Ants Will NEVER Come Back — The $2 Amish Kitchen Trick

My name is Darlene Hollis. I cooked in a school kitchen for thirty-five years, feeding four hundred children a day, where a line of ants on a prep counter meant a write-up with your name on it. You have sprayed the counter before. You watched them curl up, wiped them away, and felt like you had settled it. Three days later they were back, four inches to the left, walking the same wall. You did the work. The problem came back anyway. The can did not fail because you used it wrong. It was never sold to fix what is actually happening. The ants you see are not the problem. They are the messengers. When a scout finds food she walks home laying a chemical marker, a pheromone, which only means a smell the rest of them follow like paint stripes on a highway. That is a road painted across your kitchen, and every ant in the colony can read it. Kill forty and leave the road, and forty more show up by supper. An Amish woman down in Lawrence County, near Ethridge, put it plainer than I can. You don't fight the ants. You wash out their road. The USDA was printing the same thing in farmers' bulletins back in the 1910s, and home demonstration agents carried it into Tennessee farm kitchens through the twenties and thirties. The advice has not changed in a hundred years because the ants have not changed. We just quit hearing it. White vinegar, cut half and half with water in a spray bottle, wiped over the whole path corner to corner. The bottle was a dollar and a quarter at the dollar store here in Lexington, a gallon of vinegar about three and a half dollars, and you will use maybe a cup. Call it two dollars. Ant spray at my store runs around seven dollars a can and the baits about eight a pack, twenty-two dollars in a bad summer, spent again next June. In this video I show you how to follow the line both directions before you touch anything, how to wipe up the ants you can see with soapy water, how to mix the vinegar, how far past the ants to wash, how to get sugar and flour into sealed jars, how to caulk the gap for about three dollars, how to set a pie plate moat under the dog bowl, and why you wash the road again the next two mornings. I also tell you where it falls short. This handles the little sugar ants and pavement ants, and it does not kill a colony. It does not need to. It only makes your kitchen not worth the trip. WHAT YOU WILL NEED Spray bottle, $1.25 White vinegar, one gallon, about $3.50 Dish soap and a rag Painter's caulk, about $3 A caulk gun Wide-mouth jars with lids that seal A pie plate A WORD OF CAUTION If you are seeing black ants a half inch long coming out of the woodwork, or little piles of what looks like sawdust near a windowsill, that can be carpenter ants. That is a structure problem, not a vinegar problem. Call a professional and don't feel bad about it. Keep any spray or bait you do use well away from where food sits. Vinegar is the one thing I will spray on a counter I eat off of. I put up the old ways of keeping a house on this channel, the ones my mother and Miss Doris taught me, so subscribe if you want them. #ants #antcontrol #kitchentips #vinegarcleaning #frugalliving #oldfashionedhomemaking #pestcontrol #homemaking