Cockroaches: 100% success without commercial poisons by Deborah Lockett Blog entry

Blog: The New Earth
by Deborah Lockett

Cockroaches: 100% success without commercial poisons

You can eliminate cockroaches from your home completely, permanently, without using any commercial poisons

Date: 4/8/2005 8:15:28 AM ( 19 y ) ... viewed 6349 times

Is anyone putting up with cockroach infestation at ANY level?

If you are, you don’t need to continue. You can eliminate them completely, without using commercial poisons and thus avoiding contaminating yourself.

You can also use the innate intelligence of the cockroaches themselves to stop them ever coming back.

They will post signs at all the ways in to your home saying “Danger, out of bounds”.

I’m blogging this information because I didn’t find it anywhere on the net when our own cockroach problem emerged. I had moved from Wales to Canary Islands, at a latitude of 28° North, and I had to learn about cockroaches from scratch.

We achieved 100% success rate. This is what we did.

First, George and I located the nests. I took all the things out of the kitchen base units while George stood ready with a cloth to squash the emerging cockroaches.

There was a nest underneath a small metal colander just where the waste water pipe from the sink goes down through the bottom of the cupboard. Between us we squashed all the cockroaches that emerged from the nest and none got away.

This is a typical place for a nest in any home, and hence the first place to look. It’s dark and the cockroaches get warmth from the hot water coming down the pipe.

Next we moved a freestanding cupboard and revealed a nest on the floor underneath. This cupboard stands directly underneath an air vent in the kitchen wall. I guess the bottom of the cupboard was the first stopping-off place for cockroaches coming in through the vent and, for that reason, they built their first nest there.

We went into the bedroom where the computer desk is. I lifted up the battery that sits on the desk and powers the computer (uninterruptible power supply). There was a nest under the battery. Again, it was a dark place and the battery gave off heat.

With the nesting sites spring cleaned, there were much fewer cockroaches, however they weren’t gone altogether. But as we didn’t know how to stop them coming back into the flat, we didn’t know what more we could do.

A while later I mentioned to a friend on the telephone that we had cockroaches. Ten minutes later he appeared at the door with a small packet of boric acid powder (formula H3BO3) from the chemist, and a tube of sweetened condensed milk. He told me cockroaches can’t resist sweetened condensed milk.

He mixed the two together into a stiff paste and went around putting a small dab in the cockroach runs: behind the cooker, in the corners of cupboards and drawers. He said the stuff would soon go completely hard, and could be left there indefinitely. When he went away he said that would be the end of our cockroach infestation.

On two of the days that followed I came into the kitchen in the morning to find the bodies of cockroaches of different sizes lying on their backs with their feet in the air. There were about five altogether.

I assume these cockroaches were newcomers who had got in from outside and eaten the boric acid mixture, which by now had gone hard as my friend said it would.

And that was the end of our cockroach infestation. Nevertheless, the vent in the kitchen wall remains open, just as before the infestation. There must be a reason why they voluntarily avoid our place --- which I attribute to their reasoning power (i.e. the heavy cockroach losses from the sweet-tasting white stuff have taught the survivors to keep out of the top flat, it’s a death trap). You can make this reasoning power work for you, too.

During the two years that have passed since, they have never come back into the flat, although I know we have them in the building fabric of our block of flats and in the communal bins in the street outside. Once when I was on the landing at roof level, I saw a big one disappearing into the cavity wall through a crack in the skirting board. I put crack filler in the crack to stop it using that route again.

George has a theory that they climb up through the building along the conduit with the electrical cables in.

Personally I’d rather have the cockroaches than commercial poison in our flat anyday. But fortunately, I don’t have to make that choice. We’re free from both.