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Erin, a reader from North Carolina, asked a pest control-related question this week regarding an article about dementia and diabetes being linked to pesticides.
She writes:
I wanted to ask you for ideas about pest control. We live in an apartment in NC and are having a roach problem (we’ve been killing 20, mostly babies per day—they are going wild in our kitchen and dining room at night). I don’t want to have our apartment sprayed with toxic pesticides especially because I have a 1 yr old and 3 yr old. I guess I need a pep talk from another natural mama about why I should not spray and some ideas of alternatives. I spray down the kitchen and dining area with an orange oil spray every morning and night to keep things clean and the orange oil is supposed to be a natural repellent. I also put boric acid in the sink before going to bed. I’m sure you know from living in the South how bad roaches can be! Any other tips? I am feeling a lot of pressure from friends and family to spray. One friend almost pleaded with me “for the sake of my family” to get the place sprayed by a professional! Maybe you could write a post about home pest control sometime if you have not written on that already.
Erin, I have written a related post called Green Herbicides and Pesticides for Your Yard, but I have not written one on non-toxic pest control for your home.
Thanks for the article suggestion!
Here’s how I keep pests at bay in my home in very buggy Florida!
Non-Toxic Pest Control (Homemade Roach and Ant Cookies)
Makes about 20 cookies
There is simply no need to use a pest control service for spraying toxic pesticides in and around your home to control roaches and ants. A super simple solution is to make homemade roach and ant cookies that last for years. Just be sure to hide them well and keep them away from the kids as they look like real cookies and you wouldn’t want one of your children taking a bite by accident!
We once had a bad roach problem in our old home when we remodeled the kitchen but these cookies took care of the problem within a few days.
The roaches begin to decline in number and eventually disappear completely never to be seen again!
Ingredients
1 cup flour
1 cup white sugar
1 cup borax or boric acid (where to find)
1 egg
Instructions
Mix all ingredients together to form a moist batter. Add a bit of water if more moisture is needed to make a paste. Form small cookies about 1 inch in diameter and place on parchment paper on cookie sheets.
Bake at 350F for about 8-10 minutes. Let cool. Hide cookies in the back of cabinets, in corners on the floor and anywhere else you have roach or ant problems. They work great in garages too!
Store leftover cookies in a plastic ziplock back in an upper cabinet away from children and pets. These cookies last for years and so make enough so that you only have to make this recipe one time!
Other Non-toxic Pest Control Ideas
While these roach and ant cookies work beautifully well for keeping pests out of your home, occasionally I will have some ants trailing under a patio door or around the front porch foraging for food. For these situations, I place a bay leaf right at the same spot the ants are trailing in to repel them away in another direction.
Ants do not like bay leaves – at least the ants in Florida! This simple idea quickly and easily turns the ants around and sends them off foraging away from your house! As for fire ants, they are a different kettle of fish. This article plus video shows how I control them very easily with no pesticides.
That’s it! That’s all I do to keep pests away from my house. Two simple ideas that work. If worse comes to worst and your house is infested with more pests than just roaches or ants, be sure to call a green pest control company to fix the problem. There are two in my local area and they cost anywhere from $300-$500/year depending on the size of your house. Earth’s Best Natural Pest Control Management is one of the biggest in my state of Florida from what I understand, but I’m sure there are many others around the country.
More Information
Natural Flea Infestation and Prevention Solutions
Spider Repellent Guaranteed to Work
Natural and Effective Bed Bug Removal Techniques
Safely Get Rid of Carpenter Ants in a Snap
Fast and Effective Fly Repellent
Quick and Easy Homemade Fly Trap
Fast Acting Mosquito Bite Remedy That’s Probably Already in Your Kitchen
I would love to find good nontoxic mosquito control for my yard. I do my best to ensure no standing water. But it’s just miserable outside, at any time of day now that the new Asian tiger mosquitoes are here. They aren’t just out from dusk to dawn, but all day including midday summer heat. Can’t water my tomatoes without them all over me in seconds.
I have a small townhouse so I tried spraying both my yard, and as much of the two neighbors’ yards as I could reach with my hose with this “organic mosquito control” product I got at Lowe’s. It’s mostly essential oils. I am wondering if I have to use several applications over a number of weeks to really break the cycle–but won’t they just keep coming from the further neighbors’ yards? Ugh…miserable. And i love to be outside in warm weather.
Bat house! We have a bad house mounted on a dead tree in the front yard and it has 3 bats in it that patrol our property every evening at dusk. No mosquitoes! It is wonderful to be able to sit outside and enjoy the evening without getting eaten alive.
Many edible herb plants deter mosquitos. Thyme, rosemary, basil, and others. Plant them around your yard — great for you, kid-safe — and the mosquitos may go away. I posted on this on Monday.
Keeping water dumped out of flower pots, etc., no puddles in your driveway, etc. helps with mosquito control, yes. And keep grass mowed short. We are constantly watching for anything that might be a mosquito incubater around the place. We have bats, too, but we don’t know where they are living. And dragonflies! Lots of dragonflies, the marvelous mosquito predator! Sometimes our pastures by the house look like dragonfly city out there. We have ponds, too. Toads – we encourage them to be in our yard, ponds, etc. We tell our grandkids, “Toads are our friends!”.
For ants I’ve had good luck using this mixture:
Water
Sugar
Borax
Bacon grease/cooked bacon pieces
Ants are generally either sugar loving or fat loving, so this will attract both kinds, then the borax kills them.
I don’t remember the proportions, but I know I mixed it up in a 20 oz glass – so mostly water, a few tbs of sugar to make it sweet, same with the grease. Probably either a tsp or tbs of the borax. If you use too much borax they won’t eat it, so start lighter rather than heavier. My ants were coming in through the garage, so I put enough of this to cover the bottom of a pie plate and placed it where I saw ants in the garage. I soon had a literal graveyard-massacre of ants all around it in the garage, just thousands of them all dead on the floor!
Of course, place somewhere so kids & pets can’t get at it!
We mostly have trouble with fire ants – lots of trouble (we live in SW Arkansas)! I use my Rainbow vacuum to suck them up and they drown. Sometimes I put out a plate with some butter smeared on it and set it on the floor. I call it a bait plate. 🙂 When a good mob of ants are on it, I suck them up. The butter sticks to the plate so it can be used over and over as the ants keep coming. You get enough of them and you will kill the nest as there aren’t enough workers to feed the queens then so they starve. I also spray them with strong soapy water that I keep in a spray bottle. They drown. Works on other things, too. If they mob my counter top/stove, and I don’t have the vacuum together, I use the soapy water. If they are around the burners, I turn on the fire and they burn. My kitchen is full of them right now – they are everywhere. I’ve learned to keep most foods in containers they cannot get in or else in the freezer or fridge. They ate a bag of brown sugar in my cupboard a few years ago – I’d not even opened it yet because I rarely use it. They ate holes through the plastic bag and took it. They love meat and fats – I have to watch my bottles of olive oil. They get under the caps and right into the oil, the varmints! And our raw fermented honey, too. One summer I had to set a five gallon bucket in water in the bathtub to keep the ants from going after it. I won’t spray (not even in my garden) so I find other ways to deal with them. Boiling soapy water can work on an outdoor anthill if you use something to tear it up first – like the poker for the woodstove. But you also kill the good bugs, etc. in the soil doing that so I don’t like to if I can help it. We’ve done things like turn a couple of small pigs into our garden for the winter – they can smell the food nests and the ants and they go after them, rooting up the soil. The ant bites don’t seem to bother the pigs at all. Turning the soil over while it’s cold and winter like that also freezes the ants. The pigs got down deep and did a good job. That spring I didn’t have the ant problem for several months until they were able to build up their numbers again. They are bad in the garden – like one giant ant nest because they have the food and the soft soil there. We don’t usually have pigs or eat them plus we have raised beds with bricks so using the pigs every winter isn’t something we want to have to do. And it’s getting harder and harder to get pigs now that the government is taking control of the animals. If the ant cookies will work for fire ants, too, I’m sure going to try them!
A word of warning about fire ants – they apparently like electricity for some reason. We have farmer friends who have had them ruin electrical boxes for chicken houses, grain bins, etc. We had them get in the walls of our mobile home. We didn’t realize that’s what was happening, we just knew we were dealing with a lot of ants in the bedroom/house and when the woodstove would get the house nice and warm, the ants would swarm in the house! They fly when they do that. We ended up waiting until we had some days coming in the winter that were going to be clear but very cold, especially at night. My husband took off the outer walls (easy to do on a mobile home with no siding) just before dark. He did spray the insulation where the ants were living so they wouldn’t just drop to the ground and get away – or get on him. That drove them to the inside of the house where I waited with the Rainbow. For several days I sucked up ants as they tried to get away from the cold outside. Most of them froze. When no more ants were showing up, we put the walls back on the outside. That was several years ago and so far, they’ve not done that again. They got in another part of the house and had an ant interstate going across my living room floor. I literally sat on a chair and sucked up ants with the Rainbow as they went back and forth. At times I counted them as I sucked and would get into the thousands before I stopped counting. After two weeks of this (!), I was amazed to think that the ants I was sucking up were all new ants, not the ones that had already been sucked up. The floor is 12 feet across so they had a long ways to go from wall to wall. Finally they started thinning out. I’d go away and come back to check and suck up some more. By the third week I wasn’t seeing any more and I haven’t since then. I killed the nest by doing that. That was three summers ago.
I am wondering if you ever use the cookies or bay leaves outside. Wouldn’t they just get wet in rain?
I am going to check out the DE, but I am discouraged that the other commenter said that it didn’t work for her. :(.
I use the bay leaves on the porch but they are under cover. They do sometimes blow away in the wind, but I just put another one down. I do not use the cookies outside.
I have not had much luck with the DM.
We live where brown recluse spiders are everywhere – I would love to know if there is actually a way to be rid of them in the house. My in-laws sprayed every few months and didn’t have them, but I don’t want to use the chemicals in our home.
I have been having the same problem. We just found out that we have a brown recluse infestation in our house (I found 4 this week in our bedrooms) and so I ended up calling pest control to try to get a handle on it. It sounds like the best way to keep them at bay are glue traps. They get stuck on them and it is a great way to tell if you have a problem. We did have a couple of glue traps down (though we probably need a bunch more) and they exterminated was able to tell that we had an infestation by just looking at them and realizing that their were a bunch on them. (We are new to our area and didn’t realize that they were brown recluise or we would have acted faster. ) It also helps to have no other insects inside so that they have nothing to live on.
I live in North Carolina and did not want to rely on any toxic pesticides to take care of all the ants, wood roaches, ( or as some people nicely call them “palmetto bugs”) camel crickets and other bugs that our house is plagued with but after trying every thing I knew about at the time,(including DE) and not having any success, I called a Pest Control place that used non-toxic stuff. The guy did the entire exterior of the house, as well as the interior (closets, attic space, cupboards and floorboards) and he said it was about as dangerous as table salt. He does not wear gloves or a mask as he spreads the powder and the company claims it is safe for animals and children, which was a concern that I had. I have not had ANY problems with roaches or ants or any other bug since. The company is called Bulwark but if these cookies work then there is no need to rely on any company!
Do any of the solutions work on scorpions? How about mice? We live on 3 acres and have mice getting into our garage and some outer walls. The scorpions are really bad this time of year.
We have coyotes in our neighborhood so no mice problems from what I’ve been able to see. We used to have fruit rats that loved to climb my citrus trees and munch on the fruit but haven’t seen them in a few years too – probably due to the coyotes.
We live in the boonies with no close neighbors – we have coyotes galore *out there* and cats and miniature dachsunds in the yards by the houses (these dogs are real good mousers as well as other things). Despite this, we still have mice get in our houses on a regular basis. I keep a small box of poison pellets in an out of the way place in the kitchen at all times because of this. We had one running around in here just two weeks ago but he found the poison (we check to see if it’s being eaten) and he’s disappeared now. They can do so much damage if you don’t keep up with keeping them out of the house. We live in mobile homes so they aren’t even down on the ground. I don’t know how the mice run the gauntlet to even find a way into my house, but they do! We have owls, too, and chickens that run the yard. We have trouble with kittens making it to adulthood in the barn because the Dachsunds see them as “rats” when they are little. They don’t bother the grown cats at all. We haven’t seen a rat in years and years though. The cats go after those, too.
I assume the cakes would not work on spiders? Any ideas there? We get wolf and wood spiders (think Tarantulas only brown) ugh! I can handle most bugs but cannot stand waking up to these in my house so we are treated quaterly. Now that we have a lo crawling around it concerns me about the pesticides.
thanks!
We have a lot of spiders too. They run in the house at night when the door opens. Pesticides don’t work on them from what I’ve been told.
Spiders love cardboard, so getting rid of the cardboard boxes anywhere in the home really helps keep them at bay because if they do find their way in, they will find a way out with no cardboard to chew on.
Hi Sarah,
My family had to get rid of a bug infestation through a professional about a year ago. Could the chemicals still be present in the house?
Some of these chemicals do take awhile to break down. How long depends on the chemicals used. The soil half life for DDT for example is anywhere from a month or so to 30 years. Inside a home where there isn’t any rain, wind etc to breakdown the chemicals would require longer but that’s just a guess.
Hi Sarah,
The extermination was done inside the house (I know, horrible). The exterminator stated that the chemicals will be potent only for a few months. I hope the chemicals are not present in my house anymore.
Another great, natural product is Diatomaceous Earth. It’s food safe – you can actually use it to rid yourself of parasites and intestinal worms as well. It’s made of small ancient sea bed fossils that are ground up. They cut into the skeletons of bugs with exo-skeletons and then they dry out from dehydration. So, this is also a safe, kid friendly/safe option. You just have to put in on the areas where they come into your home – they simply need to walk through it and it will work. We purchased ours from an Indoor Growers shop – like where they sell lights and other equipment for growing plants inside, hydroponically – stuff like that.
This is a pretty good link that talks about DE and it’s benefits and uses.
What about fire ant nests near houses? Or wasp/hornet/bee (non-honeybee) nests near houses? I have no problem with these bugs as long as they aren’t by my house but, at least everywhere I’ve seen in TX, there are extreme problems with them living near houses since it’s usually cooler and less windy.
When I was a kid my grandmother used to pour boiling water down the fire ants nests. that seemed to work although it won’t deter them from building in the first place. We have wasp nests being built all the time on and around our home because it’s log and they like the wood. My husband just goes out at night and knocks them down when they’re quiet. And he tries to get to them before they get too big. It might just take vigilance to keep them away. And you can try those traps with nectar in them that trap the wasps once they enter. That seems to work in our yard too. We’re in upstate NY.