Here Are Six Natural Pest Control Tips & Tricks

Written By Vince Wheeler

These six natural pest control tips and tricks are going to help keep your garden thriving by reducing the damage pest can do. Ants, slugs, bettles, and worms can call wreak havoc in your vegetables and fruit trees.

Ants: What can you do to get rid of ants in the house?

Ants can be a huge problem when you live off grid. It usually starts with scouts. The colony sends out scouts to find food sources. You’ll typically see a few ants walking around your counters or near your pantry. The best thing you can do is catch these ant scouts in the act and kill them before they lead the rest back to your home. Once you kill them, it’s a good idea to clean the spot up quickly so the ant doesn’t release pheromones that could potentially lead more ants back to your home. If that preemptive effort fails you and you find a trail of ants leading towards your food supplies, you have a couple options. First, and sometimes effective step would be to spray the trail with rubbing alcohol or clean it up with soapy water on a sponge. The goal is to kill the ants coming into your home while destroying the scent they leave behind. Each ant follows a trail left behind by the previous ants. This is how they create those highways through your home. By killing them and wiping away their scent trail, you make their lives more difficult and potentially drive them away. With more stubborn, persistent ant colonies, you’ll need to start chemical warfare against them.

A simple solution is to make your own ant baits. It is important that you protect your pets from this concoction, but that isn’t hard to do. There’s little chance your pet would be interested in it, but its always better to be safe than sorry. The ingredients are natural, but not everything natural is edible for you or your pets. Follow these steps and you should rid your house of ants and protect everyone else!

Get A Container: You’ll need to find some type of disposable container. Yogurt, butter, coffee, or other food containers that you get and toss out after using will do great. Any small container will do. The key is to have a lid that comes with the container.

Access Holes: Now you need to put some holes in it. About an inch from the bottom of the container, put holes in the side. You can use a knife by twisting it or better yet, use a drill. Don’t go crazy here. 4-6 pencil sized holes will do fine. Too many holes will dry out the bait. The only goal of these holes is to let the ants climb in and out with the bait.

Making The Bait: In the bottom of your container, mix 4 parts sugar to 1 part borax. You can find Borax at most Wal-Marts and even some grocery stores. It’s traditionally used to clean your laundry. Again… it is natural, but it should not be consumed by anything you don’t want to die. It is fairly harmless to most animals and humans, but there’s a slight risk so be safe. The way borax kills ants is by damaging their digestive system. It slowly kills off the entire ant colony; preventing more invasions on your home in the future.

Add just enough water to get the whole mix damp. You don’t want to add so much water that you create a soup. Just enough to dampen everything. Do a tablespoon or so at a time until it turns into a paste

Fill Your Container: Add enough of the mixture to create a small layer on the bottom of your container. A half inch or so will do fine.

Secure Everything With A Lid: Put your lid on and secure it with tape to prevent animals from getting into it. Even though it’s a low risk, this can potentially kill your pets if they consume enough. Securing the container with a lid and taping that lid down will give you an extra layer of protection from unwanted accidents.

Placing The Container: You have two goals here: 1) Place the container near the ant trail. 2) Place the container in a location that kids or animals can reach.

What will happen is the ants will eat the sugar laced with borax (boric acid) and then carry some back to the colony to store as food. As the ants inside the colony eat it, they will die as well. This is a good long term solution by wiping out or severely knocking down ant colonies. After a several days to a week, you should notice your ant problem come to an end. Clean up the mess and toss the container with sugar and boric acid away. If the problem returns, repeat the process. I’ve used this to rid my home of ants that the previous person couldn’t get rid of, even with poison ant sprays.

This method also works great for roaches and other insects that feed off food in your house.

Slugs: How do you get rid of slugs in your garden?

Slugs will eat the leafs on your vegetables and damage your garden. This method will help reduce the numbers over time and its safe and natural.

Containers: You need a few container in each row of vegetables you have. These can be any container, glass or plastic. Peanut butter jars, yogurt containers, or even old cans. They just need to have an easy way for slugs to climb into the container. If it rains a lot in your area, you might want to buy special slug bait traps. Here’s a link to buy them from Amazon.

Bait Mixture: You can add beer or make your own mixture using one tablespoon of sugar and another tablespoon of yeast. Add a cup of water and mix thoroughly. Add this to your container.

Bury The Containers: You’ll need to dig a hole just big enough to bury the containers up to the rim.

Every day or two, you’ll need to go out and remove the dead slugs and replace the bait mixture. Do this until you kill off enough slugs to keep your garden safe. If you notice leafs that have been eaten, than put out some more traps.

Flies: How do I get rid of thousands of flies?

Flies are a huge nuisance for many households. Especially people raising animals. Here’s an excellent method to keep those pest in check by killing hundreds or even thousands of flies at a time.

Container: You’ll need a fairly large jar. The bigger the better. If it’s too small, it will fill up quickly and you’ll need to clean it out more often. A gallon size jar is perfect. I’ll do some experiments this summer with milk jugs and I’ll keep everyone posted on how well those work.

Bait: You’ll need to fill the jar about ¼ of the volume with water and then add nasty stuff to it. Find the stuff the flies are already attracted to. Animal poop, old meat, or anything else you think will attract flies. Put it in the water.

Lids: You’ll need to layers of lids to keep the flies trapped. The first is just a black plastic back ripped from a trash bag. Put it over the opening and use some string to secure it. Push a couple holes in the top of the bag with your finger. Don’t go crazy. Just big enough for the fly to comfortably get into the container. Because the flies are phototropic (attracted to light), you’ll need to hide the sun from shining into the openings. Do this by placing a plastic lid over the top with another piece of plastic bag over that. You are essentially creating an umbrella. Put a hole in the center of both the plastic bag and the plastic lid. You’ll use these holes to hang the whole container in the next step.

Hanging Your Trap: You can use some string to hang the jar from anything around your property you want. If you’re raising animals, you can hang these traps near them. Tie a knot in the string and thread the plastic lid and the plastic bag onto the string until it is resting on the knot. Just below that, you’ll need to try tie the string around the jar to suspend it. You could also use metal wire to secure the jar and then tie the string to the wire. Whichever is easiest for you. Then tie the whole trap off to whatever you want. An eve to a house, a tree, a fence… it’s up to you. Now you’re ready to trap flies.

Within a few days, you’re jar will start to fill up with flies. Once the jar is ¾ of the way full, dump the flies out. If you have chickens, they will love this extra protein! If not, dump them into the trash and reload the bait with fresh nasty material and water and let it go to work again. Happy hunting!

Bonus Tip: If your having a problem with a few flies inside your house, an easy solution is to mix Dawn dish soap with water and place it into a squirt bottle. When they land, or possibly even when they fly by, you squirt them. The Dawn dish soap mixture will kill them almost instantly. I believe it causes them to suffocate. This mixture is amazing throughout the garden as well. It kills all sorts of insects and if diluted enough, won’t harm your plants.

Mice & Rats

 Mice and rats can ruin chicken feed, spread disease, chew through electrical wires , and damage other parts of your homestead. Here’s an easy method to keep them in check.

Container: You’ll need a five gallon bucket. You can buy the buckets for $3 or so from any box store.

Seeds: You’ll need to buy a bag of sunflower seeds. Don’t buy the expensive stuff designed for humans. You want the feed grade sunflower seeds. You can buy a 40lb bag from Amazon for $19 or so. You’ll need Amazon Prime to make the shipping worth it. If you don’t have Amazon Prime, look around your local animal feed store and you’ll likely find a bag. You’ll likely be out of mice before you’re out of seeds. This trap is amazingly efficient.

The Setup: You’ll fill your bucket about 1/3 of the way with water, then put enough seeds into the water to create an even layer on top of the water. Put a board or stick up against the 5 gallon bucket so mice or rats can climb up and jump into the bucket. When they see the seeds, they’ll jump in and drown.

You’ll need to refresh the trap every 2-3 days to clean out the dead mice and put in clean water and more seeds. If you are super frugal, you could keep the seeds, dry them out and reuse them. If you plan to reuse your seeds, you’ll need to change the trap every day to prevent the rodents from rotting and damaging the seeds. Let the seeds dry out for a few days to make sure they don’t get waterlogged and sink. This trap works because the mice/rats don’t know there’s water under the seeds. They think they’re jumping down to a bucket full of seeds only to find out too late that there’s no getting out of this trap.

Side Note: If you feel bad they are drowning, something to consider is drowning only sucks because of the panic it induces. The act of drowning isn’t painful. From stories of people who have drowned, it’s actually peaceful. No death is a good death, but hopefully that gives you a little peace about the procedure.

Squash Bugs

These pest will destroy your squash and zucchini plans like no other. They are relentless. Good news is they are easy to kill.

Sprayer: You can buy these from any home improvement stores, and most box stores. A two gallon sprayer will cost you about $35 and a smaller one gallon is about $20.

Mixture: You’ll need to mix one gallon of water for every one tablespoon of Dawn dish soap. I’m not sure why, but it seems Dawn is the dish soap is the only soap that works consistantly.. Every recipe I’ve heard of recommends that exact brand. It’s cheap enough.

Spray: While watering your plants, keep the sprayer with you. As you see the squash bugs come up the plant towards “safety”, you’ll want to spray each bug down with the Dawn mixture. Those buggers will be dead in 10 minutes or so.

Keep doing this all season long to keep them in check. They are super destructive and multiply very quickly. If you are on top of your spray game, you’ll keep most of your squash and zucchini safe.

Cabbage Loopers, Tomato Hornworm, Leaf Rollers, And Caterpillars

Bacuillus Thuringiensis is commonly referred to as BT. It’s a bacteria that attacks a specific kind of pest while they are in their larva form. If you are having trouble with catapillars and worms attacking the leafs of your vegetables then this is for you!

Sprayer: You can use any sprayer you choose. They just need to be the kind that allow you to pressurize them.

Mixture: Mix 4 teaspoons of BT to one gallon of water. Spray your plants thoroughly.

This will kill any bugs that are currently on your plants. You will need to respray the plants every two weeks to keep killing off the new bugs. This product is a natural bacteria that only attacks these specific pests. It won’t kill the helpful earthworms in the soil. It only kills the pest on your plants.

Symbiotic Relationships To Help Reduce Pests

Not every problem in the garden requires direct action. Sometimes letting your animals handle bugs is a great solution. Chickens are great at reducing bugs around the yard. You’ll need to keep them clear of your garden, but if you let them feed and the land around your garden, you can help reduce the catapillars, worms, and other insects.