Turned my backyard into a stamped-concrete patio. No ants after that.
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I grew up in B’klyn, so I know you know about water bugs (a million times more spine-chilling than common roaches). One night a loud, scratching sound outside my bedroom door woke me up. I opened the door… and stood eye-to-eye with a huge water bug that was scuttling up the door, with the bug just inches from my face. I was not happy.
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Mosquitoes kill thousands of people a year. “Malaria, which is among the diseases carried by mosquitoes, kills more than 600,000 people a year” I like bats too but mosquitoes have got to go. And who the hell came up with how to spell that name. Ticks as well, they can be lived with out.
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You lay the bay leaf down as bait, then, when a roach shows up, you pound it with the cucumber.
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Yea, that’s a good one. I live in what the CDC has found to be ground-zero for lyme disease. I have several friends who have a hard time even walking when it flairs up, and one person who’s pretty much house-bound…
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… and me and my early career roommates should have spent some time de-bugging a used fridge we picked up cheap from West Hollywood. The fridge exploded with roaches once it was in our shared apartment. Post mortem talk had us uselessly fantasizing about bagging the damn thing beforehand then throwing in a bunch of bug bombs. Would’a, could’a, should’a.
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I’ve also hear lavender repels scorpions.
Next viral video: a montage titled “Cockroaches Afraid of Cucumbers”.
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I’m mostly familiar with the DE used as a pool filter medium, which is in crystalline form and not considered safe to breathe. It’s not synthetic, just crystalline. There’s also “food grade” DE, right? I assume that’s amorphous silica, which is safer. So I guess it depends which kind you’re using.
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I won’t bet against it!
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I like this stuff- http://ecosmart.com/
Edit: it has a really strong smell. Lots of licorice smell. Not unpleasant, but very powerful.
It might be useful for that vent issue, Grey_Devil
As for getting rid of them permanently, you need to remove or cut off water sources. A roach can go a month without food, but only a week without water. If you use the ecosmart stuff around the water sources you can’t remove for a few weeks, like a toilet, it could serve to repel the roaches until they die or move on permanently.
If you own a house, try planting aromatic herbs in the area around the foundation. Lavender, thyme, rosemary, basil. Anything with strong smelling essential oils. It will discourage insects from entering the house. If you want something from the mint family, like catnip or peppermint, plant in a container. Otherwise you’ll have an entire yard of mint in a few years.
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At my old house the previous owner had planted mint throughout the backyard. I never realized it was a really persistent weed until I tried mowing it a bunch of times and removing it by physical means. Eventually I gave in, defeated by the plant and learned how to make mojitos and pho.
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My neighborhood cats would looooove that. But I don’t really mind them visiting. The resident Burmese kitty not so much.
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I had a mint plant in a container outside our apartment for a while. I forgot to water it a lot and it was frozen in the the winter a few times. It kept coming back. I’d think it was dead, it would look dead for months, and then poof, more mint. It never seeded, just came back. I called it the phoenix mint.
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The thing about mint is it takes abuse like (insert tasteless simile here). Plus the root system becomes far more spread out than you possibly can imagine. Watering it is not much of an issue.
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Very true! I also caught that particular mint sending tendrils into the planters next to it and the crack in the sidewalk 
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mosquitoes can go extinct, bats will eat other stuff
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