Jonathan Hatch
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How to Get Rid of Crickets
There's nothing quite like laying in bed on a warm summer evening, enjoying the warm breeze and the chirping of crickets--until you realize that those chirps are coming from your closet. Crickets will eat anything, anything at all: cloth, silk, cotton, wallpaper, wood, anything they can get their mandibles around. This and the incessant chirping sound coming from somewhere in your house is a good enough reason to keep crickets out of your home.
Natural & Organic Remedies:
Cricket Traps are an inexpensive way to keep cricket populations in your yard or in your house down to a minimum. All you'll need are three things: a jar, some water, and some molasses..
Steps to Making a Cricket Trap:
1. Empty and clean the jar.
2. Create a solution of water and molasses.
3. Fill the jar with your new cricket attractant solution.
4. Place jar where you have been noticing crickets chirping.
5. Crickets should be attracted to the solution, attempt to feed, and be drowned when they fall into the jar.
6. Clean the jar every so often to make sure it doesn't get really gross. Dead bugs don't make good conversation pieces.
Preventative Cricket Control
Once a female cricket makes it into your home, it's possible for her to lay hundreds of eggs. Since it takes almost a year for cricket eggs to hatch, an early detection is almost impossible. Here are some tips to help avoid attracting crickets into your home:
Crickets get in through cracks. Make sure you fill cracks in walls and your foundation. Crickets are bound to sneak their way in rather than go through the front door. Screened porches that are open to the house during the summer months are especially susceptible.
Crickets love tall grasses. If you have tall grasses near or around your house, it's best to keep them trimmed low. Crickets tend to find refuge in these grasses and will usually migrate from those areas onto your house, eventually finding shelter indoors.
Crickets live in debris. Crickets are attracted to moist, shaded debris, like grass clippings. So if you're mowing your lawn or clipping tall grasses, make sure to rake them away from the house. A compost heap several yards away is always a good idea.
Crickets feed on garbage. If you want to avoid inviting crickets to nest near your home, it's best to keep garbage recipticles sealed and kept several yards from your home.
Crickets gather in drains. The moist debris found in the gutters on your roof are the perfect place for crickets to find shelter. Make sure you keep them clean throughout the summer months.Cricket Traps and Cricket Bait
It's not always possible to keep crickets out, no matter how much lawn care and cleaning you do. If part 1 of this guide fails you, and the alternative doesn't produce results, there are always insecticides, baits, and poisons that are easily found on the internet. Some of these solutions are spread around the parameter of your house, others (traps) are set inside and outside your house to reduce populations, and still others are just left on your floor to pick off those unlucky stragglers. It's up to you to decide what's the most safe and effective solution to your pest problem.
Once you've completed these steps, your cricket problem should be solved and you can once again enjoy chirpless nights, knowing your wardrobe won't be turned into so much cricket droppings.
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