— Marching of the ANTs —

The ants have brought me misery in their march through the greenhouse, I the little red ants is all that’s left, and they are crippling the many plants that bare fruit, and also the blight. I don’t know what the ants do to the plant, are they the carrier of the blight virus.

I would rather repel them than kill them, but I spray what they hate, and when it evaporates the ants are back, and the fruit shrivels up… Zucchini shrivels up, so when I grow them in the pot it develops powdery mildew and never produces fruit… going on the 2nd year with them.

Spaghetti Squash does the same thing, but I see ants crawling all over it, but I see the fruit slowly showing up so bright with hopes, and slowly it shrivels up, to be no more.

The Goji berries hasn’t produced one berry in 2 years since I started this project, but the peppers and jalapeno peppers, started off good, but for the last few weeks the ants are attacking it. I bought the ant bait, but I squirted some on the floor, and the ants traveled through it, and didn’t even notice it.

So I started making oregano oil, with different carrier oils, I get’s close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the greenhouse so it’s slowly cooking the oils. I just picked rosemary, I like the scent of the rosemary, I’m going to try the cold press machine, to see if I get any oil out of it.

But what comes out of the cold press, I’ll infuse with carrier oils and leave it cooking with the carrier oils in the greenhouse, the herbs and spices seem to be not bothered by the ants. So I’m thinking, I’ll just grow herbs, and spices… though I like romaine lettuce, but I tried to grow that in the greenhouse, and the ants liked to farm aphids, that with the red kale which I had to throw out of the greenhouse.

The ants killed me and my motivation to grow things… perhaps next year will be better… I managed to get 2 ears of corn, I should’ve picked them earlier, cause the kernels go flat like indian corn cobs, there was 6 ears of corn that I let the kernels shrink to flatness, cause I picked them late, I needed to pick them a few weeks earlier. The ants attacked them too. It seems the ants have that effect on every plant they attack, they don’t kill it, they just make it work harder to produce fruit, or even kill the fruit.

Farming is work to the max… I need more time to be successful at it. Just take away the drumbeats of the ants… if they go away,  then there is one more pest to be free of.