Ants

This past spring I started to see a few ants here and there in the kitchen. It was never more than a few ants at a time, so I never really worried about them too much. I would just kill them and continue with whatever I was doing. I tried to be very conscious about wiping down the counters and not leaving anything that would be enticing to ants laying around. This seemed to work well until one day in August I was really busy. I don't even remember what all was going on but, I do remember that one of the things I was doing was baking some cookies to take to my husbands softball tournament and my friend's party later that afternoon. So, we went to the tournament and I left after their first game to head to my friend's party. When I finally got home it was fairly late so I cooked up something quick for dinner and when I went to wash the dishes (remember, I didn't have time to do them that morning because I was crunched for time) there were ants everywhere. I mean EVERYWHERE!!! Hundreds of them. Clearly they had found the crumbs I had left then gone back to their nest and let the whole colony know about this gold mine. I stood by our sink squishing ants for a good 30 mins. I must have killed at least 150-200 ants.
After that incident they kept coming back looking for more food. It was really frustrating, so I was talking about this at our labor day party and one of my friends said she had a similar problem (with ants in her kitchen). She said she read online that ants hate cinnamon, so she created a line of cinnamon where they were coming from and she hasn't had a problem with them since. She said she even had ants waiting to cross the cinnamon coming out of her pantry!
So, I took her advice and created a wall 'o cinnamon to deter the ants.

As you can see the wall has been messed up a little bit, but it still serves it's purpose of keeping the ants out. They all came from that corner. I have only seen one ant since putting the cinnamon there almost a month ago - and I think he was already in the kitchen when I put the cinnamon there so he couldn't get back to his nest.
Lesson learned: If you ever have ants in your kitchen all you need to do is figure out where they're coming from then create a line of cinnamon for them to cross and you'll never see them again :)