I’ve got ants.
It’s very depressing.
I do live in a very anty area. A neighbour once opined she was surprised the entire street hadn’t been moved several feet to the left because of the ants.
Usually however, they’re in the garden. I have fought them in the garden every year for ages, always wondering where their nest could be.
I found out.
Do you remember my giant lilies in the front garden?
This picture is from several years ago when there was still a tree beside the giant lilies in their giant pot.
Last year a lady passing by asked if she could have a lily bulb if I ever repotted the lilies.
This year I repotted the lilies.
Lifting the bulbs was difficult, to put it mildly. They had wedged themselves in, sent shoots under the turned in rim and nearly filled the pot, which was huge.
Some of the pot filling was new baby bulbs, some was old gigantic bulbs, the rest was ants.
So, with difficulty I rescued all the bulbs down to the last third, which was ants and then (spot the bit where I went wrong, no prizes except a feeling of ineffable smugness) I moved the pot from the front garden to the fence near the house to make it easy for myself to put ant powder into the pot at daily intervals.
And, as it turned out, for the ants to move out of the chilly garden into the nice warm house.
First we saw them whizzing along the counter top, maybe coming up from the rarely emptied bottom corner cupboard. Somewhere under the Formica is a formicarium.
It took a couple of days to move all the stuff out of the cupboard, the end result being a trip to the dump with a car full of 1970’s enamelled cookware. By the look of it I did nothing in the seventies but buy casserole dishes, pans and dishes with enamel outsides and enamel interiors. I did save the kettle in case the international situation gets so bad the only way I can make a cup of tea is to balance the old enamel kettle on a bonfire of anything that is left.
Although the tea is in doubt because once the corner bottom cupboard was cleared out the ants made their way to the wall cupboard where I keep the teabags.
So once all the stuff from that cupboard was cleared out, and put everywhere else, I purchased a packet of bait stations and put one in the cupboard instead.
It took them a couple of days to find it, then the cupboard was crawling with ants. I wanted to put the bait station in the cupboard in a flattened disposable foil tray because there were dire warnings on the packet about the extreme dangers of people, pets and other life forms encountering the bait station poison. The OH, however, said casually it would be all right and moved the station out of the foil and put it on its own in the cupboard.
For a couple of days activity dwindled. I decided to leave it one more day, to be sure.
Predictably activity increased, which is when I put the second ant bait station in the cupboard, which very many ants seemed enthused about.
By this stage, a week after the start of proceedings I was quite depressed. I don’t want to kill anything but I don’t want ants in my kitchen either.
I was coming to terms with it all and then at four o clock..
we had a cup of tea
and at five o clock
I spotted an ant in the bottom of my drained tea cup.
I’m very depressed again and if I have the urge to lie on my back and wave all six legs in the air, I leave the dolls to my collectors, my crafting stuff to anyone who can be bothered to take it and my new, extremely expensive Prima Donna bras to Smalls for All in Edinburgh.
Whoever first vouchsafed that we should not sweat the small stuff, either did not have ants or did have a pet aardvark, or just never had an ant in their tea.
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