How to Get Rid of Earwigs and Live Happily Ever After

Earwigs can damage your vegetables and flowers and, oh, yeah, they can HURT you with those pinchers!

Things You'll Need

• Sock or pantyhose
• 7 Dust
• newspapers
• paper towel tubes
• the desire to WIN

Instructions

1. I had never even heard of earwigs until we moved to our new home. There's a lot of shade and some areas of the yard stay kind of damp, even during the summer.

   Earwigs were everwhere. All in the flower beds, in the gutters (they hadn't been cleaned out in a year or two when we bought hte place), in the house, everywhere. There's nothing quite as alarming as putting on a pair of jeans to feel a sharp bite or pinch on your thigh. I found one inside my daughter's swimsuit and that was all I could take.

2. Step one: Get rid of their habitat if possible. They love mulch. Replace it with stones if you can. Pick up grass clippings, leaves, boards, boxes, anything that can give them shade outside and keeps the ground damp. Move planters and flower pots around - they love to hide under them. Spray the ones you see with a product that kills earwigs. We use Ortho Home Defense Max.

   Spray the foundation of your house. You may have to do this every other day for a week or so.

   Sprinkle Ortho Home Defense granules onto flower beds. Sprinkle 7 Dust into vegetable gardens. Earwigs will eat your veggies. Using 7 Dust on the plants and the plant bed is advised.

   Consider getting a few guineas. They will make many a meal out of earwigs, ticks and snakes. They're great all around pest control creatures.

   Roll up a newspaper, loosely, and place it in an area you know has earwigs. They'll get in between the pages by the dozens and then you can burn it or seal it in a plastic bag to kill the earwigs. Paper towel tubes stuffed with mulch or straw will also work for this.

   Exterminate every one you see. Just take a little piece of a paper towel and pick them up and squish.

3. Seal up every imaginable opening around your home. Bathtub type caulk works well. Seal around the hoses to your washer and dryer, seal around any wiring with an outside opening, get under the sinks where the pipes go through walls or floors (expanding foam works well for this). Pull out the stove a fridge and seal around the openings in floors or walls behind these appliances. Seal, seal, seal.

   We've taken the above steps and have dramatically cut down on the earwig problem and are genuinely optimistic that we are on our way to the total riddance of these awful little bugs.

   I really hope this can help you, too.

Tips & Warnings

• You may have heard that earwigs get into your ears and attach to the eardrums with their pinchers...FORTUNATELY, this appears to be a myth.

• Wear gloves as a precaution.

Resources

• ~*~* Visit Kimmi J's website ~*~*