I read on a different website that someone recommended for the ant problem use 1/2 borax, 1/2 sugar and the ants would drag that back to their colony and would kill them without the pesticides. He also mentioned that some people even used aspertame (artificial sugar) to kill them. Might be worth a shot. Hopefully your cat wouldn't take a liking to it though.

Ilene - welcome to the forum, and you have brought lots of good ideas! I like the sheer curtains idea, but for another reason. I raise butterflies, and I could use them to "sleeve" my caterpillars on the plants. I may need to double them over to keep the wasps from being able to kill my babies, but that's okay, too. I bet they are really cheap at the Dollar Store, too.

Unfortunately, I don't grow many veggies, except a couple of tomato plants for the hornworms I like to raise! Yes, read my thread on them if you get a chance.

I'm getting close to 60 - at 58. But, in gardening, you're always young enough to learn something new!

Susan

Hi Ilene,

Welcome to the Oklahoma Gardening Forum. Thanks for sharing your ideas. I think you will find us to be a friendly, congenial group. :)

SOIL, PH, ORGANIC MATERIAL:

With regards to your question about soil pH, have you ever had your soil tested? If you have had a soil test and know the pH of your soil, then working to raise the pH is a fairly simple thing.

If you haven't had a soil test, you might be wasting your time and money adding amendments that are not precisely what you need.

For example, the soil in my county averages out at a pH of 5.9, but my soil stays closer to 7.0. So, I base my soil amendments on what I know is going on with my soil. If I had tried to amend my soil based on the average for my county, though, I could have created additional problems for myself.

When you have a soil test done, they will tell what amendments to add and at what rate to apply them. For a home gardener, they usually tell you how much to add for how many square feet of garden or lawn space. For a commercial grower, they will express it in how many pounds (or whatever) to add per acre.

If your tomato crop was fine 2 years ago but did not do all that well last year, it is probably more related to the drought than to your soil. On the other hand, if your tomato crop yield has been less and less each year for a few years, then you probably have some sort of deficiency in your soil. Last year was a very hard year for home vegetable gardeners and their tomatoes, not just in Oklahoma, but in many parts of the country.

I have the hard, red clay soil that dries and cracks badly in the heat and then turns into sticky, mucky stuff when it rains. I have been working to improve this soil since moving here in 1999.

Over the course of the years, I have added the following at various times: compost (every year), greensand and lava sand, composted cow manure (both from local cows and from bags purchased at Lowe's), lime, fireplace ashes, shredded leaves, grass clippings (added as mulch to top of beds where it eventually decomposes and enriches the soil), old half-decomposed hay and/or straw, composted chicken manure from my own chickens, peat moss, rabbit manure (both purchased commercially in bags and our own rabbit manure composted here in our pile), leaf mold, bone meal, blood meal and finely shredded bark mulch.

Yes, I have seen great improvement in the soil and in the yield of my garden crops. It is a long, continuing process that will never end. Having said that, I don't have to do nearly as much amending as I used to.

The absolute most important thing you can do for your soil is to give it lots and lots of organic material. Soil that has a good amount of organic material usually doesn't have pH problems.

Many of the Oklahoma soils that have pH problems are commercially farmed soils that have been farmed for years and years. Every year, the crop that is planted removes some of the cations (nutrients) from the soil. Every year the amount of organic material in the soil will decrease naturally as those cations are used up. Soil that is plowed or tilled repeatedly will lose organic material at a quicker rate than soil that is not plowed/tilled. The combination of using up the cations quickly, not adding much if any organic material back to the soil, and continual plowing/tilling are part of the reasons that agricultural soil tests at a lower and lower pH over time.

When the state does the soil tests for each county that they use to track soil fertility, including pH, I believe they do NOT include samples taken from residential lawns and gardens in the county-wide and state-wide averages that they prepare. The reason is that residential lawns and gardens are maintained differently from the commercially cropped areas, and the main goal of the county-wide and state-wide averages is to let commercial growers know what they need to do to their county's soil to keep it in good shape for commercial crops.

ANTS:

Ants can be annoying, but I try to tolerate them as I think every insect has a role to fulfill in the food chain.

One method of getting the ants to go away is to spray the ground with a mixture of water and peppermint soap or peppermint essential oils.

I use Dr. Bronner's pepppermint castille soap which I buy at a health food store. I add a tablespoon or two to a sprayer full of water, mix it up, and spray the ground where the ants are. The ants don't like the scent of the peppermint so they pack up and move away. I especially like to use this to change the path they follow as they travel around the yard. For example, for a while the big red ants liked to follow a path that led them right by the outside water faucet. If I happed to stop near that faucer to turn the water on or off or to hook up a hose, the red ants were pretty quick to climb up on me and sting me. One spraying of the soap solution made them change their path.

TOMATOES: Sometime, when you are't too busy, post us your list of tomato varieties that you are growing this year. I grow mostly heirloom, open-pollinated ones too, and raise my own from seed. This year I have 95 varieties. Of those, about 80 different varieties and 120 plants are already in the ground. We were just talking about Darrell Merrell, the tomato man, the other day. It is our understanding that he is ill and that his daughters are now running the business.

I don't know of a specific list that details which kinds of plants prefer acidic soil over alkaline or neutral soil or vice versa, although I suspect such lists could be found by googling.

Dawn

For me, myself, and I, diversion has turned out to be the best method. I use pieces of bread, cookies, sugar, a puddle (very small) of soda, whatever. If I'm working in the yard, they will track to the food source and leave me alone!

Susan

Susan,

I like the idea of diversion, but am afraid if I did that, all the ants in Love County would come here for the food.

All winter long I fed the deer and the rabbits. Basically, I was diverting them from eating my shrubs, groundcovers and perennials by giving them deer corn, cracked corn and hen scratch.

Every week I had more and more deer and rabbits and I just kept feeding them. Finally, the deer quit coming in mid-March. The rabbits are still here. The problem is that this healthy crop of fat cottontails is now attracting a huge number of coyotes and other predators to our yard. What an unintended consquence that has turned out to be!

Dawn