not kill the fire ants..   However, I thought I could see the ants loading up their tiny ant luggage and hitting the open road with the pepper row in their rear-view mirrors.  It is clear that fire ants do not like coffee grounds, but coffee grounds doesn't  kill them.  But by the next day, when I moved the coffee grounds away, all of the ants were gone!  There wasn't a single ant left!  They picked up their stuff and moved. They likely moved somewhere out of the garden and into the lawn and that's where they made their fatal mistake.  I"m not afraid of using ant poison in the yard - just not in the garden.  If they moved to the yard, I'll sprinkle some ant poison on the mound and eradicate the whole mound.

Starbucks coffee grounds scared off the fire ants.  Just sprinkle a generous portion of coffee grounds over  a fire ant mound and you'll send them packing!