Don’t throw away your coffee grounds. It can get rid of some harmful ones. A free, ecological and effective remedy.
Every year, we have all these recurring appointments that we would prefer to avoid. One of them is this band of insects that arrives at our house like clockwork during the hottest periods. Flies, mosquitoes, small flying insects are everywhere, and keeping them away is a challenge. Let’s not forget the ants either, harmless to us and rather clean, but which become an undesirable sight when they parade through our kitchen.
So we prepare for war with a whole panoply of traps, repellents and systems to ward off or even eradicate these intruders. Among the weapons at our disposal is a perhaps unexpected element: coffee grounds.
Coffee grounds have so many alternative applications that they have become valuable waste, the kind of thing you should never throw away, but rather set aside. And when the first ants show up, it’s time to use it.
Most of us regularly drink coffee at home, so it’s easy to have a coffee machine that produces its daily batch of grounds. Why not keep it instead of throwing it away? It costs nothing and you just have to be sure to dry it well, otherwise it will mold if you pile it up in small closed containers, rendering it unusable.
To fight against ants, the use is super simple. Coffee grounds smell very unpleasant to these critters, so just sprinkle it on the windowsill or around the area where you see them most often. Ideally, do this when it’s barely dry, but if the heat is intense and you disperse it well, you can also crumble the still-damp coffee grounds, which will dry on their own. Place it especially close to where the ants enter the house, it will act as a natural repellent.
On the other hand, if you want to use it against mosquitoes or flies, you can burn it slowly, like incense (without flame, just producing smoke) in a metal or perhaps ceramic box or glass. In this case, it must of course be perfectly dry in order to burn. You can then use it like mosquito repellents or candles.