Adam and the ants

Well, if you don't mind losing a strip of your lawn for a while, an organic way to get rid of ants is to ring your house with rock salt (not table salt or sea salt). Your grass will die where the salt is placed, but the ants will move away. It's also effective for other creeping crawlies. I've been doing it for years and don't have any ants or bugs. Still have spiders, but no ants or bugs! Beats using chemicals, IMHO!

:D

You also need to use some caulk and seal up the cracks and crevices where they are coming in, which will help with spiders and other crawlers.

Spiders don't like conkers.

Weird, but apparently true and, since I don't like spiders and conkers are free (or were last autumn when I heard of this) I tested the method. Now, this aint scientific, but I only had one really really teeny baby spider since like september last year, and that was recently with the conkers dying, so it seems to be a success. Bear in mind that I detest spiders, so emphasis on teeny there (I didn't go running screaming out of the house in response to it, lol).

Just place them around the room(s) you want spiderless and voila (caveat: dunno if this works for any weird and, possibly, huge american spiders).

Yep, get rid of the ants. They can cause trouble - piece of useless trivia is thats where the term of a 'bug' in the system comes from, when they had big room sized computers in the early days & had to get rid of moths etc to stop it shorting. True story. :lol:

I've seen them wreck relays in cars so I'm sure the could do something similar in any electrical stuff.

ant traps. Lots of 'em.

You also need to use some caulk and seal up the cracks and crevices where they are coming in, which will help with spiders and other crawlers.
We once rented an apartment in Spain, that had loads of ants coming in through a hole in the wall - the little blighters had eaten their way through the plaster of the wall and the grouting between the wall-tiles. The supervisor came and filled the hole with a special filler, that also contained an ant poison. 24 hours later, they'd eaten the poison filler and were back as if nothing had happened.

Spiders don't like conkers.

Weird, but apparently true and, since I don't like spiders and conkers are free (or were last autumn when I heard of this) I tested the method. Now, this aint scientific, but I only had one really really teeny baby spider since like september last year, and that was recently with the conkers dying, so it seems to be a success. Bear in mind that I detest spiders, so emphasis on teeny there (I didn't go running screaming out of the house in response to it, lol).

Just place them around the room(s) you want spiderless and voila (caveat: dunno if this works for any weird and, possibly, huge american spiders).

I can't stand spiders (actually, I hate anything with more than 4 legs), so I'd love to get rid of them. However, I have no idea what "conkers" are. :) I know spiders don't like snakes, but I'm pretty sure you aren't advocating placing snakes around a room to get rid of spiders.

I once had an exterminator tell me (in a previous house) that since I had black widow spiders (1 of the 2 most poisonous spiders in my area), that I could be sure I didn't have brown recluse spiders (the other one of the 2) because they didn't like each other and never lived in the same area. I didn't really see how this was good news.

Reasons not to move to America number 1 - black widow spiders.
Reasons not to move to America number 2 - brown recluse spiders.

Reasons to move to america 1 - cheaper guitars and music gear.

Bugger, this one's really tough! :evil:

"Conkers" are, I believ, Horse Chestnuts. Just a sec.......

Yup - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conker

And Conkers is also a traditional British pursuit engaged in by school children, which later evolves into the acts carried out by drunks on Friday nights (and most other nights, too). It gets banned in every school every year, roughly one month after Conker Season really kicks in (conventiently, Conker Season coincides with the start of each school year), due to it being used by bullies as an excuse to batter smaller kids with hard objects. And as an excuse by kids generally to take shots at their teachers from a safely anonymous distance. Brilliant fun, you don't know what you've missed! :wink:

Um, I should perhaps state that I don't know how well this works on all species of spider, but it certainly seemed to do the trick on the huge but (allegedly, I'm not going to bloody well test this, am I?) innocuous house spiders we have. Worth a try if you can get em, though. I put them in random places in my bedroom, like under chests of drawers and under my bed, so they weren't in the way, caused no offending smell, and seemed to work.

I had read somewhere that says to line the house with corn meal, supposedly the ants eat it but can't digest it and they die.

Not sure if it works or not but it's a fairly inexpensive thing to try.

due to it being used by bullies as an excuse to batter smaller kids with hard objects.

Reason #1 NOT to move to the UK. Man, your bullies are mean!! hehe

Seriously though, I live in an area that is supposedly big for Brown Recluse, been here 38 years, never found one. Now i know they are here. The daughter of a buddy of mine was biten once. But it isnt like they are a serious problem so.. c'mon over. America awaits your arrival.

Jim

In my new house I have black widows. Trapped a big one last night after the wind from my ceiling fan blew it off the ceiling! Spiders don't bother me (unless they're on me).

I learned this one while a restaurant manager, and I have used it at my house, which is in a forest. The best, no poison, method of keeping ant out of the house is to make a mixture of Boric acid and baking soda. Boric acid is a powder you can buy at many places, is it used for making a solution to clean your eyes. The power form is cheap and I got a small bottle at Walmart. Mix it 1:1 with baking soda. Mix it in any container that you can shake up (jar, plastic tub, plastic bag). Then put the stuff in a sock and walk all the way around your house, patting the sock on the wall close to the ground. A small amount will come out when you pat the sock on the wall and go on the ground. You will have to cover the entire perimeter of the house, no exceptions. If there is a way in , the ants will find it. The Boric acid/baking soda mixture is harmless to pets, reptiles (frogs and snakes), plants and you. Ants don't like it. Something like if they eat it the chemical reaction of the two will make them explode. IT REALLY WORKS! And it's really cheap. A couple of dollars.

In my new house I have black widows. Trapped a big one last night after the wind from my ceiling fan blew it off the ceiling! Spiders don't bother me (unless they're on me).

They don't really bother me as long as they're in a different country! The only spiders I didn't hate were Mick Ronson, Trevor Bolder and Woody Woodmansey.......

:D :D :D

Vic

DDT got a job on me, now I'm a real sickie.

Or will The Beatles scare em' ? :wink: