Buffalo Grass Progress

The buffalo grass is slowly growing. The biggest challenge we face is fighting off the weeds without doing damage to the grass. From a distance, the yard looks to be all dirt with a healthy asortment of weeds, but if you look close, you can see how much progress the plugs have made.

Erik has begun a weekly regimen of weed attacks, carefully protecting the growing plugs while spraying a broad leaf herbicide around them.

The cats think that whatever we are doing, it is very interesting.

How to get rid of Sugar Ants

We've come across our first true pest at our new home...Sugar Ants.

These pesky little guys have invaded our home and we've found little crews of them working all about the house. I feel sick just thinking about using chemicals in my house, so Erik and I set out to find a natural way to get rid of them without the use of RAID or some other icky pesticides.

We found four potential solutions:

1. Try a natural repellent such as ground or powdered chili, or used coffee grounds. Citrus peel (ground) works well too. They hate the smell of vinegar; make a solution with water to spray around.
2. For a more permanent solution, find the ant mound, and destroy it using boiling water.
3. If you can't bear to kill them, at the start of summer leave a jar of honey up a tree in the garden. The ants will be happy to stay out of your kitchen.
4. Feed them corn meal. They eat it. They take it back to their nest and feast on it. They can't digest it and it kills them. Also, corn meal won't harm children or pets.

We're trying methods 1 & 4. I've got long lines of chili powder running along the seems underneath my counters, and little piles of corn meal scattered around the house and yard. Both seem to be working. Only the true troopers are willing to cross the chili line to get to Mrs. Beasley's food, and I think it's safe to say that the corn meal is a hit.

And if none of these solutions work, our next project will be to cause an all out ant war:

Collect a large number of ants from one ant hill (easy to do just leave some food in a container, return after 2 hours and you should have heaps). Drop all the ants in the container onto another ant hill and the ants will start fighting each other resulting in many casualties.

If you would like to see some real ant action, check out this YouTube clip.