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!
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