PTmowerMech
Lawn Addict
- Joined
- Apr 16, 2018
- Threads
- 424
- Messages
- 3,245
I have a way different problem - The Russian Cat Lady behind me...
She moved in with 12 adult feral cats and released them into the neighborhood.
Several years later and an average of 20 new kittens a year - just in her yard - , and well, do the math...
These awful animals have absolutely Killed Every lizard, toad, frog, creepy crawling things, for miles in all directions..
Sometimes, they will find a lizard, bite its head off, skin it, and eat it on my front porch concrete, leaving me the bloody, stained, concrete to deal with... I hate cats... Watched them for years now and all I can say they do is find Anything that moves, and go kill it... I have not seen them do anything else...
I have no more birds, no more bird nests in the trees, it has been like Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" for years now..
So now, I have no predators for a Zillion Ants, and sometimes some Cockroaches..
Have tried all kinds of ant baits, none of these things work very well..
Ants out here are "farmer ants" - they literally move zillions of mites, aphids, scales, all the leaf sucking insects into all my planted -Anything- including Maple Trees, and they then harvest all the poop from these leaf sucking insects for their whatever they put in their sandwiches with...
Some ants got wise to me killing their "cows" so now they just go up into my trees and suck the fluids out of all the newest leaves, flower buds, etc., themselves, since I removed their cows with Bayer insecticide control sprays...
It is a never ending battle... All because of the Russian Cat Lady.. Sometimes, I see gangs of cats crossing the freeway early in the morning, coming from all the acres of farmland around me, going back to the Russian Cat Lady's house behind me... Yes, I followed them, and that is where they went, and go, every day...
She keeps her back sliding door open 24/7 so they can come and go as they please...
I feel sorry for the man that owns that house and rented it to her...
I have found a really good place that sells those "professional" sprays, etc., that the people like terminix, etc., use to jack all the homeowners $$$ when they come in their little white trucks..
The website is domyown.com. If you're going to spray, at least use something that really works and lasts, and should cost less if you do it and not pay some guy $$ a year to do the same thing..
I have been using a product called - Suspend - to try to get a handle on the zillion aphids, etc., that the ant farmers place way up there in some of my shrubs, etc,..
It is totally odorless and kills on contact but also leaves a microscopic layer everywhere that the ants will walk on, get on their bodies, take back to the nest, and spread it around and kill more ants this way...
Tried all their ant baits, some worked temporarily, but take days, weeks, if the ants decide they really want to take the bait... Ants are way smarter and sometimes only want sugar and other time they want protein... Hard to read their minds,, you think??
So now, I am just literally "Suspend"/ing them from a lot of my growing things...
Once I had a small invasions of these smaller roaches coming into my garage at night or very early morning..
I sprayed Suspend in a wide swath outside the garage door, and inside the garage on the floor, and several days after, I found lots of dead roaches in the garage..
Eventually, they all stopped coming in...
These products = the same the pro's use... Just do it yourself if you want..
I would much rather have it back to the Natural way = predators for everything = keeping Nature's friends in Balance... But I cannot have it because of the army of feral cats who again, kill Everything that moves, in my yard, in everyone's yards, for miles around... Cats breed 5 kittens each time... I hate to do the math, it is so depressing..
Once, the totally irresponsible Russian Cat Lady came to my front door to complain that everytime I threw something at the back fence, it scared the 15-20 little new crop of cat predator killers in her yard...
I told her what she alone was doing so irresponsibly to the entire neighborhood of thousands of houses out here and she just did not understand... Guess she was bad at math in school or something...
Have called Animal Control, they have no power over all the Laws written that protect cats, no doubt written by many, Russian Cat Ladies, etc., people who hoard them or whatever...
Dogs, might work but the cats run along the top 2x4 fence boards and never drop down into the yard if they see the dog sees them... Cats can easily jump over a 6 foot high fence without touching it... Probably even higher if they are scared or threatened.. Dogs= not that good..
Borax = comes from Boron, California, close to the Palm Desert, way down there... Really hot weather...
Aphids are an easy fix. Dawn dish soap & water in a pump up bug sprayer. Spray what ever you want, as much as you want with it. It'll kill the aphids.
