CONTROL ANTS & APHIDS with this SIMPLE TRICK

welcome back to the homestead today we're gonna show you how to decimate ant colonies with a simple trick that we learned on the Internet [Music] so in the last week or so we discovered that we have an aphid problem but not only do we have an aphid problem we have an ant problem as Adam the same answer David's they have a there they're like best friends the ants will take the egg that's up to the leaves the aphids then begin to chew in the leaves I forgot what it's called but they produce this at krysta chrétien called honeydew which the ants love and the ants will actually even defend the aphids from ladybugs so not only are we going after our 8 the population we're going after the ant population and this is how we're going to do it so right here I've already made some ant traps and so it's a 1 to 5 ratio one being the borax why being the sugar yeah it's gonna it's gonna poison the ants and so the ants are gonna go through these holes these are just simple ball jars that we drilled some holes on the top and you don't have those grab a container from around the house this is just an old yogurt container we drilled some holes in and as you can see it's got the mixture in there and a couple flakes of plastic for my drilling you just go ahead and pour this in here this is just a little bit of borax earlier when I was experimenting this is one teaspoon of borax don't fit in good job and you want to put enough water and just to dissolve it so I'm gonna put just a little bit not all of it just enough to get that more extra salt all right I'm gonna stir it up so it dissolves I'm gonna help yeah all right so that's nice and dissolved good job and now we're gonna pour the sugar in this is five teaspoons of sugar I'm gonna help right now we're gonna serve whoops you're gonna stir the sin might add a little bit more water because it's kind of crunchy you want them to blend well so the sugar as we know well not the sugar is not going to be killing the ants it's the borax can you stir it up a little bit for us but try to keep it inside and then dump once you dump water in watch this turn alright I'm add a little bit more mortar mackay okay we're trying to make a paste we don't want it too wet because we don't want them to drown I'm a little pace that they can nibble on and even take back to their colony so some ants may get stuck in this trap and even die but the hope is that they will take the sugar borax blend and take it back to their colony to kill their family and the Queen alright that looks perfect so if you want to check out the consistency of this it's gonna dry out too as it's out here in the hot Sun let's open up one of those other ones I made too so like I said it's a 1 to 5 ratio one being the borax five being the sugar I'm going to put the borax in first in this all that with just a little bit of water then you add your sugar you mix it in well put your top on let me show you one of these other traps uh-huh this is nice and gooey - yeah it looks like honey yeah but it's a trap please don't eat this macaron alright guys what you see right here are the little a fits and what you see over here are their friends I might get bit as they try to protect them and so these ants place these aphids on the leaf and then as elders you will read mine too as the aphids suck on the leaves they produce honeydew and then the ants enjoy it they actually fight over it that's at this end right here looks like it's trying to protect this leaf so several days ago when we discovered that we have this 1/3 problem doing the research that's when I realized we have not only an aphid problem but an ant problem I actually myself placed the ants in the garden unknowingly I didn't realize their garden pest we had received a gift from someone of all this beautiful Indian lettuce and as I was planting or transplanting the tray into he area commanders ants everywhere but unknowingly I placed them all in and those ants have created this problem with the aphids and so we are treating the ants and the APIs earlier in the week we treated the aphids with a spray made out of dr. Bronner's peppermint soap and we sprayed all the undersides of the leaves which had just rained so we're gonna reapply that but I also left this Indian lettuce here as a host plan I didn't want to remove the lettuce because I figured the ants would go moved a pits to other plants so until we get rid of the ant problem I'm actually gonna leave these here we're just not gonna eat them and some aquila do you want to help me stir you wanna help we are going to place these traps in in these lettuces very close to their anthill you want to show them the hill yeah all right so as you see here we have found two ant hills Wow we're in a fits right here and on the underside of that one Michaela can you actually place that trap right there right next to this hill the story can you go to the other side let's put that right there see if there's any ant that'll get on it and unfortunately the ants have also gotten into the next bed with the aphids as you'll see here's some damage on the leaves we actually have had to rip out a couple plants because they were looking that bad they get viruses like this one got it from the aphid they get viruses and so this transfers the virus to the plant and so before all of our potatoes are decimated we're gonna set some traps in this bed to you found some more as you can see the difference between a healthy one and one that's got a virus yeah when they get yellow there's one down here that's looking pretty nasty this one but then there's also healthy ones our annex dome as you can see so that's it guys we set our traps we'll do like a update video on how this whole process worked but we wanted to show you our process and our kind of journey with dealing with pests in the garden we'll continue to do these videos where we kind of update you on our issues that were encountering in the garden and how to resolve them so thanks to my wife and the kids for researching this and trying to figure out how to get rid of this infestation remember if you haven't already check us out on Instagram at Goshen Farm and Gardens and we will see y'all in the next video thanks for watching

Channel: Goshen Farm and Gardens

Views: 1,308,141

Keywords: aphid control, aphids, kill aphids, organic pest control, organic gardening

Id: fm7kh7C2vqI

Length: 6min 11sec (371 seconds)

Published: Wed May 27 2020