How to Keep Fire Ants Out of Your Garden

Your garden is the pride of your backyard. You carefully pick each element as a way to perfect your home’s exterior. The last thing that you want is a bunch of harmful bugs making your garden their home. Here are tips on how to keep fire ants out of your garden.

Bucketing

When you see fire ants in your garden, you need to act immediately. Once these creatures gain a foothold in your yard, you’ll face a swarm. A fire ant queen can live up to seven years, laying up to 1,000 eggs daily. You can imagine what this sort of infestation would do to your garden.

One approach for ridding your garden of ants is bucketing. You want to dig out the ant mound and place this part of the garden in a bucket. Before you start moving the ants, sprinkle some corn starch or baby powder in the bucket. You might want to put some on the shovel, too. These substances stop the ants from escaping. Every ant that gets away is one that can restart the colony in your garden.

Think about timing when you’re ready to start bucketing. You want all the ants around the mound. During the spring, mid-morning is best. You should bring at least a foot of soil with the mound. That way, ants won’t realize that you moved them. Something else that you should keep in mind is your outfit. You want to wear to clothes that won’t create hiding places for ants. By wearing the wrong thing, you could negate all of your work while bucketing.

Hot Water

You have several good options if you want to kill ants without using pesticides. Your most straightforward option is hot water. What you need to do is pour several gallons of hot water into a bucket. Take this bucket and pour it over the ant mound. Your goal is to kill the colony.

Make sure that you don’t splash the water. The tidal wave may accidentally flood ants away. If they survive, you’ve wasted your time. You want to direct the flow of water such that it’s steady. You may need three or four buckets of water to do the job correctly. By the time you’re done, you should have confidence that no ants remain.

The only problem with hot water is that it may kill other parts of your garden. You should research the potential negative effects of water on your other flowers and plants before you start.

Fire Ant Bait

Pesticides are a proven method of killing fire ant colonies. Since many people don’t like to use them, you should think of this option as a last resort. Using fire ant bait is the easiest method, though. The bait does all the work.

All that you need to do is put traps in the areas of your garden where you’ve seen ants. The bait will lure the ants and then poison them. They’ll take the disease back to the queen, effectively ending the colony.

As you can see, you have several effective options for killing fire ants. These tips should help you protect your garden from additional infestation.