Property News · June 17, 2024

Country diary 1924: the never-ending war on ants


21 June 1924: One seems to be always slaughtering something in the exercise of the gentle gardener’s craft KEW: One seems to be always slaughtering something in the exercise of the gentle gardener’s craft, and one wishes one might let live. Lately we have had to enter the virtuous and industrious ant in our list of nuisances. All along the edge of a border intended for pinks, ants burrow and throw up soil so persistently that the plants wilt away. In a crazy pavement, to which the invited guests are all sorts of sandworts and Alpine pansies and pinks and toadflax, the ants usurp every cranny and smother the creeping things with earth heaps. It can’t be tolerated; yet what to do? The gentle lady in Shelley’s poem carried “the poor banished insects, whose intent, Although they did ill, was innocent,” into the “rough woods far aloof,” which seems a solution of doubtful morality, and in any case one not to be easily compassed by a suburban gardener.So we set to work to kill. You can do this best with boiling water, but then you have to lift all the plants, and this is not easy in a pavement. A friend suggested Keating’s powder, but though this seemed to cause convulsions in individual ants it did not stifle the nest and it greatly discouraged the sandworts. I am told camphor is an old remedy, and we shall try that and report progress. I find ladybirds burrowing deeply in pecked fruit, and my suspicions of them increase. But who could kill a ladybird? Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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