Our neighbors hired some pest control company for an ant problem on their property. The expert showed up yesterday, spotted a giant pile of mulch on our property, and immediately came over to suggest our mulch was the source. However, there have been ants here, everywhere, for as long as we’ve lived here. Plus, the mulch was delivered from the local town, made from wood chips also collected in this town. It’s a local product, so even if it had ants, they came from here. I hate to argue with ignorant people, though, because you can never win. How can a company even make claims of getting rid of ants here anyway? Even if you could, they will literally re-populate any area they can in a matter of weeks. It just seems crazy to even try.

Depends on the ants. When i lived in Houston, we had fire ants EVERYWHERE. You gotta get this stuff that that kills the entire mount. People also poured gas and lit it on fire to get rid of it. They do go away eventually you just have to make it a daily chore for a bit.

We don’t really have fire ants here in New York, thankfully we are too far north for them. Mostly just house ants, pavement ants, and carpenter ants. The only ones worth worrying about are the carpenter ants, unfortunately the nearby woods are full of them. They are in every fallen log and under the peeling bark of every tree. I could see looking at a pile of mulch and thinking carpenter ants might come from them, but nah. We haven’t seen any ants in the mulch. On the other hand, Every time a branch falls off a tree in our backyard, the branch is full of carpenter ants. The house and pavement ants are also really prolific here, but just putting down bait traps in the kitchen and bathroom keeps them in check. At best you can keep ants out of your house, but keeping them out of your yard here would be fighting a constantly losing battle.

Who even contemplates keeping ants out their garden? 😄 That's a path to madness.

I know, there’s literally millions of them everywhere. I just don’t see how one can stop them. I wouldn’t even think about it.

moral of the story is don't mess with nature, never know what consequences you will have later. Up here in pacific noth west we have ants problem in the summer, all we do is just sprinkle around ant deterrent powder in the perimeter of the house, which was recommended by our pest control guy.

You don't use maple syrup up there to stop them? I've been lied to my entire life

that's not a bad idea - ants will get stuck on syrup.

I thought it was a joke

My wife actually uses borax to make this. But we don’t waste good maple syrup, just cheap sugar water left over from filling our hummingbird feeders.

The government here is very concerned about Fire Ants, they send out this nice little brochure detailing zones of control and how to handle mulch etc. I don’t know what the laws are there as to what you’d be required to do but if you got a tarp treated with ant deterrent and put the mulch on top of it, that would rule it out. With your mulch there, any broad-spectrum eradication measures they try will be kinda pointless with a nice big mulch pile for them to hide in nearby. Perhaps this is their point?

We live in a temperate rainforest area (Hudson river valley), in a neighborhood of houses that are over 140 years old, and all of the large trees in people'

I reckon tell the contractor that, see what they say. Or call up a pest exterminator company yourself, I bet they’d tell you if that contractor doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. If they won’t go away and you need to be harsh about it too, you can probably force them to do the work/pay for it.