Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Hey I have these red ants that keep attacking my chillie plants. They look to be harvesting aphids maybe. I have tried garlic wiht no effect what else can i try?

JT

The aphids will respond to Insecticidal soap or Diatomaceous Earth. If the ants are there for the aphids, they will abate when there are no more aphids. I have no success getting rid of ants completely.

If the ants are not attacking the actual plants( only the aphids ) why not leave them, they are doing a good job for you.

but ants Farm aphids, they only eat enough and keep the population going

I had aphoids on chillis before too, and only got rid of most of the ants once the aphids had been delt with

If your growbeds are off the ground you might use ant-tac or similar to form an anti-anty ante chamber.

Dang ants using sustainable practices.

Ants got into my grow-bed despite me putting grease around each of the legs (stuff dried up too much in the heat). I have heaps that live in there - but thankfully they have caused no problem as yet. The issue of ants stopping moisture getting to roots because of the burrows they dig taking soil away from the roots is not an issue with F&D gravel beds :-).

One ant remedy that I have had some success with since Muzza posted about it early on in the piece is as follows:

- crush some yeast into fine powder
- mix yeast with honey until you get a stiff paste that can be rolled into balls between fingers
- put some balls where ants are active

The ants eat the past - when they then drink the yeast activates in their guts and they explode. This has worked very well inside the house and too my huge surprise also rid the ants from my worm farm (at which time I then put new grease around the worm farm legs). This recipe has not yet worked for my grow-bed - but the conditions may not have been favourable in that it has rained soon after I laid the bait.

Thanks For all your Imput. I will try to find some DE but might be a bit hard here as i don;t know what it is called in indonesian.

The yeast and honey sounds like a good trick. And it will work around the house so i am off to try that.

JT

From the Green Harvest site .....



Haven't tried it myself ....

good one rupe!

Looked up toxicity of boric acid to fish. was listed as practically non toxic

LC50 is over 1000mg/lt (one ppt)

This works out to 1kg per 1000L

So no worreis if the ant munch on it and then go and die in the gravel.

Meant to ask before Steve....

Where is this Toxicity reference....

What is the "LC"

http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/borictech.pdf

LD50 stand for Lethal dose the 50 means that at this dose 50% of the test subjects died. Is usually stated in mg/kg body weight

LC50 stands for lethal concentration, usually used for gases in air or in the case of fish concentration in water in ppm. Again the 50 represents a 50% mortality in test subjects.

Jaymie, maybe you could include this in the glossary?

Good idea I reckon...

So that site is the bible you use for reference Steve...

Hope you don't mind ... I tidied up the Url for others ....

Pesticide Fact Sheets

Tidy away...........i'm not much for tidy, happy for you to d it.

Nope, i have no reference bible, just google and very specific searches then a keen eye for results