What's up everyone? Welcome back to the Epic Gardening podcast. I'm your host Kevin, the founder of Epic Gardening.com.

Today we're talking about ants. Are they pests in our garden or are they friends?

We know that things like mealybugs are not friends.

And we know that things like ladybugs are friends.

But what about our ants? I know I've seen them in my garden, I'm sure you've seen

them in your garden. It's sometimes your first instinct, as it is mine, to destroy any bug that I see but that's

probably not the right approach a lot of people will find that an ant hill

is kind of an annoying thing in the garden.

Why would we want this?

Eh, let's get rid of it, right?

Well, I don't know.

They're kind of like tiny little rototillers.

If you have a tunneling ant in your garden, they're actually turning over as much

soil as earthworms, which means they're creating pockets of variation, they're redistributing nutrients,

and they are really, really interesting. They will start

scavenging and breaking down dead bugs and other things in your soil and effectively

composting those entities. and

and turning them into fertilizer for your soil.

So ants are kind of like our partners in the garden.

At least most of them. Another thing that ants do, they are seed dispersers.

So in a lot of different areas of the country and even the world, there are wildflowers that effectively rely on ants to help disperse those seeds.

So that's one other thing that I learned about ants that I hadn't known before.

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