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
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