Ants

[Amelia]

Good Luck you guys, I hope it works for you! I made "multiple feeding areas" for my ants. I have to get some more "home cooked meals" out there for my ants today to! I live in a very wooded area in Michigan so will always have this problem, more of THEM than Us!....AND I refuse to use any commercial pesticides (or weed killer) in order to protect the health of my dogs. I believe those chemicals are correlated with an increase in cancer in dogs, as well as people and the pests always become immune anyway. (Yard looks like hell but pool and dogs are healthy and beautiful)

I just thought of a couple other things. I have always loved to grow my own herbs for the kitchen and mint is one of my favorites. In particular I like chocolate mint plants, they are smaller, not as tall and ugly. Ants avoid mint and I have always planted it around the outside of the house to help keep them out. I hardly ever have them in the house now! Catnip is a type of mint also but I have enough neighborhood cats coming around the other side of the house where the catnip is and they drive my dogs nuts!

I think I'll try planting more mint around my pool area. Mint is very hearty and tends to take over anything else though, and does attract bees if allowed to flower. Easy, easy to grow, cheap and propagates easily from cuttings or just sticking the tall stems back in the dirt.

Heck, maybe I'll try sticking a few sprigs of mint in the gaps of the coping and the liner-lock.

Another thing I found in web-searches is that ants won't cross a line where vinegar has been wiped, like if you wipe your doorways with white vinegar.
I have never tried this but I think I will try wiping my pool coping with it. I don't think it could hurt anything. I don't know what it would do to the pool water but I don't plan on spilling it and it will dry quickly. I'll let you know if I see any difference in my ant population.

On to spend my day enjoying my pool, Amelia.
(Too much time on my hands, but that's just fine when it's POOL SEASON!)

[virangos]

Amelia, would or does spearmint and peppermint work? I have an ant problem
that just wont go away and would consider planting it all around my house.
Thanks, Joe