Nothing "repels" them. The best you can do is hope to kill the ones that do manage to invade. Boric acid in the interior wall cavities at the time of the build is good permanent insurance. Boric acid mixed with sugar placed as bait stations will kill the ones who make it in, but the best thing is a tight barrier on your home's exterior. Check your caulking at all windows and doors, and between the sill and foundation. The first line of defense is to not allow them access in the first place.

Try putting a line of cinnamon where they come in.

I don't think it's organic but we use "AMDRO Ant Block" with great success. You sprinkle the pellets around your foundation outside. Within a day or two the ants are gone. It works because they think it's food and they take it back to the Queen. Once she's gone they all die.

It doesn't keep them away forever. A new colony can start up, but I just apply the Ant Block again, and they are gone. Maybe 2 or 3 times a year.

I have read they strongly dislike peppermint and back when I used to be ambitious, I used to mix some into the counter-cleaner we used.

Diatomaceous earth (DE) is also all natural and kills bugs that walk through it, it does something to their exoskeletens. We used that instead of boric acid inside all of the wall joints during construction because I was concerned that boric acid wasn't quite 100 percent safe. Food grade DE is so natural that we actually feed it to our dogs as a dewormer and I've heard of people taking it to prevent against internal parasites.

I use DE around the foundation near the kitchen. I found a line of ants heading inside. The next day they had vacated the area.

A dilute solution of vinegar wiped over the counters/areas you find will also confuse the scout ants.

I second boric acid. Having no exoskeletons it's harmless to us. Not so much for the little buggers. "organically".

But truthfully, I learned years ago about dealing with ants, that the best is not to let a trail get started at all. Once it does start, clean it up (="them up") from the source back up the trail, that way you contain the scouts from fleeing. If you start to wipe them away from their source and not the foodsource, they scatter and you have an ongoing problem. Instead, be vigilant about finding the foodsource for all ant runs and clean it up thoroughly, catching as many stray scouts as possible. You will find remarkably soon that you can get this ant situation under control this way. The key is not to let any scouts escape!

I still don't understand this: years ago I had an ant trail following my fridge electrical cord from the wall to the appliance and straight on into the freezer. They all marched into that freezer and died in ever-ascending drifts. I have pictures (somewhere) to prove it. It's the most non-Darwinian thing I've ever seen.

Go figure.

It's not usually like this, fortunately.

I used to use peppermint oil around my front door where they came in. It smelled nice, and I think it worked!

Forgot another "organic" repellant: tanglefoot. In really bad years we've resorted to tangle-footing the house. That's the really sticky goop you can protect trees with by painting a ring of goop that the ants can't cross around it. In concert with the wipe-up method I outlined above, we've found tanglefoot and judicious clean-up keeps everyone's houses separate. The tanglefoot helps to stop trails from forming, but once they find a reason to cross it, they'll just kamikaze their way over the dead bodies of their fellow colonists.

Note that we don't paint a circle around the whole house! Just use it to discourage forays in certain recently-fruitful directions. (i.e., clean up trail back outside of the house. (Try to) make sure there are no errant scouts. Plug that access with tanglefoot. rinse. repeat.

homey_bird, a little caution: We had small ants, what we refer to as sugar ants. Then I noticed they were a little larger but didn't immediately figure it out. When they started showing up in another room,I realized they weren't sugar ants. I called an exterminator and sure enough the larger ones were carpenter ants. There are some great natural based methods the exterminator uses these days.

My grandmother told me to sprinkle cayenne pepper or cinnamon around the area where we saw them (which was our garbage under the sink at the time). We only had a few, but didn't want it to turn into a big problem, and we had young kids at the time and didn't want anything toxic. We sprinkled cayenne pepper around and after a week or so we didn't see any more, so it seemed to work. HTH!

OP: You mentioned that they help your edible garden? Are they eating aphids or other bad bugs? The ants I have EAT my edible garden.... so they had to be sacrificed.

I didn't get ants in my kitchen, but I had terrible red ants all over my yard. (Aside from eating good plants, they bite painfully... and rumor is it could hurt my doggies!) I had all of spring and summer this year to try every organic suggestion for battling them. Without any successes, I then had to move on to inorganic options. Like barb above, I ended up successfully using Amdro Ant Block, after the myriad of products failed. As stated, this is a last resort method, not organic and only for OUTSIDE.

If you can pinpoint their point of entry, try Diatomaceous earth, as others suggested. Although organic, I don't like the idea of sprinkling it indoors (asthma.)

Good luck.

My yard is full of ants and we get strays indoors. If they stay out of the food and don't organize, they're okay with me. Every once in a while we get a line of 'em and I'll follow the line and nail it with ant poison where they're entering the house. My ants aren't harmful (except for the occasional aphid tending) so I let them be. I don't want to kill the entire colony either.

I've lived with imported fire ants though, and showed them no mercy. They won anyway.

(As an aside, don't believe exterminators without double checking the creature. Challenge any termite inspector to produce a termite. And keep in mind that most exterminators don't bother to differentiate between, for an example from one of my previous home sales, carpenter ants and leaf-cutter ants.)

I used to use non-toxic mint spray for bugs (yellow can), on the foragers, and if i missed them, then Terro (pre-mixed boric acid and syrup baits) on the lines of ants. Ants have memory, though, so the terro would only work on a colony once in any given year. So, much better to put out two baits at once, so that they can hit the entire colony, hopefully get the queen.

Can't find the mint spray anymore, so now i use listerine. It doesn't work as long, but its non-toxic, and minty fresh!

Find the hole through which they're coming, then take a piece of regular chalk and draw a circle around the hole. Make sure there are no breaks in the line of chalk. My neighbor told me about this when we had them coming in through a couple cracks in the underside of the upper cabinets. I thought it sounded like an old wive's tale, but tried it and it worked perfectly. Apparently they don't like to get chalk on their little feet (I presume.)

I read this morning that you can use grits. They expand when the ants eat them and kill those ants, but the others will learn and stay away -- something between a repellent and killing the whole colony. Same article suggested dried peppermint or spearmint around the outside areas where they try to come into the house.

Ants in your house are porbably not the same ants that are in your garden. They would be nesting outside. If you have sugar ants, do you have a cement slab foundation? That can be a real problem.

Ants in the garden are necessary, if you want your peonies to bloom. Don't know about the other plants...

I second the chalk - they rear up and won't touch it.

But if I were you I'd get rid of the colony by using Terro baits.

FYI, while boric acid is a great and relatively safe way to get rid of ants and roaches, it is moderately toxic to humans and animals so exposure should be avoided.

Aliris, I thought I was the only one that had ants in the freezer! It's happened 4 or 5 summers in a row, and there have been PILES of them in there. I get a bit obsessive about cleaning in the summer, to try to keep those buggers out, but really, if they're coming into the freezer, there's only so much you can do.