How To Get Rid Of Ants & Termites

You have problems with ants in your garden and want to know how to solve this issue? Great!

This article is exactly for you since I will show you many simple ways how to get rid of ants in the following chapters.

Ant Overview

Short description	Ants are small social insects that gather in big populations. While small ant populations can be beneficial, too many of them can lead to serious problems in your garden.
Scientific name	Formicidae.
Lifespan	1 – 3 years on average, some ant species may even reach an age of 30 years.
What plants do they like?	Cabbage, radish, viola, primula and many more.
Symptoms	You will see ants with your naked eye. Moreover, since ants eat the leaves of your plants, you will also see some bites in plant leaves.
Distribution	Worldwide.
Potential damage	Ants eat parts of your plants. If ant populations get too big in your garden, they may eat a significant fraction of your plants and your plants may not be able to grow in a healthy manner and you may also not get the desired yields.
Control options	Chemical, biological and cultural.
Treatment difficulty	Easy – Intermediate.
Natural predators	Caterpillars, wasps, spiders, beetles, snakes, birds.

How to get rid of Ants in your Garden

1. Don’t leave food remains in your garden

One very effective way to reduce ant populations in your garden is to avoid leaving food remains on your garden table or anywhere in your garden.

By doing so, ants will not smell anything that will attract them to your garden and will rather go for ad different place.

For instance, instead of populating your garden, they will rather skip your property and go for your neighbor’s garden instead.

2. Install an ant trap

If you already have large ant populations in your yard, you can also try to install ant traps.

You can just use some sealed containers, put some sugar liquid in there and make small holes in them so that ants can get.

Many of those ants will actually stay in there and you can just collect and remove those ants every day until the ant problem in your garden has been significantly lowered.

3. Destroy the ant colony

If you want to tackle the source of the ant problem, you also have to find the ant nest in your garden.

While this will often be hidden, you will still find it by just looking where most of the ants are going.

Once you have found the home of the ant colony, you can just remove it altogether by digging the whole nest out of the ground or you can also try to burn it down.

4. Use boiling water to get rid of ants

Another simple but yet effective measure to get rid of ants is to just dash them with boiling water.

By doing so, the protein structure of the ants’ bodies will be altered and ants will decay within seconds.

However, this may be considered ethically questionable and you may therefore rely on more ethical methods instead.

5. Cayenne pepper can help as well

Cayenne pepper is another natural way how to get rid of ants. You just have to mix it with water and spray the solution over ant populations.

You can also just flood your garden with this mixture and you will be able to see great results after just a few days.

However, your garden may still look a little bit red after that since the red color of the chili will settle and will take time to be washed away by rain.

6. Use vinegar to get rid of ants

Ants also don’t like the taste of vinegar at all.

Hence, you can also just use a mix of vinegar and water and spray it onto every ant you see.

You can also flood the ant nest with this solution and you will be able to deter most ants not even for now, but also for the near future by taking this measure.

7. Peppermint tea is not only for humans

You can also just use classical peppermint tea to deter ants.

While this measure may work for small termite colonies, it will often not be enough if termite infestation in your garden is too big.

However, it is well worth a try anyway.

8. Stinging nettles can help to get rid of termites as well

You can also make your own stinging nettle liquid to deter termites.

For this, just collect some stinging nettles and put them in cold water for a few days.

After this period of time, remove the plant material and you will have an entirely organic pesticide that you can use to get rid of ants and also to deter many other garden pests.

Moreover, stinging nettle liquid is also rich in nitrogen and therefore also a good and natural fertilizer for your garden plants.

9. Neem oil

You could also use neem oil to get rid of ants. Neem oil is great since it can help you not only to deter ants and termites, but also to get rid of various other garden pests.

Moreover, it is also fully natural and in case stinging nettle liquid doesn’t help, you should just try neem oil and hope to get better results.

10. Insecticidal soap may help as well

While you could also use insecticidal soap to get rid of ants, I would not recommend you do so since this kind of soap is not entirely organic and may hurt our environment.

Moreover, the components in this soap may also contaminate the crops of your garden plants and you may therefore no longer be able to get fully organic yields.

11. Use borax to reduce ant colonies

If nothing else helps, you may also want to use borax to get rid of the ant problem in your garden.

However, borax and other chemical substances should only be regarded as measures of last resort since they are pretty harmful to our environment and can also be bad for your pets.

Consequently, if you use those substances, make sure to remove them shortly after using them from your garden to prevent any further damage to nature.

What’s left to say?

First of all, thanks for reading this article to the end. I hope you found all the information you were looking for.

Now that you know how to get rid of ants in your garden, you may also want to check out my grower’s guides and my companion plant charts to learn even more about gardening in general.

About the Author

My name is Andreas and I’m really passionate about our environment and also about growing plants. In fact, I have grown several different plants over many years. I love to see my plants grow and also always try new things to improve my overall conditions at home.

In my blog posts, I want to share my experiences with you so that you can become successful in growing various different plants and improving your home as well, even though you might still be a beginner right now.