Keep ANTS OFF FRUIT TREES With Three Simple Tricks

good morning everyone it's friday july 17th and we're in the heart of summer and that means our gardens are in full production and as a consequence so are the pests for those of us growing fruit trees our mouths are beginning to water as we await the ripening of ripe fruits on tuesday i noticed one of my fig trees was starting to ripen its first fruits of the season and i got excited then i looked closer and i saw ants crawling all over the branches of the fruits trying to scavenge the sugars that they're farming and taking those sugars back to their colonies so i had to snap into action ants have incredibly keen senses of smell in fact they have four to five times more odor receptors than most insects their odor receptors are located on their antennae which are like divining rods for finding food ant colonies send out worker ants to go find food and they can travel up to a hundred yards away from their colony to find something they leave behind them a trail of pheromones to help find their way back home but once they find something to eat they walk back to their nest and they leave a different trail of pheromones from the food source to their nest this different pheromone scent signals the other ants to abandon their search for food and they follow the new found food pheromone trail from the nest to the food source that is why you see ants walking back and forth in nearly perfectly straight lines to food because the ants organize to scavenge their food they can quickly overwhelm a fruit tree and destroy your harvest earlier in the year i had some problems with my banana trees i had a bunch of bananas form and every day i would come outside in the morning and i would find ants crawling all over the bunch of bananas i tried the pesticide route i put pyrethoid granules by the ant hills and added water and while this would kill some of the ants it would usually just result in the ants relocating their colony and often they'd relocate the colony even closer to the food source i would also spray the ants directly with pyrethrin concentrate but trying to kill a colony of thousands of ants a few dozen at a time is a waste of time so i got proactive instead of reactive i did three things to protect my banana tree and it completely stopped the ants from swarming it in fact i haven't had a single ant on my banana tree in weeks every time i've checked i did the exact same three things to my fig tree on tuesday and i haven't had an ant since either so today i'm going to share with you those three things i've done to keep the ants off of my fruit trees that you can use to help protect your garden as well i've been experimenting with ways to keep ants off my fruit trees for years now and i've found that while each of these individual methods are effective they're extremely effective when you combine them all together and the first tip that i'm going to show you is to sprinkle used coffee grounds around the base of your fruit trees in front of me i have a bowl full of used coffee grounds i make myself iced coffee i'm a huge fan i make it 365 days a year and i use a mason jar with a filter on it that's a half gallon jar so i wind up with this many coffee grounds pretty much every other day and if you make hot coffee every morning you can save your coffee grounds for this as well but the reason why this is effective is because coffee grounds have a very strong odor as i explained to you before ants have a very acute and sensitive sense of smell that's how they find their food so if you sprinkle coffee grounds around the base of your fruit trees the smell is so potent that it actually will mask the scent of the fruits themselves and last year i made a video of which i will link to above that showed you how to keep ants out of your container trees by sprinkling coffee grounds in them and it is effective it will help mask the scent of your fruit and it will help keep ants away however there is a weakness to only using coffee grounds and that's because the scent doesn't last very long because it's an organic compound it decomposes really quickly there's a lot of nitrogen in coffee grounds so that will help assist in the decomposition process so when you're using coffee grounds while they are effective because they break down so quickly you have to replenish them quickly in addition if you get any kind of heavy rains that wash the coffee grounds away you're going to have to replace them as well so they are effective at masking the scent of the fruit tree but they will need to be replaced regularly or they will lose its effectiveness and once the ants find your fruit tree you're out of luck because they're going to keep coming so this is the very first step in helping mask the center of your fruits and keep ants away the second tip that i want to give you that will help keep ants off of your fruit trees is to sprinkle diatomaceous earth around the base of your fruit trees and diatomaceous earth is natural crushed mineral dust and what it does is it gets inside the joints of the exoskeletons of things like ants and beetles and leaf hoppers and it gets inside those joints and it makes their joints grind together and it wears down the exoskeleton so if you cover an exoskeleton in this dust it will actually contribute to the breaking down of the exoskeleton and eventually kill off the insect so what i like to do is after i put down the coffee grounds to help mask the scent i like to take a handful of the diatomaceous earth and sprinkle it in a ring around the fruit tree that way if any ants do find the fruit tree through the scent of the coffee they will crawl through that minefield of diatomaceous earth they'll get the dust all within their joints and it will help kill the ants because again the ants finding the fruit tree is not the problem the problem is the ants finding the fruit tree then making their pheromone trail back to the nest which is going to signal the other ants that they've hit pay dirt and they found an all you can eat buffet so if you can kill the ants before they turn around then they can make it back to their nest and leave that new pheromone trail you're going to give yourself a fighting chance they won't find your fruit tree and even if they do if it kills the ants in the process it's not that big of a deal but again the inherent weakness to the diatomaceous earth is you're going to have to replace it every time that it rains because if it washes away it's no longer going to offer you the protection but combining the coffee grounds and the diatomaceous earth is a great way to kind of put a moat around your tree a defensive moat to try and keep the ants away so they're not able to communicate with the rest of their nest that they have found a food source and the third and final tip that i want to give you to keep ants away from your fruit trees is to wrap the trunk with simple packing tape and what i've found is when you wrap the trunk with packing tape it creates this barrier that the ants can't get over so even though they may make it to the base of the tree they can't make it up the trunk of the tree and it's good when you when you flip when you flip it over and you put the non-sticky side and you wrap it around the tree trunk because what it actually does is it creates a collar around the tree and there's there will be a separation in the tape and the tree and the ants just can't jump to that through that separation and this has been the absolutely most successful thing that i've done to keep ants off my tree because when the aran ant does find the tree they can't crawl up the trunk and if they can't crawl up the trunk they can't reach the fruits so now that i've showed you all three things to help protect your fruit trees from ants i'm going to show you how to apply all three of these things and applying these things are all going to be pretty straightforward we're going to start out with our coffee grounds and we're just going to take a nice handful of the coffee grounds and just spread it in a little ring around the tree and again the only thing that we're trying to accomplish with these coffee grounds is to try and mask the scent of the fruit as they ripen so i'm going to put this in a little ring around the tree and hopefully that should confuse the ants the next thing we're going to do is we're going to take our diatomaceous earth and with a clean hand all i'm going to do is grab a handful of this powder and i'm going to shake it around the tree almost like it's just a bag of flour and it has a consistency that's very much like flour and just remember you will have to do this every time it rains because once it gets wet it's no longer going to be effective so the drier your climate is in the summer the longer the diatomaceous earth is going to last and what you can also do is you can put a little bit of diatomaceous earth on your leaves or on the stems of the tree as well and that will prevent any ants from getting to your fruits and the final thing we're going to do is we are going to wrap this packing tape around the trunk now we want the sticky part of the packing tape to be facing outward just in case any ants were to crawl over it they'll get stuck to the packing tape and you can use double-sided tape if you wish but it's really not 100 necessary because it will stick to itself when you apply it and i'll show you how the one thing you don't want to do though is make it too tight because the trunk of the tree is going to expand and you don't want it to girdle the tree so you have to keep an eye on it and you may have to change the packing tape intermittently so what i'm going to do is i'm going to take probably about a six inch piece of this packing tape and i'm going to with the sticky side out wrap it around the tree like this and it's not the easiest thing in the world to do but again you're only really creating a collar around this tree and what happens is the ants can't really make it through this lip on the packing tape it's just it's almost like it's almost like it's too high for them to overcome so i'm going to add a little bit more up here and again you're just creating a collar that they can't get over and anything you can do to increase the size of that collar is going to help so what happens is the ants are going to want to crawl up here and then they'll hit that tape and then they will they will not be able to get over this lip right here and they will fail to cross that packing tape and they won't be able to get any higher and access your fruits and again any of these techniques can be used on potted fruit trees as well this is a reverted cauldidom ramada fig and as you can see i have the tape collar right here and some coffee grounds and diatomaceous earth in the mulch layer of the pot that will help keep ants away from this tree as the figs begin to ripen and using those three simple tips and tricks you can help keep ants away from your fruit trees everyone dale and i would like to thank you very much for watching this video and if you liked it please make sure to hit that like button and if you haven't already subscribed to the channel dale and i would love it if you subscribe for future updates and more videos like these if you're curious about anything that i use in my garden in general or in this video everything that i use is a link in my amazon storefront in the video description thank you all so much for watching and we hope to see all of you again on the next video

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 434,687

Rating: 4.8885956 out of 5

Keywords: ants, fruit trees, keep ants off fruit trees, get rid of ants, ant barrier, ants in potted plants, keep ants away, how to get rid of ants, keep ants away from plants, ant repellent, ant control, keep ants out of the garden, garden ant control, coffee grounds ant repellent, diatomaceous earth ants, pest control, organic pest control, fruit trees in pots, fruit trees in containers, get rid of insects, insect control, garden, gardening, gardening tips, The millennial gardener

Id: 8n2_7Dl0vug

Length: 11min 35sec (695 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020