Eradicating Fire Ants in the Garden

The Red Imported Fire Ant (RIFA) or Solenopsis Invicta arrived on our fair shores in the 1930's in Mobile, Alabama from a cargo ship inbound from Argentina.  Since then, they've spread across the South and have ruined many a picnic.  Their bite is angry and it itches.  We've spent hundreds of dollars treating them in our yard.  They spread all over the place, making mounds of vicious little creatures that you don't want on your property.

You especially don't want them in your garden.  They seek the high ground during rains and the garden has been built up over the years and is a favorite home for them.  That presents a problem since we don't want to kill them with poison.  That poison may kill the ants in the garden, but it will also kill the beneficial insects and soil microbes that we want to keep.  Not only that, we don't want to eat vegetables laced with ant poison.  

So we've found a safe alternative fire ant killer.  We use Orange Oil, Agricultural Molasses and compost tea to make a safe and effective fire ant killer for the garden.

We wrote the recipe on the side of the gallon jug:

2 oz. orange oil  (this is pretty expensive at $34 for 32 oz. container)
2 oz. molasses
2 oz. compost tea

1 gallon water

We follow the recipe exactly and fill with rainwater and shake up real good.

You use 1 gallon per mound.  The directions are to pour it in the center of the mound and let it go down deep.  You're attempting to kill the queen.  Then you pour all around the mound, being careful not to let it run off.

Look what happens!  The ants are killed and the eggs are ruined.

When you pass by the mound an hour later, there's not an ant stirring.  We've obliterated the fire ants from the garden!

We will keep checking.  One must be vigilant in combatting fire ants.  They are relentless.  The orange oil is the active ingredient (L-limonene) found in orange peel.  It kills the ants by destroying the wax coating in the ant's respiratory system.  Deadly to fire ants, but it has a nice benefit for humans - it smells great!

I Don't Like Them in Any Language

The Dadgum Fourmi or Fromille.  That's how you say ant in French or Cajun French.  No matter what language, this is a nuisance like no other. Right now, our yard and our pasture is full of them.  They build huge mounds that pop up all over the place.  The first time it rains, they pack up and move to higher ground.  That usually means they move into the round bales of hay.  When I go to roll them out into the pasture, the fire ant (fromille) eat me alive. 

Supposedly, they arrived from Brazil on a ship docked in Mobile, Alabama and quickly spread throughout the southeast.  These immigrants are not welcome.  Perhaps we should import some anteaters!

Fire Ant Mound (or "ant pile")

The ant piles are in all sizes.  For perspective, that is a size 10 Croc sitting beside an average ant pile in our yard.  The ones in the pasture are much bigger.

Now, I'll readily admit, I'm not real neighborly to the fromille.  I stomp on every pile I see.  It doesn't really do anything to hurt them, but it makes me feel better - unless they get on my boots, climb up my leg and bit my ankles.

Rebuild, will you?

The ants are angry.  They mobilize to attack, protect their eggs, and begin to rebuild.  They are aggressive and relentless.

Knocking down the mound

If you look closely, you can see the white eggs in the egg chamber.  These eggs will hatch shortly, birthing more vicious critters that dot our landscape.

I've seen a You Tube video one time of some enterprising and entrepreneurial guys that put a lot of aluminum in a furnace and heated it until it melted.  Once super-heated and in liquid form, they poured it over a fire ant pile.  The liquid aluminum flowed down into the tunnels beneath the mound, filling every chamber, every tunnel, every hole.  They then allowed it to cool and harden.  Using shovels, they dug it all up and sprayed it down with a water hose until nothing remained but the "ant mound art work."  Here is an example:

Image Credit

Of course, I've never done that.  I'm not that creative.  I merely stomp their mounds.  I also went to Tractor Supply, purchased some Ortho Ant Killer for $20-something bucks and spent the time from 6 pm to 7:30 killing ants.  Unfortunately, that didn't even kill half of them in the yard.  I loathe those dadgum fromille!

What To Do With the Boiling Water After Processing Pickled Beets

Here at Our Maker's Acres Family Farm, we find ways to re-use almost everything. We can't have anything going to waste.  Once we finished making and processing the pickled beets that we talked about in Friday's Post, we had an entire stock pot of boiling water left over.  I could just pour it down the drain or let it cool and use it to water some plants.

Or I could use the entire pot of boiling water on a huge fire ant mount that is right outside our back door!

That's exactly what I did.  I very carefully carried the pot of boiling water outside and then stomped on the mound with my feet to get them all stirred up.  Once the fire ant mound was "boiling" with activity, I poured the entire pot of boiling water on top of them.

The mound instantly melted down, exposing the ants' tunnels and boiled ant carcasses along with boiled ant eggs.  You can see them if you look closely in the photo below.

I checked out the fire ant mound a little later and it appears that the undertaker ants had carried all their dead brethren to the surface for burial.  There were LOTS of dead ants on the surface of what used to be their mound.  Pardon me if I shed no tears...

We have lots of ant mounds in the yard and in the pasture.  Boiling water is a good way to "nuke" an ant pile in your yard.  Tomorrow I'll show you a technique to use in the garden to make the fire ants leave.

Competing "Farmers" in my Patch of Cowpeas

I have several varieties of cowpeas that are maturing right now, including, Black-eyed peas, Purple Hull peas, Ozark Razorback peas, and Holstein peas.  As soon as they began to bloom and put on little pods, I noticed a couple of things.  First the pods and stems were covered with little bugs.  A closer look showed that they were aphids.  But, they weren't the only insects on the cowpeas.  There were ants running up and down the plants.

Aphids on my cowpeas

According to This Interesting Article the aphids are actually being herded like farmers and ranchers herd cows.  Ants are the farmers in this instance.  Instead of using a 'hot shot' like farmers and ranchers use to provide an electric shock to cows to keep them in line, ants use chemicals on their feet to tranquilize the aphids so that they stay close.  The reason the ants want their herd of aphids close is that the aphids provide something that the ants want.  The aphids eat the plant and then secrete a sugary excretion called 'honeydew' that the ants eat.

A heard of aphids on the ants' "pasture"

You can see a couple of ants on top of the cowpea leaf checking the herd and then having maybe having a snack of some sticky-sweet honeydew.

The competing farmer in the cowpea patch

So all that sounds fine and good, I guess, but not for me.  The aphids make a sticky mess on the pods and when you try to pick them, the ants bite you.  I have to do something to get rid of both the aphids and the ants and wanted to try natural means to do so.  I mixed up some Dawn Dishwashing liquid with some water in my garden sprayer and sprayed the leaves of the cowpeas real good with the sudsy concoction.  The soap is supposed to remove a waxy protective covering on the insects causing dehydration and death.  Those that don't die, will leave.  

Spraying a soapy solution on the peas

I coated the leaves with a heavy coating in hopes of making the farmers and their herd of aphids either die or leave for greener pastures.

Did it Work?

So did the soapy water experiment work?

The day after my application, I was real encouraged.  The cowpeas were completely clean!  The aphids and ants were nowhere in sight.  Unfortunately, two days later, they were back with a vengeance, covering the plants even more than previously.  I quickly picked the ripened pods and threw them in a bucket of water to wash the aphids and ants off.  For next year's crop of cowpeas, I'll make sure that I have Neem Oil on hand.  I don't have any right now, but I have since read that Neem oil is a good natural way to control aphids and ants on cowpeas.  

If at first you don't succeed, try try again.  The garden is only big enough for one of us, and I'm not leaving.  Many times I have enough trouble getting a crop in.  I certainly don't need competing farmers in my garden.

Fire Ants in the Raised Beds

We have a raised bed in the backyard in which we plant watermelons, cantaloupes, butternut squash, and spaghetti squash.  It is raised, hence, the level of the soil is higher than the surrounding area which is good, but in times of rain like we just experienced, fire ants look for higher locales on which to relocate.  Doggonit if they didn't discover our raised beds!

When we got ready to plant in the bed this weekend, there was a big, thriving ant mound.  Oh, how I hate fire ants.  They bite/sting.  They also build huge mounds in the pasture and make it very difficult to push the chicken tractors.  Earlier this week we posted about undertaker bees - those bees charged with removing the dead bees from the colony.  If you'll notice in the photo below, you'll see that there are numerous little brown things on top of the ant mound.  Those are fire ants that are deader than a doornail.  Ant colonies, like bee colonies, must have undertaker ants to dispose of the deceased.,

Dead Ants

I like to see dead fire ants.  But let's rewind.  How did we kill the ants?  We don't like using pesticides in our food plots.  Well, we cooked 'em!  Russ and I boiled water and poured the boiling water over the mound.

Cooking their goose!

The boiling water was slowly poured over the ant pile and the bubbling liquid flowed down into the tunnels and all throughout the chambers, making a nice ant "broth".

Fire in the hole!

This method is very effective for killing ants.  However, you have to do it three or four times to kill the whole colony.  As long as you see the dead ants on top, there are still live "undertaker ants" around to move them out of the colony.  So we applied the first pot of boiling water in the morning and the second in the afternoon, killing numerous ants.

By the third application, the few remaining live ants had gotten the message that constructing their home in our raised bed was a fatal mistake.  Below you see that there is no more movement in the colony.  The white dots you see on top of the ground are ant eggs, COOKED ant eggs, that is.

Eggs over easy

While this is an optimal remedy for a few ant hills on your property, it is just not practical for killing the numerous ant colonies all over the pasture.  I wish it was. We'll use it for ant hills that pop up around our house and in garden areas to try to keep them at bay.

We went ahead and planted the melons and squash and I'll inspect the vacated remains of the ant colony for signs of life and reapply boiling water as needed. Dead ants.  Ant-free zone in which to plant our crops.  No pesticides.  Now we're cookin'!