Ant Problem? Tackle it with Green Solutions

Once you start seeing ants around the house, it seems like it’s a never-ending problem – unless you want to resort to dangerous chemicals, which can be toxic to kids and pets (not to mention the environment). There are actually some fairly easy, humane, green ways to kill ants – or if you’re really a softie, to divert them away from your house.

Your mileage may vary with these four methods from wikiHow, and which one you choose might depend on your ability to stomach ant violence. Method 1 involves pipe tobacco, glue, baby powder, red pepper, chalk and lavender – check it out on the wikiHow page. The following three methods are a bit simpler:

Method 2: Fill a spray bottle with highly concentrated soap water. When you see ants, just spray them and they’ll be dead on contact. Wipe up the carcasses with whatever they were trying to eat. Within an hour, any stragglers will have dissipated.

Method 3: Collect a large number of ants from one ant hill (easy to do just leave some food in a container, return after 2 hours and you should have heaps. Drop all the ants in the container onto another ant hill and the ants will start fighting each other resulting in many casualties.

Method 4: Spray 3 parts dish soap and 1 part water on them and they will die instantly.

Method 3 seems kind of cruel but fun for those with suppressed homicidal maniac tendencies. If you’re too squeamish to kill them, one tip is to place a partially open jar of honey up in a tree in your backyard. The ants will seek out the honey instead of raiding your home in most cases.

Link [wikiHow]
Photo credit: Flickr user striatic

Long Lasting Tees Don’t Make Golf Eco-Friendly

I don’t know much about golf, but apparently wood tees don’t last very long – they splinter and leave litter all over the grass. A company called Eco Golf has created the Endurance Tee, which outlasts wood tees 10 to 1.

The company explains it:

Since the Endurance tee is so long lasting tee box litter is virtually eliminated.

The final benefit of the endurance tee is that it is manufactured with degradable materials. The tee will breakdown over time and when placed in active compost the process is greatly accelerated.

We’re glad to see golfers greening up their tees, but considering they’re using it in the middle of a giant carpet of pesticide filled grass cut by giant gas mowers sitting where natural lands used to be, it feels a bit small. It’s akin to a NASCAR team switching their cell phone service over to Working Assets- a nice gesture but a drop in the bucket in the big picture.

Golf could definitely get a lot greener. Many golfers and golf course owners are taking steps to help. While we’d prefer an untouched plot of land to a golf course any day, golf courses can provide certain environmental benefits in urban and suburban areas as a substitute for more concrete and asphalt – or to clean up disused sites like quarries and mines. We know that golf courses aren’t going to disappear, so we’d like to see more care being taken in making sure they aren’t all chemical-filled resource hoggers. You can get more info about greener golf at Golf and the Environment and Beyond Pesticides.

Link[EcoGolf] via [iGreenSpot]