A Garden Experiment

Over the years we've built up our garden with loads of compost and decomposed wood chips, leaves and other organic matter.  As time passed the level of the garden rose with all the amendments to be six inches or so above the surrounding pasture.  That's a good thing as the garden isn't inundated with rain water that stands on the soil and floods the crops.  There's a downside to that as well.  After rains, fire ants seek high ground.  That means we get fire ant mounds in the garden.

In the yard, I mix up a batch of bifen and spray the mounds, killing the colony stone cold dead.  In the garden, we don't want to introduce chemicals and poisons for the obvious reason - all that works its way into the food we eat, and we don't want that.  We have an ant killer that we make with orange oil and some other ingredients.  It works!  It safely kills the ants without killing us.  The orange oil is expensive, however.

Can we make our own organic fire ant killer?  We'll see.  We ate a bunch of oranges and saved the peels.  We put them in a gallon container and filled with water and allowed to soak for a week.  Then we strained off the peels.  The remaining slurry smells great!  Just like orange juice.  Hopefully the orange oil leached out and remained in the water.  To this liquid we added 3 ounces of dish soap.  Here is the finished product:

A cardboard box had blown off the garden sink into the garden.  When I lifted it up, it was full of fire ants!

The ants were angry.  They boiled with rage.  Here, friends, is our first test subject for our fire ant killing concoction.

I poured the solution down the middle of the mound, making sure it flowed straight down to where the queen was.  Then I slowly poured all around the mound, covering the ants and dirt of the mound until it was an orange-smelling mud hole.

So now we wait to see if our concoction is effective.

I'll keep you posted in a few days if we had success.  If so, we'll continue to make our own fire ant killer.  If we fail, I'll use the expensive orange oil solution.

An Experiment in Killing/Controlling Fire Ants

I despise fire ants.  Their mounds pop up everywhere.  When it rains, they seek high ground and float to new locations.  They decide to make their home in a round bale of hay and when you attempt to move it, they suddenly are all over you, biting/stinging or whatever it is they do.  I'm constantly searching for ways to kill them.  I've used gasoline as well as boiling water and innumerable chemicals on their mounds and take delight in seeing their dead carcasses atop the mound.

There are times, however, that you can't pull out the big guns to kill them.  The crafty buggers decide to move into the garden.  I don't want to use chemicals in the garden as they will end up in my family's food supply.  Boiling water would kill the plants in the garden.  We tried grits.  It didn't work.  We tried coffee grounds.  It works, but only causes them to MOVE and not die.  What else can I do?

Well, I found out that there is a recipe for fire ant killer that uses citrus oil.  I read that d-limonene is a substance that is in the citrus oil that resides in citrus rinds.  Here's something that we can try!  We had tons of citrus, so we didn't throw any of the rinds away.  We froze them, so we can use them as we need them.  Let's make a batch.  We half-way filled a 2 gallon bucket with citrus rinds.

Then we filled the bucket with water.

I added a tablespoon of dishwashing liquid.

Then we put the bucket aside for a week and let things happen.  After a week it is kind of nasty...  I'm assuming it is ready.

I strain out the rinds and here is our super-dooper, orange rind infused, fire ant citrus cocktail.

I walked out to the garden and just as I suspected, a colony of fire ants has taken up residence underneath the canopy of our Irish potatoes. 

They think they are being sneaky, but I have found them.  I kick the top of the mound off to make them good and mad.  It is time.

I poured the entire concoction on top of the mound of enraged ants.  Then I pour the orange rinds on for good measure.  "Orange" you sad you moved into the Irish Potato row, fire ants?

The next day I wanted to check in on the ants.  I moved the orange rinds out of the way to inspect the fire ant mound beneath them.  The tunnels are empty.  There is not a single ant in site.  Nothing is moving. 

So does this mean it worked?  I'm going to be honest.  I'm not sure.  The thing that concerns me is that I don't see any dead ants.  I wanted to see a bunch of dead ants underneath the orange peels.  Maybe they just moved?  The positive thing is that they are not there any more.  I am thawing out another bag of orange peels to make another batch.  I'm pleased the ants are gone, but I need the results of another experiment before I am ready to say it works.