Ants?

Has anyone had any issues outdoor growing regarding ants? Grow bags were left on site for a few weeks before plants were viable for tp and I found a few bags of my soil had been infested with large ants, (the kind that build these huge Sandy dirt mounds). I'm not sure if they chose the soil to nest or If they are eating the amendments but they can't be good for roots. Anyone heard of this?

ol'StaggerLee23 said:

Has anyone had any issues outdoor growing regarding ants? Grow bags were left on site for a few weeks before plants were viable for tp and I found a few bags of my soil had been infested with large ants, (the kind that build these huge Sandy dirt mounds). I'm not sure if they chose the soil to nest or If they are eating the amendments but they can't be good for roots. Anyone heard of this?

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Just grab some Neem oil from home depot, lowe's and spray the soil and the ants, two hours later they DEAD!..

-Jugz

Awesome good to know. I discarded as much if the infested stuff as I could but I'll follow up with the neem. Tanks for the prompt response jugz

Lol I had a huge aquaponic dwc raft setup outdoors, (35,000 gal to be exact) and every now and again I would get fire ants building nests in 2" net cups...they would build trails from one whole to another on top of 2ft of water until 12 or more were connected. At first I was alarmed and thought just as you, "this can not be good", but after years of being used to seeing this I quickly noticed a huge difference In the health and vigorous growth from these plants that were chosen by the ants! So I'd watch and observe before dousing your plant with. Neem.

On the technical side I still to this day am not sure what they were doing, but at the very least puting holes near the roots allowing for more oxygen. Also ants carry bacteria that they make and cultivate in their burrows, so maybe the plant is being protected by the bacteria, much like worm casting bacteria?

That's a very interesting note buzz. Being that this is a guerilla patch I don't have much means to monitor plants anywho. So if my plants grow then no harm no foul! I'll follow up with a report once stretch and flowering occur and I'll know for sure if anything funny has happened