Sprinkle this....

So there I was this morning, looking at gardening boards on Pinterest.... not that I'm a gardener, but I do appreciate pretty gardens.  For our own property, I would need the flowerbeds to be free of ants, spiders, scorpions, snakes, wasps, and even bees... and then I would be happy to go out there and play in the dirt and plant flowers that would hopefully grow and bloom before they fry and shrivel up in the Texas heat.

On a clever Pinterest person's gardening board, I happened across the following simple suggestion: Cornstarch kills ants. That clever gardening person even wrote "You probably have cornstarch right in your own pantry!"  Well, of course I did.... and of course I took that box of cornstarch right outside to see if it would work.

Out of the dozens of fire ant mounds that have sprung up since this last week's rainstorms, I picked the smallest three mounds, doing a quick calculation of the size of the mounds in comparison to the amount of cornstarch in that package. (My husband would be proud of my mathematical sense.)

I took a stick and poked some holes in those ant hills, and out came thousands of fire ants trying to defend their territory. I sprinkled the mounds with the cornstarch, and within seconds, the ants who were moving at a Jitterbug pace were suddenly doing the Waltz... and then they were barely moving at all... dancing in slow motion. Success!

Off to the second and third mounds.... more cornstarch... more barely-moving fire ants.  When I came back into the house, I checked the pantry to see if I possibly had another container of cornstarch, but I didn't.  I wrote "cornstarch!" on my shopping list, and I will be raiding the store shelves for it when I go grocery shopping this week.

The cornstarch trick is the second gardening secret I've learned on Pinterest... the first being that if you mix white vinegar with water and a bit of liquid dish-washing soap (like Dawn), that mixture will kill weeds. My husband sprayed that concoction onto a gravel path around the side of our house and it has been weed-free for weeks now, even with all the rain we've had.

So now, when my husband asks me why I spend so much time on Pinterest, I should tell him that I'm doing research into the most cost-effective and earth-friendly gardening methods which will make his life easier and protect the planet at the same time.