ants don’t like coffee grounds. The strong smell of coffee grounds, which contains caffeine and organic chemicals, can repel ants and other insects. The smell is similar to the pheromones that ants use to indicate food sources to their colony, so they may be drawn to the grounds and forage around them. The acids in coffee grounds can also damage an ant’s exoskeleton.
To repel ants, you can sprinkle coffee grounds around your garden or outside your home. You can also put bowls of grounds around outdoor seating areas to repel other pests like mosquitos, fruit flies, and beetles.
May I add a tip for apartments and homes? Roaches stay away from citrus scents! Put out peels in corners and under furniture to keep them out, but the peels need replacing when they dry out… unless the peels can be reconstituted in water regularly. I haven’t tried it because I eat enough oranges to keep my place decently free of bugs just by keeping the peels in the trash.
I grew up with 11 gardens on a city plot. I’d really enjoy that again. Would you prefer floral, vegetable, orchard, tropical, wild edible, or crystal fantasy?
I only asked because different types of plants need different types of soil and weather. We could section off parts of the land for hot and humid or dry, plants that need to be brought inside for the winter, etc.
What kinds? To you have pics? Some are quite beautiful. Others are dangerous, but cool. One I know of is very healing.
Imagine the apothecary room when we harvest it all! We’d have so much we could sell right here.
I have lions tail, Venus flytrap , tobacco seeds, sunflower seeds tomato seeds corn seeds string bean seeds corn seeds I recently bought over 50,000 seeds come to the bulk like that of wildflowers all mixed cuddlings and for pollinators. I got sage seeds I got basil seeds thyme seeds I usually look for exotic flowers and vegetables I always attempt to grow them
All I have at the moment is lettuce, but I have a north facing window- not good light- and an apartment- no land- in the high desert- too sandy for many plants. Worms for aeration are a rarity in this area. I’m not good at growing from seed, but I get cuttings to sprout roots fairly well.
Mom built a glass room for orchids in my youth. Indoors, we always had aloe vera, spider plants, moses in the cradle, and african violets. Mom tried to grow a jade and a burro’s tale, but over watered them.
One garden was mostly Iris out front- different shades, different scents. She tried to grow cantaloupe and honey dew one year, but visitors kept parking their cars on our fruit! Even when Mom made a stone barrier, people would drive into the edge of the garden.
There were two shade gardens. One did better than the other until I tried to fertilize it. Blush. I was young enough to think I was helping. One was stuff like calla lilies, lily of the valley, an attempt at gladiolas, and a fern that didn’t get enough water. The other was resurrection lilies, four o’clocks (too close to the house), a bleeding heart, an elephant burr (not by choice, but hard to eradicate!)… I can’t remember what else.
On one side of a privacy fence, Mom had hens and chickens, succulents, and flowering vines- mostly clymatis. The other side seemed like a separate garden- full of stinky plants to get rid of gophers and moles which ate the spring bulb garden to the north of the side door (hyacinths, daffodils, paper whites, grape hyacinths, tulips, crocus, wind flowers, spring beauties, mostly to cover the foundation and basement widow, and a virginia creeper to shade the side door until we found out it was poisonous and hid poison ivy). To the south of the side door, we had a sculpture garden- or an attempt at one. Mom never did trim the mini evergreen for it.
Then we had two vegetable gardens (corn, green beans, jerusalem artichoke, rhubarb, hops, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, potatoes, kohlrabi), a mini orchard that never bore fruit (apples, flowering plum, and pears), a strip of land for peonies and lilacs. The eleventh garden was bush florals- roses, quince, mock orange. We had space in there for cosmos. I tried to grow a red poppy once, but it didn’t get enough sunlight.
I don’t usually count the wildflower bed. It was at a different time from the rest. We had goldenrod and milkweed in there until the neighbor begged us to cut it down to spare her allergies.
Then there was the greenhouse for sprouting everything. One evening, I was watering plants. Mom called me for something I thought would only take a minute, but then she wouldn’t let me go back to close up the greenhouse because there was a storm coming. I’d tried to tell her I needed to finish out there, but she wouldn’t listen. We lost everything. She blamed me, of course, and never used the greenhouse again. The hops grew up the end of it with the fan and heater and destroyed the greenhouse after a while.
Oh so many plants! I can’t even remember what all we had! There was a silver mound- like a dusty miller, but softer, more lacy. There were sunburst locust trees, a redbud, dogwoods, a sugar maple, a blue spruce, fescue, buttercups, mums, crown vetch, daisies, …
Also remember that peonies attract ants. Four o’clocks attract spiders, which may help control all bugs (just don’t plant them close to the house if you don’t want spiders indoors). Marigolds around the perimeter of a garden repel bugs of many kinds.
I can rearrange and grow exotic plants I have seeds