So happy to see the vloggers I follow are somehow connected…Garden Answer; Ants Canada, Mikey Bustos and Epic Gardening. Kevin…do you collaborate with Mikey? Mabuhay ka!
I live in North Carolina and the fire ants are horrible. They are evil little creatures. I believe in live and let live, but fire ants, mosquitoes and aggressive bees will die immediately. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
I could never grow cucumbers until I started coating the bottom of the vine with a thick coat of Vaseline. The ants got stuck in the Vaseline and couldn’t go up the vine. I hosed off any pest that got near the flowers in the beginning. After that I didn’t need to do anything. Got at least 40 cucumbers off that vine.
Biologist here! I have to clarify for 2:52 - honeydew isn't excrement, it's just that the phloem in the plants is so high-pressure compared to the aphids, it literally forces its way through them. It'd be like a human trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Gotta love nature.
Just to clarify, i didn't mean that in a mean or laughing at it kinda way. One girl i know has it and she is normally very athletic so she has a hard time when it flares up. Obviously you can't really go around mountain biking when something like that could strike!
Don't use dish soap. It works on many insects, but it also stresses out the plants. Use solid hand soap instead, ideally hand-made. The chemical structure is very different, and while soap is also stressful for the plant, it does a lot less harm, while affecting the insects just about the same.
A few drops of dish soap in a spray bottle with water worked well for me this year! I have a patio garden with no hose so I just spray them off the leaves, remove any leaves that have a lot of aphids on them, and wipe them off leaves with gloves on. It is the only thing that has worked for aphids in my patio garden.
Another solution....when you wash the rice, take the first water fill it up in a air jar or a bottle...leave for 15days in a dark place, the water gets fermented...spray that fermented water over the affected area, and the Aphids loose their wax coat n can easily clear them..
I lost a bean crop last year to ants & aphids. One of the things I tried was introducing predators - specifically ladybugs - to try to reduce the aphid population, but the ants were too effective as guards. I remember watching them body-blocking and chasing away any ladybug that tried to attack an aphid.
I’ve seen this in my garden too. The few ladybugs I do have, get bullied. I literally had to guard two mating ladybugs on a cucumber plant, because a huge army ant kept trying to bother them. I was excited to get some ladybug babies.
@@bummblebee77 Ladybugs are... worryingly rare in my neighborhood. Much fewer of them about than there were a decade ago. And they have fewer spots, too, I've noticed. Nowadays most ladybugs I see have just three or four spots at most, and some have no spots at all.
Never had to deal with aphids in my garden before until this year, so I'm glad you're sharing your wisdom about this! I just live in a townhouse, and my garden is in a raised bed and pots. My 10 year old wanted to plant and grow some fruit trees, and we've seen groups of aphids near the tops of the saplings. We've tried a couple of things to clear them off, but we'll also try your methods as well. Thank you!
What a nice, kind and warm hearted person you are! I really like your focus on getting rid of ants in the most humane way possible. Very good video on TH-cam.
Yessss!!! My summer garden was taken over by aphids. I barely got any harvest:( it was my first time gardening, so it was a big disappointment. Thanks for the video!
I'm in Florida. I hate the ants. They swarm my plants, escort the aphids to the new leaves on some of my trees, bring in weed seeds and bite me. They suck!
The tiny sugar ants have been crazy bad, I dry mixed borax and sugar, will try making the paste this time. Have found frequent watering the flower pots on the deck drowned out the ants. But what I was wondering about was so many sticky plants, oh honey dew! Built a garden in what was a weed fill lot last year and pest control has been a harsh learning curve. Thanks for this video!
Meh, I have mixed feelings about DE. Effective, yes. But it doesn't break down or dilute like soap does, and it kills everything it touches, not just your target.
Aphids don't crawl around much, so diatomaceous earth isn't super effective against them (unless you use a _ton_ of it), but it will kill ants and prevent them from farming aphids near the plant. Basically, if it's a pest that doesn't _move_ much, you always need to spray it *directly,* which means there isn't much point in using something that _stays_ on the plant. Water + 1% soap + 2% neem oil (or water + 1% soap + 5% isopropanol) is generally effective against aphids, and doesn't leave your plants looking like they have a cocaine problem.
I've lost many battles with aphids eating my vegetables... I decided to just work with them and grew a sacrificial plant they can munch on for a long time like my dying calendula plant. Keeps them busy!!
You could spray the aphids while on the plants with whole milk. The milk then dries very quickly and crystallizes on the aphids and smothers them. The milk spray method works very quickly, within a couple of days! There is no foul order and doesn’t hurt the plants or beneficial bugs. Very inexpensive as well!
@@mykolapliashechnykov8701 I was going to post using fresh, unpasteurized cow milk but it’s hard to come by due to current laws… hence the whey. You are correct.
Hey this is the collab we’ve all been waiting for . I’m gonna need you to go to Mikey Bustos’ farm in the Philippines and make this most beautiful garden to date !
love watching ants Canada too, as well as his other channels. I find it interesting how they grow veg and other plants in the tropics. Also nice to see a little bit of home after living in the US for over 50 years.
I let the aphids go on my milkweed, and ants started to work with them. However, on one of the lower leaves, it was covered in these eggs attached to a string attached to the leaf, which I found out are lacewings and now I have about of hundred of them guarding my plants. Leave a couple plants like milkweed that ahpids love (plus, certain aphids like the ones that use milkweed specialize on milkweed, so they very very rarely hop over to other plants unless related) so that you can get those lacewings and ladybugs to protect your veggies.
Ants in my garden & yard are a HUGE problem. The destroy everything, such as sweet corn. They get in the husk and eat the cornels. They're nests get so large, they destroy the plant roots, including flowers and grass. Not too mention the issue with fire ants which infest my entire yard including the garden.
I've recently learned that they like to farm the young treehoppers that are all over my sunflowers, too! For the same reason - honeydew. This is my first year growing sunflowers and I think the other predatory insects have yet to catch up on the treehopper nymphs because they're _everywhere._
Ants can definitely detect borax. They can't detect it when its concentration in a sugary mix is too low. When using soap, don't use dish soap on plants - it does work on insects, but it is also mightily stressful to the plant itself. Use hard hand soap instead. The chemical composition is different. It is still stressful for plants, but a lot less, while being equally effective against insects. When spraying plants with insecticides don't do it while plants are blooming. You'll kill off beneficial pollinating insects feeding of flower pollen and nectar too. Also, don't spray if you have a healthy population of beneficial predatory insects, like ladybugs, parasitic wasps or soldier beetles. Those will exterminate not just aphids but also other pests very effectively, but will be killed off by insecticides, leaving your plants unprotected by successive waves of combined aphid and ant attacks as insecticide decompose and washes off, ants will repeatedly move in on areas with shelter and food, restarting the farming of aphids. Ants may want to do their farming thing with aphids, but they can't if they can't climb up the plant. Placing some really smelly sticky collar around the base of the plant, such as a ring of adhesive tape with the sticky part outwards, smeared with regular ball bearings vaseline, maybe with some ground cinnamon mixed into it, will create a barrier for their feromone-marked paths. This may be tedious on plants like tomatoes or outright impossible on plants like squash, which like to spread out on the ground, but it's effective on trees and bushes which have a single small trunk. A plant's ability to fend off disease is highly increased if it gets more copper than what its roots can absorb. Sticking a thin copper wire into the plant's stem, somewhere at the base, causes just that. As sap flows up and down that wire, copper ions will be caught in the sap and travel everywhere into the plant. That's too little copper to make any difference in the edible parts for humans, but enough to majorly boost the plant's defensive mechanisms against disease. Only, it only works on plants with a somewhat soft stem, like tomatoes or peppers, and it's tedious to apply when you have a large number of plants.
There was a big ant mound in one corner of my parent’s garden, and the daffodils LOVED it. There was a forest of daffodils around the perimeter of the mound. Unfortunately, the hens eventually found the mound and destroyed it, and all the daffodils subsequently died ☹️
Also, aphids were destroying my milkweed, but I decided to leave it alone. In just a few days two species of hoverflies, lady beetles, mealy bug destroyers and lacewings completely obliterated the population. There’s hardly any aphids left and I’m happy that beneficial insects were able to thrive from them.
Off topic, but all the butterflies in your garden!!! So envious--don't see butterflies where I am as much as other places I've lived. In spite of all the pollinator plants I grow I see only cabbage moths and the occasional skipper. (Lots of bees though!)
I started a milkweed bed this year and the aphids absolutely coated the plants just after I planted them, but after a few days of washing the aphids off to try to make sure the baby milkweeds had a fighting chance, I started seeing tons of aphid predators in the area, and after a few weeks they stopped being a problem. The milkweeds look like they're doing great, but I'm gonna be pensive until I've seen them survive a winter lol.
I have a huge mealybug problem in my greenhouse. BT has really knocked down the fungus gnat situation, and Purecrop1 works for mealybugs, but it’s not systemic so it needs constant reapplication. I’m looking into ordering some biological controls like lacewings or something that will hatch this winter. Our hibiscus and cordilynes are pest magnets. Definitely going to smother in Neem before bringing in this fall
Great info. I have a lot of ants at our new place and I was wondering how much I needed to worry about them. I see them a lot but I haven't seen a lot of aphids.
Dish soap in boiling water will break surface tension and penetrates ant nests faster and deaper. Dish soap and water makes effective sprays for aphids on plants and trees.
@@SoJahSeh91 Are they near trees or tall shrubs and dropping back onto the blueberries or soap and water just flat out not working at all? I've never had it fail.
@@guestaccount9051 container bushes on my balcony. Neither soap & water, nor planting basil in the same container have done anything to control the aphids already there or their reproducing.
They're going after my lemon tree. I thought the ants were killing the aphids. Learned something new! Looks like I need to take care of some ants bc K have some pretty widespread leaf problems. At the same time I think I have citrus bug... can't remember the name (curled leaves). Im going to do a heavy pruning after harvest. Lemons are almost ready.
if youre on the west coast theres a good chance youre dealing with argentine ants, *especially* so if you're in CA. they are your classic looking ant, small bodied and completely black. these ants are non-native, invasive species and they are particularly challenging to manage because they are one of the few ant species that live in multi-queen colonies. this means that even if you manage to poison the main queen using the borax-sugar method, they are very likely to recover and resume their pest/farming activities by the end of the week (speaking from experience in regards to the timeline). i do stand by the sugar-borax method (i actually use borax and honey, the honey is already in a "paste" form and i actually do almost a 1:1 ratio and the ants still go for it) but I have to be extremely vigilant. its really unfortunate because these ants are able to completely wipe out native ants with their multi-queen colonies, and their multi-queening way of life allows them to form what's called supercolonies. These supercolonies are so large with so many ants that they are literally constantly at war in some areas under California, just continuously battling on piles of slaughtered ant bodies. I've never seen a native ant species in my five years of living in this area, and I have borax-honey traps set year round otherwise I would literally be overrun. by ants. i not from CA originally so learning all of this was like reading a sci-fi horror story
My ants are an integral part of my garden. I do have one plant that I’ve been battling aphids on though and some ants are farming them. I just hose them down every couple of days.
Every year we get ants on our okra flowers. We only got 1 okra this year from 5 plants. I would try spraying them off with water but they were hanging on for life.
We have carpenter ants here in the upstate of South Carolina, been trying to grow an avocado tree and mango tree. Both died from the ants eating the roots and seed of the trees 😢
every time I bring in my Pepper plants in my basement for the winter , they dont have aphids when I bring them in.. I do cut them way back but in a few weeks they are all infested with aphids in my basement.. last yr I replaced all soil and cut back to no leaves .. as soon as the leaves started growing aphids set in and destroyed my pepper plants.. they kill off my plants and the ones that survive are deformed .. when I bring them out for the summer the aphids leave the plant but the peppers are deformed for several months till the plants manages to bounce back.. nothing works to get rid of them .. I can slow them down but never kill them off.. and they are in my basement..ug
Cool video. Loving the science here, Kev. In my central Arizona garden, and the gardens of my local gardener friends our biggest ant pest is leaf-cutter ants. They regularly strip every single leaf off of our pomegranate trees, and also our pepper plant leaves are a favorite target of theirs. Do you know whether leaf-cutter ants will go to sugar, and thus be suitable targets for the borax and sugar treatment, or do they just want leaves? If they won't take sugar, do you have any tips for dealing with the leaf-cutter ants? Thanks!
I "keep" ants on my pepper plants, even though they do destroy some of the early fruiting BEFORE the flowers even open. It's upsetting, but I still receive crop, AND they keep off all the pests. They've never tried to come inside thank god
In the south, a stupid simple ant remedy is to sprinkle cornmeal or grits around the ant hill. The ants will feed the queen until she is full. Because grits or cornmeal expand in the stomach, she will eventually burst. Because the ants won't eat until the queen is full, they will all starve due to the dead queen. Works like a charm!
Mikey! 🐜🐜🐜🦜 I use a jam jar and put holes in the lid on one side. I put the jam jar on it's side with the holes at the top so it doesn't over flow into the soil. Borax is banned in the UK but i use either baking soda or soda crystals.
Golden aphids overwhelm the milkweeds I grow (for the butterflies!), and while I have a lot of lady bugs and a variety of ants, they’re no match for the aphids. Ugh.
I had aphids attack my blueberry bush this year, tearing into the new growth. So I just mixed 2 tablespoons of cayenne pepper, and a few drops of dishsoap into a gallon of water and used a sprayer to take them out. It will kill aphids, ants and more while not killing the plant!
I am currently dealing with a crazy whitefly infestation, I’ve been spraying at them with a neem oil baking soda soap and cinnamon mix for about a week now
Oooh boiling water!!! There’s an idea! My flowers were absolutely decimated by ants and aphids and they’ve created massive colonies along our foundation. We used an ant killer powder but it didn’t last long. The boiling water sounds like a better idea. Definitely trying it next year.
Forget giggles and sh*ts, we're talking tickles and sh*ts.. 🍃 💩 🍬 🐜 also, I hear "Borax" and my slimer brain wakes up and goes oh yeah, I have Borax. lol Slime is how this rapacious gardener (me) copes with Chicago winter; having a foot deep of rock frozen soil I can't put my hands into, for months on end. I see you zone 8+ gardeners saying "what I'm planting this fall" and I'm like "do I want thick and glossy, cloud, or snowfizz ?" 😅 if you know you know. On a more serious note, I see these massive 40 lb bags at the hardware/gardening store of "lawn insect killer" and I want to set up a podium lecture right there in aisle 3. If you've ever seen how incredibly effective ants are at churning up compacted clay soil you'd be giving them an award. Nevermind all the rest of the vital life in soil. Sigh, lawns..guaranteeing the killing of everything, one blade at a time.
Love the Videos. But i live in zone 10a in deep south texas along the border, so we get the heat and humidity. We have Leaf Cutter Ants. once you have them you can never rid of them.. they love to eat my plants, especially my young seedlings. I have tried everything to get rid of them, even a professional pest control company couldn't get rid of them. I am so Discouraged.
I have a few pots (container/balcony gardener) that have little tiny black bugs crawling all through the dirt and around the pot. They don't look like ants, they look more like gnats almost. They don't seem to hurt anything so I've kinda just let them hang out because they basically live in the soil. Anyone else have these and know what they are?
Ants ate all my cherries this year. We were watching and waiting till they were ripe. A few days before we would harvest every single cherry was eaten by ants.
The aphids are literally swarming our okra and no amount of spraying or squishing is making a difference. I'm thinking we may have added too much manure when we amended the bed..time to try some soap spray! :(
Food Grade Diatomaceous Earth (DE) - I have an Aji Dulce pepper plant that was hoarded by aphids, of which I saw ants too. Thank to this video now I know why :). I bombed the plant with DE not even knowing if the plant would survive. They all died and/or disappeared. What's odd to me though is that my pepper plants are really close together on a grow table and only one plant was affected. I immediately quarantined the plant by first moving it on top of a cinder block before using DE, but thought that was rather odd. Lucky for them, they have not since returned mwahahahahaaa.
Love AC! I’m in zone 10b, and I’m so over those damn Argentine ants. They look so innocuous, but those buggers BITE, and they search out our delicate bits to wreak their assault: crooks of elbows and back of the knees are their favorites to attack. The more I battle, the more I get…and finding their colonies is practically impossible. 🤬
In the same boat. They are impossible to kill off/deter for long. Baits can help, but with the many queens in each of the many nests they have, they just show back up. I've tried clove oil and cedar oil sprays, but they are not deterred by the smell. I wash their trails with water and dawn soap (which kills the ants, too) to get rid of the pheromones they follow. They took over my Zucchini plants this year and fed on the pollen and whatever is inside the female flowers. The bees stopped coming to pollinate. They destroyed my cuccs last year by farming aphids on them. It's all out war in my garden. I check daily for new arrivals. But they cross into my yard from the neighbors. I have tracked their trails across my 2 acres. It's insane how far they travel and how big their colonies get. Not had an issue with them biting me, though, so I guess that's good.
Big shoutout to Ants Canada for the feature! Go check out his channel, it's certified epic. - Kevin
So happy to see the vloggers I follow are somehow connected…Garden Answer; Ants Canada, Mikey Bustos and Epic Gardening. Kevin…do you collaborate with Mikey? Mabuhay ka!
I live in North Carolina and the fire ants are horrible. They are evil little creatures. I believe in live and let live, but fire ants, mosquitoes and aggressive bees will die immediately. 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
As a kid who grew up in SD and now actively follow both Epic and Ants Canada this was a pure gem...Even my kid got hyped. Keep it up Kevin & crew
I have been watching Ants Canada for yrs now .. was shocked when you brought him on the video..lol
I could never grow cucumbers until I started coating the bottom of the vine with a thick coat of Vaseline. The ants got stuck in the Vaseline and couldn’t go up the vine. I hosed off any pest that got near the flowers in the beginning. After that I didn’t need to do anything. Got at least 40 cucumbers off that vine.
Wow that's an excellent idea...will try it on my chilli plants
What? Wow! Thanks 😊
Biologist here! I have to clarify for 2:52 - honeydew isn't excrement, it's just that the phloem in the plants is so high-pressure compared to the aphids, it literally forces its way through them. It'd be like a human trying to drink from a fire hydrant. Gotta love nature.
Do you have a degree? Do you have a neat job in that field? Or maybe just fun facts about misconceptions you've observed people have about biologists
the concept of what you drink having so high pressure it shoots out of your back end sounds traumatic
both physically and mentally
@@tsuribachi i think ppl with ibs know this very sensation !
Just to clarify, i didn't mean that in a mean or laughing at it kinda way. One girl i know has it and she is normally very athletic so she has a hard time when it flares up. Obviously you can't really go around mountain biking when something like that could strike!
WOW, that is very gross and also kinda cool
Hi-larious animation! Now I can’t unsee an ant tickling an aphid. Thanks a lot!
I imagine Kevin tickles Jacques like that sometimes
The sound effect too!😅
Garlic water with a few drops of dish soap worked for me. I boiled the garlic for a few hours. Let it cool, put it in a spray bottle and went to work.
The black aphids infesting my garlic plants must've missed the memo 😢
@@ZappBrannigan88 Garlic bulbs contain all the magic, not the above ground parts
Don't use dish soap. It works on many insects, but it also stresses out the plants. Use solid hand soap instead, ideally hand-made. The chemical structure is very different, and while soap is also stressful for the plant, it does a lot less harm, while affecting the insects just about the same.
A few drops of dish soap in a spray bottle with water worked well for me this year! I have a patio garden with no hose so I just spray them off the leaves, remove any leaves that have a lot of aphids on them, and wipe them off leaves with gloves on. It is the only thing that has worked for aphids in my patio garden.
I’ve used this method on pepper plants.
I was outside just now, doing that exact thing. Bleh.
I actually watch AntsCanada too, this is a real treat
Love seeing all the butterflies flying around in the background. Gorgeous garden!
Another solution....when you wash the rice, take the first water fill it up in a air jar or a bottle...leave for 15days in a dark place, the water gets fermented...spray that fermented water over the affected area, and the Aphids loose their wax coat n can easily clear them..
I lost a bean crop last year to ants & aphids. One of the things I tried was introducing predators - specifically ladybugs - to try to reduce the aphid population, but the ants were too effective as guards. I remember watching them body-blocking and chasing away any ladybug that tried to attack an aphid.
Yeah they are vicious!
I’ve seen this in my garden too. The few ladybugs I do have, get bullied. I literally had to guard two mating ladybugs on a cucumber plant, because a huge army ant kept trying to bother them. I was excited to get some ladybug babies.
I see more ladybugs in my house than in my garden where they belong
@@bummblebee77 Ladybugs are... worryingly rare in my neighborhood. Much fewer of them about than there were a decade ago.
And they have fewer spots, too, I've noticed. Nowadays most ladybugs I see have just three or four spots at most, and some have no spots at all.
Never had to deal with aphids in my garden before until this year, so I'm glad you're sharing your wisdom about this! I just live in a townhouse, and my garden is in a raised bed and pots. My 10 year old wanted to plant and grow some fruit trees, and we've seen groups of aphids near the tops of the saplings. We've tried a couple of things to clear them off, but we'll also try your methods as well. Thank you!
What a nice, kind and warm hearted person you are! I really like your focus on getting rid of ants in the most humane way possible. Very good video on TH-cam.
@5:27 love how the butterflies came by to say hi 😂😊❤
They're always around these days!
@@epicgardening yes I love it 🦋🌻🌹🌺🍃
Yessss!!! My summer garden was taken over by aphids. I barely got any harvest:( it was my first time gardening, so it was a big disappointment. Thanks for the video!
I'm in Florida. I hate the ants. They swarm my plants, escort the aphids to the new leaves on some of my trees, bring in weed seeds and bite me. They suck!
2:58 Omg the graphics of the ant 🐜 😂I had no idea that was the relationship between arts and aphids. The planet 🌎 is so intertwined, it's amazing.
The tiny sugar ants have been crazy bad, I dry mixed borax and sugar, will try making the paste this time. Have found frequent watering the flower pots on the deck drowned out the ants. But what I was wondering about was so many sticky plants, oh honey dew! Built a garden in what was a weed fill lot last year and pest control has been a harsh learning curve. Thanks for this video!
I've had great success with diatomaceous earth. Excellent against earwigs, too.
What did you do with it? Just sprinkled around the plants or something else?
Meh, I have mixed feelings about DE. Effective, yes. But it doesn't break down or dilute like soap does, and it kills everything it touches, not just your target.
Aphids don't crawl around much, so diatomaceous earth isn't super effective against them (unless you use a _ton_ of it), but it will kill ants and prevent them from farming aphids near the plant.
Basically, if it's a pest that doesn't _move_ much, you always need to spray it *directly,* which means there isn't much point in using something that _stays_ on the plant. Water + 1% soap + 2% neem oil (or water + 1% soap + 5% isopropanol) is generally effective against aphids, and doesn't leave your plants looking like they have a cocaine problem.
I've lost many battles with aphids eating my vegetables... I decided to just work with them and grew a sacrificial plant they can munch on for a long time like my dying calendula plant. Keeps them busy!!
I love that Ants Canada was included.
Shout out to your Epic Editor! Heckin love the person!
You could spray the aphids while on the plants with whole milk. The milk then dries very quickly and crystallizes on the aphids and smothers them. The milk spray method works very quickly, within a couple of days! There is no foul order and doesn’t hurt the plants or beneficial bugs. Very inexpensive as well!
Interesting 🤔
@@squidward5110 you can use any whole milk that’s organic.
In fact, you can use the milk whey instead of the whole milk. Works great on the plants that can't be sprayed wth a real insecticide.
@@mykolapliashechnykov8701 I was going to post using fresh, unpasteurized cow milk but it’s hard to come by due to current laws… hence the whey. You are correct.
Yes, and using whey from yogurt-making can be a beneficial bacteria feed.
Hey this is the collab we’ve all been waiting for . I’m gonna need you to go to Mikey Bustos’ farm in the Philippines and make this most beautiful garden to date !
Bruh… what a time to be alive for the ants Canada-epic gardening collab
Omg the explosion of aphids we had in the UK this year was insane, they were even taking out buddlea and elderflower 😅
Sheesh!
love watching ants Canada too, as well as his other channels. I find it interesting how they grow veg and other plants in the tropics. Also nice to see a little bit of home after living in the US for over 50 years.
I've been stung by different kinds of ants and fire ants are the most itchi when they bite.
Thanks for all information! Love plants!!
I let the aphids go on my milkweed, and ants started to work with them. However, on one of the lower leaves, it was covered in these eggs attached to a string attached to the leaf, which I found out are lacewings and now I have about of hundred of them guarding my plants. Leave a couple plants like milkweed that ahpids love (plus, certain aphids like the ones that use milkweed specialize on milkweed, so they very very rarely hop over to other plants unless related) so that you can get those lacewings and ladybugs to protect your veggies.
I didn't know the ants would actually cull out sickness in their herd. That's awesome in itself
Ants in my garden & yard are a HUGE problem. The destroy everything, such as sweet corn. They get in the husk and eat the cornels. They're nests get so large, they destroy the plant roots, including flowers and grass. Not too mention the issue with fire ants which infest my entire yard including the garden.
I've recently learned that they like to farm the young treehoppers that are all over my sunflowers, too! For the same reason - honeydew. This is my first year growing sunflowers and I think the other predatory insects have yet to catch up on the treehopper nymphs because they're _everywhere._
I spent the last 3 days trying to solve this problem! Perfect timing!
Ants can definitely detect borax. They can't detect it when its concentration in a sugary mix is too low.
When using soap, don't use dish soap on plants - it does work on insects, but it is also mightily stressful to the plant itself. Use hard hand soap instead. The chemical composition is different. It is still stressful for plants, but a lot less, while being equally effective against insects.
When spraying plants with insecticides don't do it while plants are blooming. You'll kill off beneficial pollinating insects feeding of flower pollen and nectar too. Also, don't spray if you have a healthy population of beneficial predatory insects, like ladybugs, parasitic wasps or soldier beetles. Those will exterminate not just aphids but also other pests very effectively, but will be killed off by insecticides, leaving your plants unprotected by successive waves of combined aphid and ant attacks as insecticide decompose and washes off, ants will repeatedly move in on areas with shelter and food, restarting the farming of aphids.
Ants may want to do their farming thing with aphids, but they can't if they can't climb up the plant. Placing some really smelly sticky collar around the base of the plant, such as a ring of adhesive tape with the sticky part outwards, smeared with regular ball bearings vaseline, maybe with some ground cinnamon mixed into it, will create a barrier for their feromone-marked paths. This may be tedious on plants like tomatoes or outright impossible on plants like squash, which like to spread out on the ground, but it's effective on trees and bushes which have a single small trunk.
A plant's ability to fend off disease is highly increased if it gets more copper than what its roots can absorb. Sticking a thin copper wire into the plant's stem, somewhere at the base, causes just that. As sap flows up and down that wire, copper ions will be caught in the sap and travel everywhere into the plant. That's too little copper to make any difference in the edible parts for humans, but enough to majorly boost the plant's defensive mechanisms against disease. Only, it only works on plants with a somewhat soft stem, like tomatoes or peppers, and it's tedious to apply when you have a large number of plants.
The crossover I never knew I needed
There was a big ant mound in one corner of my parent’s garden, and the daffodils LOVED it. There was a forest of daffodils around the perimeter of the mound. Unfortunately, the hens eventually found the mound and destroyed it, and all the daffodils subsequently died ☹️
Sorry to hear it!
Also, aphids were destroying my milkweed, but I decided to leave it alone. In just a few days two species of hoverflies, lady beetles, mealy bug destroyers and lacewings completely obliterated the population. There’s hardly any aphids left and I’m happy that beneficial insects were able to thrive from them.
Off topic, but all the butterflies in your garden!!! So envious--don't see butterflies where I am as much as other places I've lived. In spite of all the pollinator plants I grow I see only cabbage moths and the occasional skipper. (Lots of bees though!)
I started a milkweed bed this year and the aphids absolutely coated the plants just after I planted them, but after a few days of washing the aphids off to try to make sure the baby milkweeds had a fighting chance, I started seeing tons of aphid predators in the area, and after a few weeks they stopped being a problem. The milkweeds look like they're doing great, but I'm gonna be pensive until I've seen them survive a winter lol.
I have a huge mealybug problem in my greenhouse. BT has really knocked down the fungus gnat situation, and Purecrop1 works for mealybugs, but it’s not systemic so it needs constant reapplication. I’m looking into ordering some biological controls like lacewings or something that will hatch this winter. Our hibiscus and cordilynes are pest magnets. Definitely going to smother in Neem before bringing in this fall
Great info. I have a lot of ants at our new place and I was wondering how much I needed to worry about them. I see them a lot but I haven't seen a lot of aphids.
My family always used Borax for various types of pest control by just sprinkling it around.
Dish soap in boiling water will break surface tension and penetrates ant nests faster and deaper. Dish soap and water makes effective sprays for aphids on plants and trees.
The dish soap/water trick never worked for me and the aphids on my blueberry bushes.
It's an oil change funnel for me. Send it down straighter and faster!
@@SoJahSeh91 Are they near trees or tall shrubs and dropping back onto the blueberries or soap and water just flat out not working at all?
I've never had it fail.
@@guestaccount9051 container bushes on my balcony. Neither soap & water, nor planting basil in the same container have done anything to control the aphids already there or their reproducing.
They're going after my lemon tree. I thought the ants were killing the aphids. Learned something new!
Looks like I need to take care of some ants bc K have some pretty widespread leaf problems. At the same time I think I have citrus bug... can't remember the name (curled leaves). Im going to do a heavy pruning after harvest. Lemons are almost ready.
I think getting a bag of ladybugs is the most satisfying for aphids, just watching them go to town. Good to know about borax and sugar though! :O
I use Diatomaceous Earth to get rid of ants in my garden. It's part of my soil mixture. Works great.
if youre on the west coast theres a good chance youre dealing with argentine ants, *especially* so if you're in CA. they are your classic looking ant, small bodied and completely black. these ants are non-native, invasive species and they are particularly challenging to manage because they are one of the few ant species that live in multi-queen colonies. this means that even if you manage to poison the main queen using the borax-sugar method, they are very likely to recover and resume their pest/farming activities by the end of the week (speaking from experience in regards to the timeline). i do stand by the sugar-borax method (i actually use borax and honey, the honey is already in a "paste" form and i actually do almost a 1:1 ratio and the ants still go for it) but I have to be extremely vigilant.
its really unfortunate because these ants are able to completely wipe out native ants with their multi-queen colonies, and their multi-queening way of life allows them to form what's called supercolonies. These supercolonies are so large with so many ants that they are literally constantly at war in some areas under California, just continuously battling on piles of slaughtered ant bodies. I've never seen a native ant species in my five years of living in this area, and I have borax-honey traps set year round otherwise I would literally be overrun. by ants. i not from CA originally so learning all of this was like reading a sci-fi horror story
The Castile soap trick is new to me, I’ll give it a try
Yeah AntCanada
Epic crossover,
2 of the best !!!!!!
Awsome 🎉❤
My ants are an integral part of my garden. I do have one plant that I’ve been battling aphids on though and some ants are farming them. I just hose them down every couple of days.
Every year we get ants on our okra flowers. We only got 1 okra this year from 5 plants. I would try spraying them off with water but they were hanging on for life.
Millions of years is not logical. Just informing you. I love your garden helps. You guys are great.
We have carpenter ants here in the upstate of South Carolina, been trying to grow an avocado tree and mango tree. Both died from the ants eating the roots and seed of the trees 😢
every time I bring in my Pepper plants in my basement for the winter , they dont have aphids when I bring them in.. I do cut them way back but in a few weeks they are all infested with aphids in my basement.. last yr I replaced all soil and cut back to no leaves .. as soon as the leaves started growing aphids set in and destroyed my pepper plants.. they kill off my plants and the ones that survive are deformed .. when I bring them out for the summer the aphids leave the plant but the peppers are deformed for several months till the plants manages to bounce back.. nothing works to get rid of them .. I can slow them down but never kill them off.. and they are in my basement..ug
Cool video. Loving the science here, Kev. In my central Arizona garden, and the gardens of my local gardener friends our biggest ant pest is leaf-cutter ants. They regularly strip every single leaf off of our pomegranate trees, and also our pepper plant leaves are a favorite target of theirs. Do you know whether leaf-cutter ants will go to sugar, and thus be suitable targets for the borax and sugar treatment, or do they just want leaves? If they won't take sugar, do you have any tips for dealing with the leaf-cutter ants? Thanks!
Ants Canada, epic gardening and dr plant is like mg holy trinity
I "keep" ants on my pepper plants, even though they do destroy some of the early fruiting BEFORE the flowers even open.
It's upsetting, but I still receive crop, AND they keep off all the pests. They've never tried to come inside thank god
In the south, a stupid simple ant remedy is to sprinkle cornmeal or grits around the ant hill. The ants will feed the queen until she is full. Because grits or cornmeal expand in the stomach, she will eventually burst. Because the ants won't eat until the queen is full, they will all starve due to the dead queen. Works like a charm!
I watch AntsCanada too! Love his content.
That Ant tickle 😆
Plain vinegar in a spray bottle works for me
Yes, but it can burn your plants and it acidifies the soil. Are you using it on just the nest?
I really had no idea that ants were farmers, Eric blew my mind with that one!!
Nature is wild 🤪
As always, thanks for the info, Kevin!
Mikey! 🐜🐜🐜🦜 I use a jam jar and put holes in the lid on one side. I put the jam jar on it's side with the holes at the top so it doesn't over flow into the soil. Borax is banned in the UK but i use either baking soda or soda crystals.
Golden aphids overwhelm the milkweeds I grow (for the butterflies!), and while I have a lot of lady bugs and a variety of ants, they’re no match for the aphids. Ugh.
Did not expect this crossover!
Holy shit epic gardening just did a crossover with ants Canada guys
I had aphids attack my blueberry bush this year, tearing into the new growth. So I just mixed 2 tablespoons of cayenne pepper, and a few drops of dishsoap into a gallon of water and used a sprayer to take them out. It will kill aphids, ants and more while not killing the plant!
I am currently dealing with a crazy whitefly infestation, I’ve been spraying at them with a neem oil baking soda soap and cinnamon mix for about a week now
When using the soap spray I find if you have a foam sparyer it seems to be more effective.
Oooh boiling water!!! There’s an idea! My flowers were absolutely decimated by ants and aphids and they’ve created massive colonies along our foundation. We used an ant killer powder but it didn’t last long. The boiling water sounds like a better idea. Definitely trying it next year.
Since it's your foundation and not directly in the garden, I would liberally dust the perimeter with diatomaceous earth.
In Vietnam, some kinds of Ants we use them to make good food ^^, the yellow ant
Awhh I watch Mikey’s vlog channel with his farm house and good vibes! 💚
WOW they really studied these bugs.😮
So the bar scene in "Antz" was legit...nice
Ants farming aphids-I didn’t know that! Good info.
Forget giggles and sh*ts, we're talking tickles and sh*ts..
🍃 💩 🍬 🐜 also, I hear "Borax" and my slimer brain wakes up and goes oh yeah, I have Borax. lol Slime is how this rapacious gardener (me) copes with Chicago winter; having a foot deep of rock frozen soil I can't put my hands into, for months on end. I see you zone 8+ gardeners saying "what I'm planting this fall" and I'm like "do I want thick and glossy, cloud, or snowfizz ?" 😅 if you know you know.
On a more serious note, I see these massive 40 lb bags at the hardware/gardening store of "lawn insect killer" and I want to set up a podium lecture right there in aisle 3. If you've ever seen how incredibly effective ants are at churning up compacted clay soil you'd be giving them an award. Nevermind all the rest of the vital life in soil. Sigh, lawns..guaranteeing the killing of everything, one blade at a time.
Kevin,
Good advice--thank you!
Love the Videos. But i live in zone 10a in deep south texas along the border, so we get the heat and humidity. We have Leaf Cutter Ants. once you have them you can never rid of them.. they love to eat my plants, especially my young seedlings. I have tried everything to get rid of them, even a professional pest control company couldn't get rid of them. I am so Discouraged.
Hoping you can find a solution!
Good tip. Short and sweet video.
Nice introduction into farming evidences.
5 stars for this crossover.
“My milkshake brings all the ants to the yard…”
Very helpful this video, thank you ❤
I love ants Canada ❤ what an awesome combo
Thanks for the information!
I have a few pots (container/balcony gardener) that have little tiny black bugs crawling all through the dirt and around the pot. They don't look like ants, they look more like gnats almost. They don't seem to hurt anything so I've kinda just let them hang out because they basically live in the soil. Anyone else have these and know what they are?
Ants ate all my cherries this year. We were watching and waiting till they were ripe. A few days before we would harvest every single cherry was eaten by ants.
Have you considered growing date palms (Phoenix dactylifera)?
Ohheck it's AntsCanada! 😮
Wow, such great information!
I wasn't expecting AntsCanada, who is actually in the Philipines or something lol
The aphids are literally swarming our okra and no amount of spraying or squishing is making a difference. I'm thinking we may have added too much manure when we amended the bed..time to try some soap spray! :(
Ladybugs for the aphids and Borax in mint jelly for the ants.
nice works! Thanks for sharing
Food Grade Diatomaceous Earth (DE) - I have an Aji Dulce pepper plant that was hoarded by aphids, of which I saw ants too. Thank to this video now I know why :). I bombed the plant with DE not even knowing if the plant would survive. They all died and/or disappeared. What's odd to me though is that my pepper plants are really close together on a grow table and only one plant was affected. I immediately quarantined the plant by first moving it on top of a cinder block before using DE, but thought that was rather odd. Lucky for them, they have not since returned mwahahahahaaa.
I have large anthills all over my yard. Beneficial or not, they have GOT to go!
Love AC! I’m in zone 10b, and I’m so over those damn Argentine ants. They look so innocuous, but those buggers BITE, and they search out our delicate bits to wreak their assault: crooks of elbows and back of the knees are their favorites to attack.
The more I battle, the more I get…and finding their colonies is practically impossible. 🤬
Best of luck!
In the same boat. They are impossible to kill off/deter for long. Baits can help, but with the many queens in each of the many nests they have, they just show back up. I've tried clove oil and cedar oil sprays, but they are not deterred by the smell. I wash their trails with water and dawn soap (which kills the ants, too) to get rid of the pheromones they follow.
They took over my Zucchini plants this year and fed on the pollen and whatever is inside the female flowers. The bees stopped coming to pollinate. They destroyed my cuccs last year by farming aphids on them.
It's all out war in my garden. I check daily for new arrivals. But they cross into my yard from the neighbors. I have tracked their trails across my 2 acres. It's insane how far they travel and how big their colonies get.
Not had an issue with them biting me, though, so I guess that's good.
I love Ants Canada too!
Without ants, the wasps come and eat them.