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How To Keep Ants Out Of The Kitchen

Oddly, this works.

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Either my wife massacred a cucumber in a whirlwind of rage or she was trying another hippie remedy to keep ants out of the kitchen. 

It ended up being the later. 

We are staying in an unrestorated traditional courtyard home in a village on Kinmen island. This is a very rural place — things other than humans actually live here. The house is on a hill and a cool breeze comes in through the wide open front doors and circulates through all the rooms. The windows are kept open, the cracks and crevasses of time provide additional ventilation. An array of insects wander in and out at will. 

These include ants. Lots of ants. 

A train of ants making their way across my bed isn’t anything to bother with, but that same train heading into my food requires a very different reaction. 

My wife tried dish detergent, lemons, and some other stupid shit that she read about somewhere, but what actually worked was probably the least likely seeming: cucumber peels. 

She spread cucumber peels over the sink right in the path of the ants. By the next day they were gone. 

Apparently, this works because the ants taste the peels, don’t like how they taste, and then determine that everything else in the house tastes equally as shit, so they move on to the next place like a gaggle of food snobs in a tourist town. Apparently. 

So now we don’t have ants in our kitchen — instead we have rotting cucumber peels scattered around everywhere …

Filed under: Food, Kinmen, Taiwan

About the Author:

I am the founder and editor of Vagabond Journey. I’ve been traveling the world since 1999, through 91 countries. I am the author of the book, Ghost Cities of China and have written for The Guardian, Forbes, Bloomberg, The Diplomat, the South China Morning Post, and other publications. has written 3699 posts on Vagabond Journey. Contact the author.

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