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.
