Problems!

You guys, things are going wrong. Some of my plants are dying! Something is eating the others! Also the ants got back into my house, and I accidentally got boiling vinegar smell up my nose and allow me to tell you: it is not pleasant.

The talcum powder defence has failed.

I'm beginning to learn that there are three main issues with this house.

1. the soil in the garden beds sucks
2. the neighbourhood cats love to fight outside my window (and, possibly, dig up my garden?)
3. it is plagued with ants

The first has been the most inexplicable to me - when I had my first "putting the garden in" session (which involved convincing my garden-skilled parents to come by and help out!) we noticed that the existing soil in the garden beds was intensely dry and very sandy. There do seem to be a few plants that love sandy soil, and I suspect by how it's flourishing that artichokes are one of those, but for the most part the things I want to grow need a little more than that. We dug in a few bags of potting soil and for the most part things have gone alright, but one of the garden beds seems to be cursed (or maybe just got less soil improvement than the others).

The first four green bean plants I grew in it all died before the plants were more than about fifteen centimetres tall. The fifth and sixth have flowered and grown a handful of beans, but I noticed recently that they look like they're about to follow their predecessors - a few of the bottom leaves have shrivelled up, and a number of the others are turning very yellow. The marigold in that garden bed is also looking very sad: the leaves are all drooping and it has the least flowers of the four marigolds I planted throughout the beds. The three other plants - two in other beds and one less than a metre away in the same bed are all looking great, though.

Why are my plants dying?

The second problem has just been plain weird. While I can assume it's slugs and crickets eating those pesky holes in my poor plants' leaves, I've barely had any actual fruit eaten (a few holes in some strawberries but that's almost expected). But I've seen a number of times that the dirt is disturbed as if something has been digging, and when we moved in we did find a lot of fossilised cat feces (in the bed where everything is dying: coincidence?!). There are a few neighbourhood cats that like to hang out around the house - on one of my first days here one of them cosied up to the screen door looking for some attention, we frequently catch them sunning themselves on the little brick courtyard out front, and I've woken up a number of times to them fighting each other under my window. 

I wouldn't be surprised if it was those same cats digging up the garden to use as a bathroom. I've heard that cats don't like citrus so I might grab some oranges and see if I can keep them away. I have also seen rabbits in the neighbourhood, although I haven't spotted any close to home. If that's what's sneaking in and causing problems I'm not sure what I can do, though!

Also something ate the tops of a row of my carrots!

The ants thing has really bothered me the most, though, I have to admit. All the other problems can be shut outside when I don't want to deal with them but the ants are bringing the fight to me. I don't know if it's something to do with the way the house faces, if there are nests in certain places or if, as I'm starting to wonder, they're somehow living inside my freaking walls. Because let me tell you I have had an inordinate amount of trouble with ants - in one half of the house. One half, on the left of the front corridor, has not seen a single ant despite some of our occasional lazier habits of leaving ice cream wrappers or empty glasses in the rooms for a day or two before cleaning them up. The other half, however, is never ant free. 

One night, after an especially long shift closing up at work, I arrived home to a complete nightmare. It was midnight and I was tired: I tossed my work clothes aside and reached for the basket of clean laundry sitting beside the bed. Ants swarmed up my arm almost immediately. I guess it was my fault for leaving the basket with one handle touching the wall near the window, because apparently this was all the invitation the ants needed to move right on in. To add to the excitement this happened only a few days after we moved in, and before we had either a washing machine or a vacuum cleaner. The basket of laundry ended up in the tub covered with fly spray, and a spare towel was laid down over the ant graveyard that my bedroom carpet had become. I bought a vacuum cleaner the very next day but my problem with ants has never subsided. It is a war fought daily and with no end in sight!

The more-or-less daily sight of an ant trail through my bathroom.

The kitchen and bathroom are on the same side of the house as my bedroom, and both also suffer for it. While it's probably for the best that it encourages a tidy kitchen, it's irritating to dodge ant trails on morning bathroom trips. They do convene in places that make sense - the sink and shower, where the water is - but not exclusively by a long shot. There are usually ants on the floor near the window, on the tiles near the sliding door (as you can see above) and on, well, all of the walls. The trails are occasionally easy to follow, and most of the time those come in the windows, but often the little groups of ants are simply inexplicably there.

I'm reaching the end of my ant-handling rope. I've had ants swarm a plate that I sat on my bedside table for half an hour while my partner and I attempted to have a cosy Valentine's dinner in bed while watching a movie. I've ingested ants that I didn't know how infiltrated my glass of water (I don't even drink from a glass any more - only bottles that I can close). I've found ants on my purse and name tag because they decided to hang out in my handbag. I'm ready to try anything, at this point, is what I'm saying.

Ant graveyard: I've cleaned up more of these than I can count.

At this point I've tried enough that I could write an entire post reviewing the anti-ant measures I've found online. Baking powder traps, talc perimeters, peppermint-oil window dressing... so far the only thing that is guaranteed to stop the ants are the cans of fly spray that live in every room on the ant side of the house, but I'd really rather move away from spraying chemicals all over the place every time something crawls into sight. I am declaring war on the ants and taking back my house!

Oh, and the vinegar smell? My pickles are nearly ready to be sealed up (I can't believe I'm meant to leave them a month before I get to eat any?!) but I still haven't gotten the hang of boiling vinegar without assaulting myself with it. I'm not sure any smell is as physically affronting as the nostril-burning fumes of boiling vinegar!