Tag Archives: Eight bug spray

September 19, 2020 · 12:21 pm

A Beautiful Day for Murdering Fire Ants

Orkin

I just hosed down our raised bed square foot garden with EIGHT, a wonderful spray that kills ants and other bugs, but is safe for our animals and plants. I will do it over and over again before finishing my harvest of our onions, since the minute I pull out a weed or onion, they swarm all over the place. :0(

The clean up of the garden will be a many-step-many-day enterprise.

  • I will harvest the onions first, armed with more EIGHT spray, if needed.
  • Then I’ll pull the dead plants and weeds.
  • I will mix a BUNCH of fresh Mel’s Mix and keep making and distributing more until all six planter boxes are full to the brim.
  • I will replace broken boards that hold the hoses and sprinklers, plus run wire criss-cross fashion to delineate square feet in one box that needs it.
  • Finally, I will cover each planter with a tarp, probably holding them with bungie cords.

Hopefully, this will result in nice, fresh, happy planter boxes without a lot of weed growth to welcome my spring efforts to get my garden planted.

My 2-gallon sprayer seems to be giving out, though, so we have it on Monday’s list to get a replacement at our local hardware store.

It’s a really lovely day to be murdering fire ants!. :0)

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August 7, 2019 · 10:06 am

“No Good Deed Goes Unpunished”

Gardeners Path

This quote by Clare Booth Luce is said fairly often around here.  So many things that should be good things seem to backfire or cause us harm.

The latest was yesterday when I was working in our square foot garden.

I’ve been feeling guilty because I haven’t been taking care of things out there as well as I would like to, so I made a special effort to put in some time, pruning dead leaves off our zucchini plants. I lifted one last plant up to get to some dead stuff and was suddenly covered with fire ants.

I rapidly brushed them off my arm, pulling off my weeding gloves and getting away from the source as quickly as possible, but ONE got me.

I rushed inside, took two Benedryl tablets, washed the bite and slathered Benedryl ointment on it. It still swelled up, but not as badly as I have in the past. I DO learn from mistakes….

Priority on today’s list is murdering fire ants. I don’t care if they perform some wonderful service to us. I want them gone. I will mix up some EIGHT spray and hose down the whole garden area, plus any ant hills I find, plus our tomato planters today.  The EIGHT is really good at killing bugs, but is safe to spray on veggies and other plants and won’t harm our pets. I can’t say enough about this product.

 

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August 5, 2016 · 5:22 pm

Eight

8

We have been staring at our tomato plants in an effort to find the caterpillars that are eating them. We stare and stare and – if we’re lucky – we find ONE of the big, fat green gloriously camouflaged critters and squash them.

Today at Lunch Bunch, my friend Kay told us about a product she and her husband use on their garden. “Eight.” She said you mix it with water and spray your plants. Usually, you only have to do it once for the season. She hasn’t had ANY pests eating her plants.

Assuming it cools off this evening – right now the actual temperature is 108 with a heat index of 113 – we’ll mix up a batch and spray everything. The man at the co-op said it was safe to use around our pets, and that it wouldn’t harm humans, either.

We’re keeping our fingers crossed that it works!

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