How to remove ants from a greenhouse with cucumbers quickly and effectively

Help and sabotage of ants in borage

Therefore, if ants appear, then first of all, before starting to fight them in different ways, you need to take into account all the advantages and disadvantages of breeding these insects in the beds and in the greenhouse with cucumbers.

Therefore, the benefit:

Loosening the soil. When building anthills, these insects loosen the top layer of soil, while a lot of air flows to the roots of the plants and oxygen saturation occurs.
Destruction of harmful insects. Ants are good garden cleaners, cleaning it from spider mites, larvae and caterpillars of other pests.
Enrichment of the soil with useful microelements (potassium, nitrogen), as well as humus. This occurs due to the vital functions of the ant colony.

Negative aspects of finding ants in a plot with cucumbers:

Ants eat cucumbers (seeds and seedlings), causing their death.
Depletion of plants due to aphids. For the life of ants, glucose is necessary and for this they make themselves an animal - aphids, with which they “milk” this substance.
The pasture for aphids is the plants from which they consume “vital” juices.
Painful ant bites. In defense, the ant can bite painfully, injecting its acid, which causes an acute allergy. Children and people prone to various allergic reactions can especially suffer from bites.

If, after weighing all the pros and cons, you decide to get rid of ants in borage, then you need to choose ways to combat them.

It is better to get rid of ants while there are still few of them

When there are few insects, they do not cause much problems. But it is better to get rid of them at this stage, since the fight against large colonies is much more difficult. In addition, ants cause many problems:

If you don’t remove the ants in the greenhouse, they can also bring aphids to the cucumbers, and this is already a big problem.

Insects move both inside and outside the greenhouse . They often introduce weed seeds and the beds become much more overgrown than usual.
Large colonies release a specific composition into the soil . Because of it, the acidity of the soil significantly increases, which is extremely undesirable both when growing cucumbers and when growing most other crops.
Insects require large amounts of sugars to survive . Therefore, very often they bring aphids, which spread on plants at an alarming rate. It may be the other way around - if there are a lot of aphids in the greenhouse, and you do not fight them, this will cause the appearance of ants.
Can ants eat cucumber seedlings? Yes, they bite off the cotyledon leaves of the newly emerged stems and the plant dies. Also, insects often eat the seed material, so you may not even wait for seedlings, as I once had in a small greenhouse.
Insects also harm adult plants . They suck out nutritious juices and the lashes develop much worse. Because of this, the yield is significantly reduced and the fruiting period is reduced; the plants can quickly become depleted.
Anthills in the ground do not allow cucumbers to fully develop . And if they are located in the roots, then the plants generally dry out. Plus, pests bite painfully, and if there are a lot of them, then picking cucumbers can turn into a challenge.

With mechanical methods, you can simply dig up the anthill and remove it.
The video shows an option to fight ants using ammonia. The effect is achieved after about 3 days - the insects completely disappear.

Ants in the greenhouse and in the garden: what to do

There are many methods that can be effective in controlling these insects. Each gardener chooses his own option, but one should not forget that the effectiveness of any method may be different.

All these means are divided into a number of categories: mechanical, using chemicals, combined and the use of industrial toxic drugs.

Mechanical methods

To remove ants from a cucumber bed using a physical method, you will first need to find their locations. These insects do not like dark areas; they are happy to dig tunnels for their nest in a place unprotected from the sun under the leaves of plants.

If the search for the anthill is successful, then it should be carefully picked up with a shovel, transferred to a suitable container along with the queen and eggs, and removed from the cucumber bed.

A good method is to water the nest with boiling water, kerosene, a decoction of tomato leaves, sprinkle with ash, quicklime or soda ash. Many gardeners, in order to save cucumber seedlings, water them with soda water, but you need to be quite careful with this method, since soda can burn young plants. The best solution would be to use a solution of soda with the addition of linseed oil before planting cucumbers, spilling the prepared soil.

Ants do not much prefer to group in well-groomed areas, so it is recommended to loosen the soil as often as possible, and in spring and autumn to carefully dig up the garden. Very often, folk remedies such as covering the anthill with millet or semolina are used. What is strange, but they bring results - the insects leave and do not return.

Folk remedies for ants

Chemicals are mainly used to prepare various baits that will help get rid of ants in the cucumber bed. These include:

Use of boric acid. It is mixed with sugar or honey and placed in a small container on ant paths. But you need to make sure that the ants can get to it, but children and pets cannot.
Baits impregnated with borax and yeast. These toxic components can be mixed with any sweet substance (honey, jam, molasses), as well as with a boiled egg or minced meat. It is known that ants are omnivorous insects, and they will happily feast on poisoned baits.
It is necessary to remove aphids from the greenhouse with cucumbers. The ants will be deprived of their main source of food and will leave the area. As for chemicals against aphids, spraying cucumbers with Karbofos gives good results.
Use of odors. Ants are afraid of the smell of such plants and seasonings: cinnamon, garlic, onion, mustard, wormwood, bay leaf, mint, and elderberry. You can plant mustard and garlic next to the cucumbers, and then the ants will avoid such an area.
To protect the sown cucumber seeds from ants, you need to pour black pepper into the holes with the seeds, or better yet, along with red hot pepper.

Do you need to fight ants?

It’s not so scary if ants live in small numbers in the greenhouse. They are even useful for the greenhouse ecosystem: they loosen the soil, help it become saturated with mineral and organic elements, and eat some insect pests.

However, the ant family multiplies quickly, and within a couple of growing seasons the greenhouse risks turning into an anthill. Excessively multiplying insects cause many problems:

Constantly cruising between the greenhouse and the open part of the garden plot, the ants pick up weed seeds and transfer them to the greenhouse soil.
As a result of its life activity, a large ant colony continuously releases special substances that increase the acidity of the soil. But cucumbers and other greenhouse crops do not like acidic soil.
Ants need to consume large amounts of sugars to function properly. Therefore, they protect and take care of aphids, which suck juices from plants and then secrete a sweet liquid. They are also called “shepherds” of aphids. If you do nothing about aphids, then it will be almost impossible to cope with ants.
Ants eat cucumber seedlings: they bite off the cotyledons of the seedlings, and as a result, the young plant dies. They are also capable of eating sown cucumber seeds, resulting in a lost harvest.
Herbivorous ants are capable of sucking sap from the stems of adult plants. As a result, the cucumbers begin to wither, the vines hardly develop, and the fruiting period becomes shorter. Depleted cucumbers produce almost no fruit; the quality of the harvest leaves much to be desired.
An anthill located in the ground does not allow the cucumber roots to fully develop. If the ant's home is located inside the root system, then the plant withers.
The bite of adult insects is quite painful. Collecting ripe cucumbers from among a greenhouse anthill is real torture.

Combined options for destroying an anthill

These include mechanical methods in half with a chemical analogue. You can put a dark cloth with sugar sprinkled on it or soaked in plenty of molasses in a bucket and place it near the ant’s nest. Soon the queen and her family will move into this container, and after that it will be possible to safely take her outside the site.

To protect cucumbers from ants, you can spray them with mustard solution, which is infused for three days. Also, these insects can be repelled by simply mustard powder scattered in their path.

There is another effective way to remove ants from a greenhouse with cucumbers: take 2 cups of vinegar, vegetable oil and shampoo for 10 liters of water, stir well and pour into the ant nest, and then cover with dark oilcloth. Within a week, the “undesirable” neighbors will leave the greenhouse.

How to repel ants

A number of methods can help prevent the spread of pests in the garden. Thus, these insects like to live in quiet places with low risk of invasion. Loosening and digging the beds will reduce their numbers.

It is also important to reduce the number of places where ants live. This requires mowing long grass, removing weeds and uprooting stumps. Do not plant crops too densely, maintaining distance.

If trees grow near the beds, they must be regularly treated with slaked lime solution. This way insects will not move along the trunks. And to reduce the risk of an anthill appearing under the roots, it is also necessary to cultivate a plot of land in the root zone.

It is considered effective to plant plants with a specific smell that will repel ants. Therefore, it is recommended to plant a little around the perimeter of the site or between plants:

garlic;
Luke;
mint;
valerian;
parsley;
tomatoes;
mustard;
laurel;
marigolds;
anise;
carnations;
wormwood;
tansy.

This will create a barrier for new guests, and will encourage those already settled to go in search of a new place of residence. An important part of preventive work is the removal of aphids, whose nectar serves as a source of food for ants.

Industrial poisonous drugs

In the case when almost all options have been tried, and the ants in the greenhouse with cucumbers continue their harmful activities, then it is worth resorting to more radical measures - industrial pesticides.

The most commonly used drugs are the main component of which is diazinon (a highly active organophosphorus chemical compound), which causes damage to the nervous system in insects and, as a result, paralysis. Such drugs include “Thunder - 2”, “Muracid”, and also “Anteater”.

There are many different ways to get rid of these insects, and if ants appear in cucumbers on your site, experienced gardeners and time will tell you how to get rid of them.

Mechanical methods

Mechanical methods of fighting ants are the safest and often even humane.

The most humane method of combating ants is considered to be moving the anthill. If the ant nest is small, it can be dug up and moved away from the garden (at least 800 m from it).
If the anthill is large, it is easier to stir it up, pour it with kerosene solution, and cover it with film. The ants themselves will not want to stay in this home.
If the anthill is not located on the cucumber bed itself, you can block the ants’ path to their tasty prey. To do this, make a ditch around the bed, cover its bottom with plastic film, secure its ends with bricks, and fill the ditch with water. Ants that cannot swim will not be able to overcome this obstacle.
If you place sticky tapes around the perimeter of the beds, the ants will stick tightly to them, this will lead to a decrease in the population, but will not allow you to get rid of the insects completely.

If you want the effect of using mechanical methods of insect control to be maximum, you need to supplement them with chemical and other methods.