yet another day of bashing in the yard... was trying to find a spot to put a pad for a composter. Ran to the stone place down the street and bought a 2'x3' flagstone and a bag of sand (regular readers of my posts
- right, like my life is some kind of riveting drama, but still - will remember that I still have a 30 gallon trash can full of gravel that I screened out of the topsoil that I removed from the asphalt driveway. Yes, you read that right.) So anyway, I bring this home and go behind the garage to poke around. That area has about 2 feet of excess composted wood chips just laying on the ground; at some point I will advertise some more free topsoil on craigslist to get rid of it, as I don't like that much soil sitting up against a wall that is just sticks 'n' bricks.
So anyway. I start digging, and find that underneath the top layer of soil is just a bunch of scrap wood. Of course it's all infested with carpenter ants. Yay. What the hell was the guy thinking? As soon as I get a pickup I'm going to have to haul all this to the dump, I don't particularly want it around. For the time being I dug through a good amount of the soil and tried to sort out all the big pieces of wood, and piled the wood up separately to hopefully drive out the ants.
Then I decided since I was standing there with a shovel in my hand I'd remove the posts for an old cyclone fence that had been removed years before. First one came out OK; second one I dug down to maybe a foot below the top of the cement and pulled on the post; it was so corroded it broke off flush with the cement. Oops. Guess this will have to wait until I can find a bigass wrecking bar or piece of iron pipe to stick down inside there. I don't want to just leave it as a surprise for someone (probably me.) I don't feel up to running to the store right now as I'm filthy and literally drenched in sweat (it's about 90 degrees outside; I know, not too bright doing hard labor on a day like today, but you work when you can.)
So that was my day so far... now that I've ranted, what about these ants? Is there something I can do myself once the area is cleared out to make sure the garage framing is ant-free, or should I just clear it out and then call an exterminator?
nate