An Update to our Organic Homemade Fire Ant Killer

Last week we introduced you to Our Garden Experiment in which we poisoned some ants in our garden using the method discussed in the post in the hyperlink above.  It uses orange oil that we extracted from orange peels that we ate.  The post from last week tells you how we made it.  I wanted to give it a couple days and then check to see if the fire ant mound was affected.

Take a peek at the photo at the top.  The mound was destroyed, decimated, obliterated, wrecked.  There was not a single fire ant alive anywhere near it!  This is great news.  Now I want to repeat it at least one more time before I get my hopes up.  There's an outside chance that the ants simply don't like the fragrance of oranges and packed up everything in tiny suitcases and moved.  Except, that doesn't explain the pile of dead ants on top of the mound.  I scraped my foot across the top to see if the ants were dormant on top and alive underneath, but there was no sign of life at all.

If this is indeed indicative of the efficacy of our homemade ant killer, Tricia and I already discussed saving every peel from every orange we eat and making gallons of it to use in the garden.  It looks like we'll have a nice navel orange crop this year, so we'll have a big inventory of peels to save and get the oil out of them to use in our fire ant killing concoction.

I know it's a short post tonight.  More to come tomorrow!

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.

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!

Fall Spuds: The Good and the Bad

Earlier this fall, IN THIS POST we introduced an experiment we were trying for the first time: Fall potatoes in pots.  We'd never done this before as we normally plant them in the ground.  This year, I figured, due to lack of space in the garden, we would plant in pots.  This would enable us to move the pots in the event of an early frost.  We learned that lesson from an early freeze years before in which we lost our crop before they were ready.  

We harvested all of our potatoes this past week.  We'll show you the results today.  If you click the link above, you'll note that we planted 12 potatoes that we had stored successfully from the spring crop.  Those 12 potatoes were planted in 12 landscape pots under rich mulch that had composted down from 3 year old wood chip mulch.  I incorporated some composted chicken litter from the hen house for fertilizer.

Here is one of the plants we harvested.  You'll notice a brown material right at the base of the plant.  Those are coffee grounds.  I'll tell you a little story about that.  We read somewhere a natural remedy for fire ants is to spread some used coffee grounds.  The grounds provide compost as well as repel fire ants.  Or so they say.  This did NOT work in our Potato Pots.  It may have even caffeinated them, making them more aggressive in reproduction and growth. 

Back to the potato harvest.  I simply turned the pots over in a wagon to capture the mulch and then sifted through the mulch to pull out the potatoes.  (This resulted in being bit by the ants numerous times.)  Here are a few of the potatoes:

They were nice looking, new potatoes and we'll eat them up.  The photo below shows you the extensive fire any colony that was in the bottom of the pot.  The fire ants are always looking for high ground.  In times of rain and wet soil, the highest ground proved to be the soil in our Potato Pots.  We'll have to think this through better next time.

Here are a few more of the potatoes that we harvested as they are shown stored on our drying wagon.  This allows air flow to get around them and it is shady and cool, perfect conditions to store potatoes.

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I wish I would have weighed or counted the potatoes, but I forgot.  I was hoping for a better yield.  Oh, we definitely got more than the 12 potatoes that we planted, but if I had to guess, I'd say we got 36 nice sized potatoes and a bunch more small ones.  If I would have waited a couple more weeks, the small ones you see may have grown to golf-ball sized potatoes, but the ant infestation made me wonder if there were even going to be any potatoes.  In hindsight, I should have waited until the plants died or frost killed them.  In summary, a disappointing harvest, but we'll do it again next fall.  I have another nine months or so to learn about killing fire ants without pesticides.  It's probably not a good idea to eat potatoes laced with Amdro or Spectracide.  We've tried boiling water as an organic fire ant mound treatment option.  That works, but it would also kill the potato plants.

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!

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. 

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!

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.

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'!