Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose farm and today I got an unpleasant
surprise when I went to get this pot for a customer and found that there were
ants all over the floor of the greenhouse and in fact there are ants
crawling up into the pot making their little tunnels in there and of course
making the plant unsalable for my customer so I have to take care of them
now normally I would give a pretty live-and-let-live a attitude towards
ants they can be associated with aphids a little bit so they can spread those
around your garden but normally I don't bother with them much but now they're
affecting my living so I'm gonna give you some close-ups of how bad the
problem is and then I'm gonna take you step-by-step how I get rid of them well
if this don't make your skin crawl I don't know what will if you can see up
close here that they're they've fully colonized to the bottom of this pot here
and you can even see them sort of hauling around their little eggs within
there so they're definitely colonized this pot completely so I'll give me the
heebie-jeebies I need to get these guys gone you may already have heard that
borax kills ants but let me show you how to make into a trap that will kill both
the adults and the babies in the colony and you start by using I'm using a sour
cream container here but just a zipping a couple of holes in it so that the ants
can access the poison mix three teaspoons of sugar I've already put in
two to one teaspoon of borax I'm doing a rather small trap here so I'm not mixing
it at large quantities but the ratio remains the same it's three of sugar to
one of borax and then some warm water to help dissolve it I'm just going to stir
that around here now adult ants leach liquid the babies eat
solid so what I'm going to do is I'm going to put both into this trap for the
solid portion I'm just using this instant waffle and then for the liquid
I'm going to pour that over and just let it dissolve into the solid portion now
there's runoff to that's going into the bottom of this container and the adults
will eat that liquid but also and the hope is that they will take this solid
portion here and bring crumbs of that back to the colony and feed that to the
young and the young will feed that to the Queen and then that wipes out the
whole colony all right let me put the cover on and I will place this trap well
there you go so this is only been down for about a day and they've definitely
found it you can see that the side of that waffle they pulled off a chunk
there and they're starting to divvy that out and carry it back to the colony but
there's a whole ton of ants in here so I'm hoping that does it I like having it
in a container like this because that way I can keep it away from non-target
insects and just put it exactly where I believe this colony is but the next step
is to see if it does its work because I don't just want to kill the ones that
end up in the trap here I want them to carry back the liquid and also the
solids to the colony and wipe out the rest of the ants so I'll leave this to
run its course for a couple of days and then I will check the bottoms of those
plots again now for the results this is day four so four days after application
on the second day I went back and I added just a little more of the sugar
and borax solution because they had eaten it all up but even by then ant
activity around the area was way way down I went back today to look there's
no more activity of ants on the floor of the greenhouse in that area and here's
the pod which as you may remember was just crawling with ants and now you can
see that there's really no sign of the ants even though the signs of their
tunneling is still present there there's no longer any sign of the ants
themselves so I'm going to call this one a victory and I can sell this pot now
alright thanks for watching that gives you some idea of how you can deal with
ants in your garden if you need to get rid of them and if you have any
questions about that or any other garden pests maybe drop that in the comments
below the video and I'll see if I can help