Steve's World Blog Information and articles on cities, towns and villages around the world.

Around this time very year in Spain we seem to get inundated with ants, tiny ones, normal ones, huge ones, they are everywhere, in the house, in the garden, crawling over our plants and fruit trees, crawling over us! This week I decided to try to find a good way to get rid of ants, preferably without killing them, as I am not that sort of chap. I wanted to know if there was a natural product that would deter ants, Doing a quick search on the internet found all sorts of wild and wacky ideas, but the most commonly occurring suggested cider vinegar, chalk, mint, cinnamon and talcum powder. Great so off we go, plenty of vinegar in the cupboard (well its white wine vinegar but the ants won’t notice!), so find some ants to get rid of and give tham vinegar. Well I have to tell you my ants must be different from other peoples ants because they were drinking the vinegar and coming back for more (maybe they died later who knows). I moved on to chalk (they won’t cross a chalk line), blimey my little blighters were running all over it, they seemed to think it was the finishing line for some high speed race, try cinnamon then – they took no notice. What next? Blow it give em a kettle of boiling water, haven’t seem the damn things since.