Post 1 Notes From Mitch: How to Actually Get Rid of Ants with the Baking Soda and Sugar Method Instead of Quitting Before It Works

On the baking soda and sugar method for ants, the six brutal days it actually takes to work, and why bailing on day two guarantees you lose.

Out here, the quiet has a texture to it. Six in the morning, no cars, no neighbors, just the swamp cooler kicking on and the specific betrayal of looking down at my own back step and seeing a line of ants marching across it like they’d been issued a permit.

I want to be a man who handles small invasions with calm, measured wisdom. Instead, I stood there in my boxers with a mug of Café Bustelo going cold in my hand, watching this thin dark thread of ants cross my threshold, and felt something in my chest go fully feral. They weren’t even hiding it. They walked right past me like I was the intruder.

The Urge to Go to War

My first move — and I want to be honest, because that’s the whole point of this — I texted Kevin — a friend with historically terrible judgment and zero interest in talking me out of anything — a single word: War. He wrote back in under a minute with the name of an ant spray he swore he’d used to, quote, “erase an entire civilization off my porch in one afternoon,” and by the time I’d finished my coffee we had fully convinced each other this was a job for the industrial stuff sitting in my shed from a Tractor Supply run two summers ago.

Here’s where it gets embarrassing. I got the can out. I stood over the trail like I was about to do something biblical. And Dorian, without even looking up from whatever he was yelling about into his phone in the kitchen, said, “Don’t spray that near where the dogs eat,” and just like that the whole operation lost its momentum.

So, I didn’t nuke it. I went a different route — the baking soda and powdered sugar thing, the one I’d half-read about at two in the morning some night I should’ve been asleep. Equal parts baking soda and powdered sugar, the sugar pulls them in, the baking soda does something ugly to their insides once they eat it. Slow. Quiet. The kind of fix that doesn’t feel like a fix at all while it’s happening, which, if you know me, should have been my first warning that I was going to hate this.

Attempt One: The Monument to Failure

Let me tell you about the first batch, because I did not read the instructions so much as vibe my way through them. I used regular sugar because that’s what was in the cabinet. I dumped the whole mixture into one dramatic pile in the middle of the trail, the way you’d serve something at a party you were proud of. I have never once in my life needed a recipe to be right on the first try, and I saw no reason insects should be the ones to change that about me.

The ants ignored it completely. Not cautiously — completely. They rerouted around my pile like it was a checkpoint they’d already cleared with management. I stood there in yesterday’s sweatpants, genuinely offended, watching a colony of bugs with brains the size of a comma outsmart a grown man with a mortgage.

It’s fine that they walked right past forty cents of ingredients I mixed with real emotional investment. It’s fine that I’ve been outsmarted today by something I could kill with a single flip-flop if I could catch it holding still. It’s fine that I am currently losing a war I started for sport against an enemy that does not know a war is happening. I said all of that out loud to the dog, who supervised the whole thing from the porch with the specific judgment only a boxer mix can deliver, and then I went inside and looked it up properly instead of guessing again.

Attempt Two: Following Actual Directions

Turns out the sugar has to be powdered — the fine texture is what lets it blend all the way through the baking soda instead of just sitting on top of it where the ants can eat around it, which, in hindsight, is exactly what mine had let them do. Turns out you don’t dump it in one glorious mound. You scatter it thin, right along the actual trail, right at the cracks and edges where they’re actually coming and going, because a big pile is just a monument to your effort and not an actual trap.

So, I mixed it again. Correctly, this time, with the powdered sugar I keep around for the lemon bars I make when I actually feel like proving I’m more than just a guy with a shovel. I laid it out thin along the line, right at the seam where the step meets the dirt, and I went back inside feeling, honestly, a little smug about it. I want that on the record. I felt like a man who had solved something.

The Six-Day Staring Contest

Day one, nothing happened. I checked at seven, at nine, at noon, at four, like I was running surveillance on a house I suspected of something. The trail was exactly as busy as it had been the day before. My stomach did that thing where it starts grinding a little, low and steady, like I’d swallowed something with edges.

By day two I was ready to call the whole method a myth invented by people with more patience than sense. I told Ray this over the phone and he said, flatly, “Did you give it more than one day,” which is the kind of question you ask a friend right before you have to admit you did not, in fact, give it more than one day.

The slow methods aren’t broken. They’re just running on a clock that has zero interest in how you feel about it, and for two straight days that clock and I did not get along. It’s not that they don’t work. It’s that they work on a timeline that has zero interest in your feelings about it. Six to ten days, is what I found, sometimes longer depending on the species, and during that entire stretch it looks like absolutely nothing is happening, which is exactly when most people — me, very specifically me — decide it isn’t working and go back to the spray can out of pure wounded pride.

I didn’t touch it. That’s the whole secret, and it’s a deeply unsatisfying one. I kept the bait dry, didn’t hose down the step, didn’t sweep around it even when it was driving me insane to leave a little scatter of white powder on my own porch like some kind of amateur. I refreshed it every few days instead of every few hours. And I stopped checking on it every hour like it owed me an update.

By day five the trail had thinned out enough that I noticed before I remembered to look for it — half the ants I used to see were just gone, no ceremony, no announcement, the way most real progress happens when you’re not staring directly at it. By day seven there was almost nothing crossing that step at all, and the ones still around seemed to have lost interest in whatever used to be worth the trip.

I’m not going to stand here and tell you this fixes everything every time, because it doesn’t. Some ants — the bigger carpenter ones especially — don’t care about sugar and won’t touch it, and if you’re ten days in with zero movement, that’s not a patience problem anymore, that’s a different problem, and at that point you get the stronger stuff or you call somebody who does this for a living. Knowing the difference between staying patient and just refusing to admit something isn’t working is its own separate skill, and I am, admittedly, still practicing it.

But this particular fight, on this particular step, I won. Not because the bait was some miracle. Because I was more stubborn than they were patient, and it turns out that’s usually the only edge you actually need.

Outlasting the Enemy

The thing about the ants is they never left because I scared them off. They left because I outlasted them at something I was convinced, for the first two days, I’d already lost.

“I’ve been calling myself a patient man for years and it took a line of ants to prove I’m actually just stubborn with better PR. Turns out that works almost as well.” — Mitch

Go check whatever you’ve been meaning to check on for exactly one day before giving up on it. The fix you already started might just need you to leave it alone a little longer instead of doing something louder. Mix it right, put it where the actual trail is, and then, and this is the hard part, don’t touch it. Give it the six days it actually needs before you decide it failed. I’ll be out back, refusing to sweep my own porch on principle.

Thanks for reading Plants, Panic & Paranoia. If this one landed, share it with someone who needs a reminder they’re not the only one out here.

If you want the stuff that didn't make it into this post — what Dorian actually said when I put the spray can down, the specific tone Kevin used when he texted back the name of that ant spray, why I own powdered sugar in the first place — that's what Coffee With Mitch is for. It's free, it's tucked behind a little password gate, and it's worth the two minutes it takes to find the word. Come sit with me a while. I'll probably still be out here refusing to sweep that step.