Ants in the vegetable garden are not usually a problem

Ants actually help to aerate the soil by digging tunnels and eating dead insects. One problem with ants is they farm aphids therefore they can unwillingly cause an aphid pest problem but if you’ve got

plenty of ladybugs, they’ll get rid of the aphids. Fire ants and Carpenter ants can be a nuisance so it could pay to get rid of those.

I have heard that Nutrasweet and Equal, the artificial sugars, are very good at killing ants.

As you know ants love sugar but for some reason the artificial kinds just take out the ants. Corn meal is pretty good, I don’t know how it works but it takes them out. The old grandmother’s recipe of sugar and a little borax seems to be very effective. Let a few ants play around in the mixture then let them loose to take it back to the colony and that should wipe out the colony.

If you have wooden sided raised beds and you got Carpenter ants you could have problems.

Usually ants are not a problem. They usually don’t eat vegetables and there will be other critters that cause more problems. If you can set up a little pond and bring in a couple of toads, they eat lots of insects including ants. Hedgehogs love snails and slugs and other creepy crawlies that come out at night.

My favorite is chickens and ducks but they eat everything that moves, the good and the bad. Anyway coming back to ants in your vegetable garden. I would say there are more things to worry about than ants so unless they have to go, just leave them.

Check out our Vegetable Gardening page and see what you think, but now is the time to stop thinking and just throw a few seeds around the house to see what happens.