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Spiders are friends. I leave them alone when at all possible – including going out of my way to do so.
Leggybois (centipedes) are gross, but they take care of much grosser things, so I am happy to let them live, as well.
Borax and diatomaceous earth are good low toxic solutions for ants, just be sure that it’s not where pets can eat it, can be harmful to them as well.
Had rodents in the garage several years back, figured out where they were coming in, blocked that and then some snap traps took care of the few still inside. Not that big on killing wildlife, but rodents inside or eating the garden have to go. The mess they can make inside is pretty awful.
Not pests as such, but for some reason, our urban neighborhood now has wild turkeys. They like to hang out under the neighbor’s orange tree, typically four or five at a time. Occasionally have to wait for them to get out of the street on my commute.
The worst to me are roaches, I can’t stand them! (I can still kill em though) I don’t mind spiders as much, they still freak me out though. I hate ants, they are more just very annoying than freaky. Outside of insects, snakes really scare me; can’t stand rodents either. Pest control is necessary especially in the south. Used to do it on my own; now just have a service and it is SO nice hardly ever seeing any bugs. It takes care of everything too. I don’t feel bad one bit about killing insects & rodents; they really can be health hazards
Down here in south Texas we tend to get a LOT of scorpions, basically spraying all around the house every few months to keep everything out as best as we can and they still show up here n there, granted they’re dying but they’re just so numerous… I’m just just glad we don’t see too many of those really big red and yellow centipedes! I generally love all living things but scorpions and those particular centipedes can all BURN as far as I’m concerned!
David, you said you moved into the house recently, and I’m guessing that means you bought the house recently and probably had it tented for termites. It’s quite common for ants to invade after a house is tented. Also, it’s heat time in SoCal when ants are most active so none of this is a surprise.
Ugh. Roaches. What hell.
After nearly a decade of blissfully pest-free living in my concrete box in the sky (an apartment 60 feet up in an old industrial building), I got a neighbor who had a fraught relationship with garbage. Apparently hauling it half a block to the property’s dumpsters was too taxing for them, so they started filling the mailroom trash with their soggy Hefty sacks. Management’s response? Take away the mailroom bin. Then my neighbor countered by just hoarding the waste. For about a year. Right next to me.
I’m often away for long periods, so my introduction to my new roommates came when I returned and ran the faucets to fill the J-traps that had gone dry in my absence. When I did this at the kitchen sink, a very large roach rocketed out of the drain and onto my button-down shirt, scampering to get inside. I prevented this with a great deal of jumping, swearing and swatting, but it was just the opening salvo of an ongoing war.
Why was I suddenly plagued by these things? I don’t leave food out, I’m crazy vigilant about my own garbage (trimmings get frozen to make stock and potentially stinky waste gets sealed in empty zip-to-close packaging I’m throwing out anyway), so what made these bugs move over to my place?
Simple: The neighbor got evicted and the roaches had to branch out in search of sustenance.
I dove deep into my pantry and found that most everything not sealed in glass or heavy plastic had been compromised. I tossed all that but they kept coming. Dinnertime became a race against their nocturnal habits: Imagine glancing at the next ingredient on deck in your mise en place and seeing a roach scuttling up to it. This is where I’d insert a GIF of Newt from Aliens saying “…they mostly come out at night… mostly.” Leftovers had to be immediately refrigerated; dishes rinsed right away. I put out roach bait. I made the weatherstripping on my front door airtight. But they were still getting in. How? This building has cast concrete walls about a foot thick.
THEY USE THE ELECTRICAL CONDUITS. Those tubes are like a cockroach superhighway. I made this cheery discovery when my vacuum blew a breaker on a circuit that had never done that. Before resetting it, I took a look and found… evidence… that they’d been in there quite a bit. And in the kitchen outlets. Especially there.
Two rounds of spraying by management’s pest control guy diminished the problem but didn’t fix it. What has worked is a bait paste called Advion that I used to essentially caulk the electrical outlets’ cover plates. After running heavy beads of that stuff along ALL the outlets’ edges, I’ve seen far fewer six-legged intruders.
So yeah, if you’ve got roaches, try that stuff.
LA resident here for 30+ years. Only had a couple of mice in my house in all that time, one I finally chased out the front door and the other unfortunately ended up in a trap. Every once in a while (once a decade-ish?) there’ll be a particularly ‘anty’ summer, but since the last one, I put food scraps, etc… outside immediately, instead of into the kitchen trash. We do get the occassional spider, cetipede thingy, silverfish thingy, etc… but they’re blissfully rare. Never any bedbugs either thank Glob. One of the two brown recluse spider bites I’ve had in my life did happen in my own yard while clearing ivy, so there’s that. Took months and a few rounds of antibiotics to heal. We also have lots of small lizards here in the ivy, and I don’t mind them… one did get in the house years ago and my dog chased it into a corner, where it dropped its tail and ran a couple more feet and froze… I picked it up and put it outside and then tried to keep my dog from eating the still-thrashing tail.
There are plenty of birds of prey (hawks and owls), coyotes, and bats (mostly around dusk) to help keep the rodents/bugs in control, but there’s no ending it of course… you can only do what can be done.
I gleefully kill mice. They do so much damage. They kill the lawn over the winter, they piss and shit on everything if they manage to get in your car, and if they don’t they may very well eat your wiring. Not only do I have no conscience about using kill traps and poison, I have been known to chase them around the yard with the mower when I scare them out of a hole while mowing. I’m sure my neighbors enjoy the show. 🙂
I’m less gleeful about killing spiders since I know they’re generally beneficial, but they also freak me out to an irrational degree and their webs are super annoying.
You all are making me feel a lot better about my rodent problem in the garage. I made a bucket trap but it hasn’t caught anything so I’ll have to come up with something else. I’m more dreading having to clean everything in the garage. It’s like the rodents are just constantly leaking from both ends. If they could just decide to have a little corner for their business, I’d be a lot less bothered by them.
For anyone with a mouse/rat problem I’d recommend just getting a cat. Even if they don’t kill many, just the smell of cat around the place will usually be enough to put them off.
The thing is, I live in a very modern building, so mice wouldn’t be a problem, except that my cat sometimes brings his kills back with him, and he doesn’t always do a great job of killing them. It’s also not much fun stepping in mouse guts when you get up in the morning.
Agreed. Don’t waste your time on barely working human fixes for the situation. Nature had millions of years to perfect the perfect killing machine. Get a cat.
I’ll add, when my mum was a kid, her mum didn’t feed their family cat, because it was expected to feed itself by doing it’s job of killing rats and mice. They still loved it as a pet, but it was very much a working animal.
Fun story: a few years ago we bought a real Christmas tree and set it up, everything looked perfect and everyone was in the holiday spirit until 3am, when our cat decided to evict the mouse that had somehow managed to stay hidden in the tree all the way up the stairs to our 3rd floor apartment (and throughout the decorating of said tee.) That was a lot of crashing, meowing and broken baubles to clear up in the middle of the night.
A couple of hours later the cat felt the need to place the freshly dispatched (and partially dismembered) mouse on my pillow, about an inch away from my nose.
I got these little freaking gnats that have been coming out every afternoon when I’m trying to enjoy a post work back porch beer. They’re annoying as hell and could give two shits about the Deep Woods Off I just doused myself in.
We had gnats like those last year in the house and got a product called Mosquito Bits and put it in all my wife’s indoor plants to attack the larvae; it takes a while but eventually got rid of them…they were so damn annoying! That may help
Worst infestation we had was bats in the attic. Was great for mosquito control in the yard, not so great for the guano. Took forever and thousands of dollars to get rid of. And I learned bats are protected in my state for like 3 months out of the year.
Borax based ant killer is the best! It takes a while but it hasn’t failed me yet.
Now take it a few steps further and proactively treat your house for bugs, ESPECIALLY kitchens and bathrooms. A half and half mix of food grade diatomaceous earth and borax (or boric acid) lightly wafted in crevices, behind counters, under cabinets, in carpets, etc is a very cheap, non toxic way to deal with roaches, ants, silverfish, fleas, etc. Its also good first line of defense for the garage floor as roaches tend to sneak in at night under the garage door and from there have access to the house.
I used to live in a tiny ranch house on a concrete slab, the ants were unbeatable until I got some BASF Advance 375A. I had tried everything the Borax traps, straight up mule team and powdered sugar, professional pest control sprayers…
Small granules, spent time outside figuring out where the ants were coming in and set out small pile of it (less than a teaspoon) replenished it daily, and within a month I had managed to destroy the ant colony that was infesting my house and yard. The trick was to find their marching routes and put it directly in their path. They immediately seized it as (what Imagine) super food and hauled it back to the nest.
Glad you found something that worked.
I live in an old stone farmhouse on fourish acres that has a fairly large natural marshland on it. With that comes critters of all types. I had to hired a pest control company to keep things under some semblance of control. At first, I felt some kind of way about the mice but there is something to be said about not having to worry about them.
Between the ants, hornets, wasps and mosquitos, it was a necessity. Hiring that pest control company was a great decision.
In my experience all it takes is one rat issue to stop feeling sorry for killing rodents. War crimes are the only way to win against them and after that you’ll be a changed person.
We’ve got the occasional bugs that’s typical in the south but the real infestation are the ducks. SO. MANY. DUCKS!!! They’re muscovy ducks (look like Darth Maul) and since they’re an invasive species we’re not allowed to humanely relocate them. We can kill them but the neighborhood doesn’t have the stomach for that. They used to be down by the pond and that was cool but my neighbors started feeding them in their backyard so now I’ve got a dozen or 2 in my yard on any given day, shitting all over the driveway and sidewalk and front porch and eating all my grass down to the roots and killing it. Occasionally they lay eggs in our flower beds too which quickly brings fire ants.
Seriously, anybody want some ducks? You can’t release them in the US but legally you can make all the soup and gumbo and bbq you want!