Fighting Roaches and Ants
Natural Ways to Ward off Insects in Your Home
Ants and roaches have been a headache for households all over the world. There is no proven way to get rid of them forever. They become immune to the chemical agent used to eradicate them or they find another way into you private space to continue irritating you. The natural ways that I know of to dissuade them may not kill them off, but it will make them want to leave your area to bother someone else a little more lenient.
Roaches
Roaches apparently don't take to bay leaves very well. I don't know why, but it really bothers them. You can tear the leaves up and put them along the walls and line the inside of your cabinets with them. Something else that seems to work is boric acid. You want to mix this with equal parts of sugar with slightly more emphasis on the sugar part of it. The sugar attracts them. They love sugar, but the boric acid eats up the roach's stomach. Make sure it is the real boric acid that you're buying not a mix of boric acid and anything else. You line walls and the inside of cabinets with this and wait. Bay leaves drive them away. Boric acid and sugar will kill them because of their love for sugar. If you live in apartment you want to take some kind of caulk and fill up any gaps in the walls to block insects (mainly roaches) from entry to your kitchen which is basically were roaches like to start.
Another thing I found out on accident is that duct tape traps roaches of all sizes and holds them there until they starve to death. It's inexpensive and effective. I put duct tape in the corners of cabinets with spaces too big to caulk up. I wrapped it in a tube form making it stick to itself with the sticky side facing out and placed it in corners length wise from the inside of the cabinet top to bottom. I thought I was going to caulk around it. I got tired went to bed. The the next morning I found roaches on the tape struggling to get off. When I checked back a couple of days later they were dead and dried up. I began replacing the tape once a month.
Ants
Ants are a different story. Apparently they don't like black pepper. If you don't like spraying you may want to try this. I hate to use spray almost as much as I hate to take aspirin or any medicine for that matter. I know there's got to be a way somewhere on this earth that I can do things without having to spray some chemical and then try to escape the fumes. Yes they are fumes I don't care if they have a pine scent. It's still not safe to breathe. All you do is take a pepper shaker and shake it on the ants in the area were they have accumulated. If they are coming from some place in particular find the point of origin and start there. Say along a wall or at a point in the floor where they have worked there way up to attack some sugar left out by some careless child. Start there. Sometimes you need only to wipe away the trail completely and they will stay away. Pepper, of course, will not work on a slant. Unfortunately then you will have to buy the wretched spray.
Tell others about
this page:
Comments? Questions? Email Here