Welcome, Newcomer

A new little tree arrived this week and we finally got around to planting it - a 7-foot or so tall Japanese Snowbell, Styrax japonica. A friend of our botanist neighbor wanted to find it a home and even brought it to us for free - with all the trees that have come down around here lately, we never say no to a new tree.

So finally the hole was dug and the tree planted:

Here it is, with the as-yet-untouched mulch pile where our old tree once stood.

 If we are lucky and good caretakers, it can grow up to about 30 feet tall with a 10 to 25 foot spread.

Better yet, it will get white flowers like this on it:

It certainly won't take the place of our fallen oak or the 8 trees removed from the vacant lot, but a fragrant flowering (and free!) tree can't be a bad thing.

The actual story about ants

In what is apparently becoming an annual occurrence, we got ants this summer. They invaded our kitchen via the wall near the stove, and even though we kept spraying bug spray both inside and out and attempting to fill holes, they kept finding ways in. We suspect there is a small ant-sized gap behind the wall-mounted cabinets, so we can't get to that without some serious construction. We did our best to take away any temptations, but with two small children, the kitchen disaster each morning was a feast for them most days. But we did our best, trying to use Soft Scrub each evening to get rid of any possible food residue and meticulously put away food. Fortunately their infestation was mostly limited to surface access, and they didn't get into our cabinets where, let's say, we aren't the most diligent about sealing items (for example we used to put all our cereal into tall air-tight containers, which works if you have one or two open boxes of cereal, but not when you have five, as seems to happen lately with our toddler's ever-changing requests). There was that day we left a just-opened box of Honey Nut Cheerios out while we were at work. That was fun for them. Oops.

We were almost ready to give up and call in professionals, especially when we saw them starting to build a home at the edge of our kitchen sink. Then D did a little reading and decided to try one more do-it-yourself solution, a cotton ball soaked in a solution of water, borax, and sugar (stored in a well-labeled container, in keeping with poison-control guidelines).

The idea is to use enough sugar to get the ants to want to eat it, and enough borax to kill them afterwards, but not so much borax that they can taste it. We left a small cotton ball on the counter just at the point where they crawled from the wall to the counter (the red line is the ants' approximate path and the blue ball represents the cotton ball).

For a few days, it seemed like we may have had more ants, but they all just stopped at the ball and then turned back around, so they didn't venture into the rest of the kitchen. They found their food (the sugar) and that was sufficient.

Eventually, their numbers shrank. After about a week of no ants, we removed the cotton ball.

That was about a month ago...

I think they're gone!