I havnt made a post for a long time but I need some advice cause a man that is hired by the manager of the care home to mow the garden isnt a wildlife friendly person he is a jokey person and a nice person but can have a tendancy to be so blunt that he can be abit rude and can also be abit mean at times and I dont find him aproachable and dont tend to talk to him cause im not keen on him.
he only comes to do the job that the manager of the care home has asked him to do or if we need help putting something up and he has helped put my nest box up and put my trail cam up cause he was asked to come over and help put it up
but when it comes to actual Wild - life hes not a wildlife person at all he doesnt think about the flowers, the bees, the imvertebres and the plants or the birds its just about the gardening which is what hes been hired to do
hes not going to think about weather there is any imsects on flowers or spiders in the grass. he once complained about me having my widlife houses on the ground for the insects even though they wernt on the grass to the manager causeing me to have to move it onto my border
and hes also the sort of person where if you were to ask would it be ok to just leave the wildflowers that are im front of my border and only do the grass he wont. aswell as mowing he gets rid of the flowers regardless of weather it is put of the way and only up against my border or anything else hes only come mow and get rid of weeds and thats it
my main issue is that his atitude borders on methods that arnt wildlife friendly for imstance I dont use weedkiller or any form of pesticide and he brings weedkiller but to make things worse he has started bringing ant killer (aswell) today he didnt bring the weedkiller but he brought ant killer and put it down on a patch I know to be a ant nest but you never see them unless you disturb them or the weather is warm.
we dont have any ant invasions or pests in the house or the garden either and hes put it down on certain pathches of the garden including one not close to but a short distance nearby the pond aswell
I know talking to him isnât an option but the him bringing pesicides when comeing to mow problom is going to have to wait cause my main concern now is that ants are being killed in the garden just cause there is an ants nests and they dont like them and the longer i leave it the more ants it will kill particularly since they will have there nuptual flight in the summer or when the weather is warm enough. I kimd of just want to get rid of it now rather than leave it there so I need to get rid of the powder. i was thinking of spraying it with water but I dont want it to get on the grass or acidently make things worse fo you have any ideas or soloutions or how to get rid of the powder
1 Like
Zo, I was very sorry to read about your dilemma. My first thoughts are that you should speak to your support worker about your concerns and ask how the situation can be brought to the actual care home managerâs attention. I think your support worker would do their best to help you.
the problom with that is that the manager is the one that asked him to do it. my support workers dont like ants either. there aware of the ants nest cause they saw them at one point and after that they had been talking about ant powder last month and thinking about weather they should put some down like one of the neighbours down the road or not so now the manager has asked him to get rid of the ants and so went to get it I have seen him with it before but I dont know weather it was aplied that day. today he brought it agaim and I saw him actualy useing it.
so every time i look out the garden I see the powder and im wondering how to get rid of it before it does any more damage
Zo, read the section called âHow to get rid of ants in the garden naturallyâ in this link to see if you get any ideas. I donât kill ants either and so I know how you feel. You might not be able to do anything.
https://moowy.co.uk/how-to-get-rid-of-ants-in-the-garden/
I have at times had to use ant killer when the ants took all of the soil out of a pot with a food plant in it. They first infest the plant with sap sucking greenfly and if they fail to stick on the plant they will kill it to make way for plants the pest sticks to.
That white powder only works if it gets into the lungs of the insect. They do not have âpowered breathingâ like we do. Non winged ants just walk over the powder and are not affected. Put some of that powder down around the entrance of a stinging wasps nest and it will kill them as they need more power to fly and a little bit of air flow from there wings goes over there lungs and with the powder on the ground the draught kicks some of it up and into there lungs.
That powder is a waste of money for killing ants.
I will often dig the nest up and put it in a container and tip it out into the chicken run. They will recycle the ants and there eggs to make nice breakfast eggs.
I have at times had to use spray if the nest is in the roots of a fruit bush.
unfortunatly they wernt damageing anything and they wernt causeing any probloms or coming indoors. there isnt an invasion either and you wouldnt even notice the ants unless you disturbed them with a mower or you walked over there mound or there was some other comtact or disturbance. they just dont like them which is why they dont want it there and the manager absoloutly hates insects and all that stuff. the support workers notmaly asume theres an imvasion just cause they make a nest and they worry that the ants are going to get in when they dont usualy over here unless they have been eating outside and eating sugary things or leaving sugary residue that they havnt cleaned up yet. when they want to eat food outside at the table the ants pick up on it and then they complain about the ants crawling all over the table and chairs but other than that they dont really bother anyone
the ants have been keeping to themselfs this whole time and cause there not causeing any probloms for the garden they dont need to kill them there only killing them cause they get creeped out when they see the nest there and the ant workers comeing out and walking about just being workers or come out when people or the staff approach the nest.
they dont know much about ants so there thinking is the second they see a nest thay it automaticaly means invasion and they are now comsidered pests just like that simply cause they have ( seen) an ant nest. its only when they see ants coming out of a nest carrying things or just being ants that they automaticaly asume it needs to worry this is not just in the garden but also out and about they see nests this way. they normaly look at them and go I wouldnt have those in my garden they give me the creeps. put simply they hate ants exspecialy ant nests regardless of weather there causeing any probloms or not.
i prefer to use wildlife friendly methods to pesticides amd they should be tested out first. pesticides should only be used as a last resort but even then its only for pests and there not causeing any probloms so Im trying to think of a way to get rid of the ant killer stuff on the ground im not sure if trying to cause it to dissolve like useing water or something will get rid of it
when I saw the bottle it wasnt anymore reassureing when I found out it also kills woodlice and other invertebretes an ant specific one is one thing when there not being pests but picking up one when it also reads not just ant killer but kills woodlice and other invertebretes under the title aswell which means it will afect and poison the
(non target species) (aswell) even more of a reason for me to find a way to disolve it or get rid of it somehow
You could try the argument that it is dangerous to be using poisons in a garden where people go because you donât know what the effects will be on the people. The container might say it is safe, but I bet it also says you must wash your hands after using it, so it clearly isnât totally safe. We donât know all the effects of the chemical pesticides that are used, but the general trend is for âsafeâ ones to turn out to be harmful to humans - e.g. glyphosate. So ask to see the safety documentation for all the chemicals the gardener is using. That should slow them down for a while. Then look on the web for stories about how harmful these chemicals can be.
3 Likes
How naive I am - thought chemical pesticides/ weedkillers were forbidden in the UK - so the person who is spraying on the building site alongside the Thames may well be using something that will be detrimental to the environment?
Very little grows there anymore, but the Crows seem to survive. Interesting
Zo Maybe he was using talcum powder Thereâs a trick using that or blackboard chalk that I remember. Talcum powder is a natural ant repellent , and itâs safe for kids and pets. Talcum powder is an ingredient found in baby powder and chalk, so you may be able to use what you already have on hand. Sprinkle the powder or draw a line of chalk where you think the ants are entering. Blog - 10 Natural Ways To Prevent An Epic Ant Invasion.
Then think Happy thoughts - reading your posts made me think that you may find some of my iSpot pics interesting. I dinât know much about insects nor ants, but have lots of pictures from iSpot Southern Africa.
You may need to change community but the tags myInsects and myAnts should link.
Interesting spiders Crab spiders The Thomisidae, or Crab spiders are the masters of ambush and disguise. They range in size from 3-32 mm although they rarely exceed 11mm in body length. This large family includes 38 genera in South Africa (Biodivrsity Explorer)
ALSO Flower-crab Spider - Issuu
Stay happy
Marland
Pesticide production is a big industry in Britain and British farmers are major consumers. Herbicide use is so severe on most arable crops that the GM industry could reason that using herbicide-tolerant GM crops would reduce the amount of herbicide used. Though it turned out their scheme was not better for the environment after all (field-scale trials circa 2004). There is also constant pressure from the farming lobby to be allowed to use more neonicotinoid insecticides.
1 Like
maybe. thanks for the idea
no he was definatly useing an ant killer I saw the bottle and what it said on the bottle and also saw him actualy spraying the bare ground with it one where I know to definatly be a ant nest and one spot that was actualy a mound one of the support workers created from digging and pouring out and pouring in soil in borders when adding exstra borders in the garden some years ago now and from making a compost heap in the garden make a compost heap which they never moved and thefore grass and weeds grew over it over the years. grass eventualy grew over it which just makes it look abit like a mound even though it isnt. and that isnt far from my pond. so naturaly it got sprayed asuming or fearing it to be a ant nest.
the 3rd place they sprayed wasnt a mount at all and was just a bare round circle that is flat ground. interestingly they mainly got it all over the grass even though they got it on the bare ground aswell.
I didnt take a picture of the bottle only what he sprayed
but this is the spray to show what it was in the absence of being able to take a picture of it
the range is literaly not far from me either and it was this bottle that I saw on the table outside and come over to the table pick it up and use it. he had a spray in his right hand already but he went over to get the powder he sprayed and used the powder but poured it into the spray bottle and sprayed aswel. he also just poured the bottle onto the ground to get as much out as he could and shaked it abit before pouring it
for ease of getting it it will of been easy for him to get it to take care of the ant nests before he went to get the spray since they dont like ant nests.
https://www.therange.co.uk/garden/pest-control-and-weed-killer/insects-slugs-and-snails/ant-killer/?position=3&s=194805#194805
and this is the powder and what he sprayed
Does this mean we are getting carcinogenic foodstuffs? Googled and then thought of what we gave in our diet - oh dear!!
The short answer is yes. Longer is yes, pretty much all foods contain carcinogens, whether they have been treated with pesticides or not. I learned in a food chemistry class that cabbage contains several molecules that are carcinogens, but that doesnât mean you shouldnât eat cabbage. The level of risk is a question of dose and personal susceptibility, and a normal amount of cabbage in the diet would not be considered risky. As for the novel man-made compounds used in insecticides and herbicides, the same principle applies but I would be more wary as they are not chemicals we have been exposed to during evolution so we may not have the biochemical pathways to deal with them. A few years ago, a government minister replied to the accusation that apples were contaminated with pesticide by stating they were completely safe to eat provided you peel them. On the other hand, there is a professor who is often wheeled out by the chemical manufacturers who claims traces of pesticide in food are good for stimulating the immune system. Iâm not qualified to agree or dispute it.
2 Likes
