- 2 days ago
🔗 Save $6,000 a year with my complete Amish home-saving method that I teach: https://eliasyoder.com
Most people spend a fortune on sprays, traps, and chemicals trying to get rid of pests. The Amish have long relied on simple household ingredients instead. One of the most useful is ordinary baking soda.
In this video, I'll show you traditional Amish-inspired ways people use baking soda around the home to help deal with roaches, ants, spiders, mice, and other unwanted pests while keeping costs low. You'll also learn why many expensive solutions don't always work as well as people think and how simple habits can make a big difference in keeping pests away.
These are the practical, money-saving household lessons I learned from older generations who believed in using what they already had before spending money on complicated products. Small savings add up, and the old ways often work better than people expect.
If you want my complete Amish home-saving method—the same system we use to save thousands every year—I've put everything in one place.
🔗 Save $6,000 a year with my complete Amish home-saving method that I teach: https://eliasyoder.com
Tell me in the comments: What pest giv
Most people spend a fortune on sprays, traps, and chemicals trying to get rid of pests. The Amish have long relied on simple household ingredients instead. One of the most useful is ordinary baking soda.
In this video, I'll show you traditional Amish-inspired ways people use baking soda around the home to help deal with roaches, ants, spiders, mice, and other unwanted pests while keeping costs low. You'll also learn why many expensive solutions don't always work as well as people think and how simple habits can make a big difference in keeping pests away.
These are the practical, money-saving household lessons I learned from older generations who believed in using what they already had before spending money on complicated products. Small savings add up, and the old ways often work better than people expect.
If you want my complete Amish home-saving method—the same system we use to save thousands every year—I've put everything in one place.
🔗 Save $6,000 a year with my complete Amish home-saving method that I teach: https://eliasyoder.com
Tell me in the comments: What pest giv
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00You walk into the pantry and there is a line of ants marching along the shelf like they pay rent.
00:06A silverfish darts under the cellar boards.
00:09You lift a flower pot and the slugs have chewed your seedlings down to lace.
00:14So you do what most folks have been taught to do.
00:17You go to the store and stand before a shelf of bottles with skulls on the labels.
00:23And you spend money you did not have to spend.
00:26On poison you must then lock away from your own children.
00:30My mother told me something in the same kitchen when I was a girl no taller than the counter.
00:36The bug you see is not the real problem.
00:40It is just the thing that finally got your attention.
00:43The real problem is you were taught to reach for the bottle before you reach for the shelf you already
00:49own.
00:50The plain, cheap shelf that every house used to keep before a house was made to feel helpless without something
00:58bought.
01:00I am Esther Yoder and today I am going to do something the man who painted that skull on the
01:05bottle never will.
01:06I am going to tell you what a four cent box of baking soda truly does against the pests in
01:15your house.
01:16And just as plainly what it does not do.
01:20So let me give you the truth.
01:22And the truth is plenty.
01:24Quick word before we go further.
01:27The old methods my family uses, the kind I am sharing today and many more like it, too much of
01:34it for any single video.
01:35I put the whole of it together in a book at EliasYoder.com.
01:40The book is the long version.
01:43Here is the whole secret of baking soda and it is a good and simple one.
01:48It is a drying agent.
01:50It pulls moisture out of things.
01:52Hold on to that one plain fact and you can tell for yourself which of these promises could be true
01:59and which could not.
02:01Because there are creatures whose whole life depends on staying soft and damp and against those it earns its keep
02:08honestly.
02:09And there are creatures it can do nothing to, no matter what anyone says, and you will be able to
02:15reason it out yourself.
02:17The slug and the snail first.
02:19After a heavy rain, you find them on the undersides of your tomato leaves and along the base of your
02:25beans,
02:26tacked where the stem meets the soil.
02:29They hide through the day and crawl out at evening to chew your garden down to ribbons.
02:34And a gardener who has lost a row of seedlings to slugs knows the particular grief of it.
02:41Sprinkle plain dry baking soda directly onto the slug or the snail itself.
02:46It draws the moisture straight out and that is the end of it, quick and certain.
02:52This works for the plainest reason in the world.
02:56A slug is very nearly all water held in a thin, soft skin and the soda undoes that.
03:03My grandmother did the very same thing with a pinch of salt from the cellar and the soda works on
03:09that same honest principle.
03:12Now here is the one thing you must know up front, and I tell you because I would tell my
03:17own daughter.
03:18Sprinkle it on the pest, not heavy onto your garden soil.
03:23Too much baking soda will sour your ground and the plant you were trying to save will suffer for it.
03:29A light hand aimed at the creature around the base of the plant.
03:34That is all you want.
03:35More is not better here.
03:37More is a mistake.
03:39Now the second honest use, and this one is different in kind.
03:44It is not a poison at all.
03:46It is a barrier, a line they would rather not cross.
03:50The soft, damp-bodied things that come up out of basements and creep in around door seals.
03:57Silverfish, centipedes, those long millipedes that curl up when you touch them.
04:02The pill bugs that get at your tender garden seedlings.
04:05For these, a dry line of baking soda laid across the threshold is a thing they do not care to
04:11climb over.
04:12And what does climb over it dries out for the trouble.
04:16Take a little bulb duster.
04:18You can get one for a dollar or two.
04:20And it is worth having for a dozen jobs around the house.
04:24And lay a thin, even line along the door seal, along the window track, along the base of the cellar
04:30wall where they come through.
04:32You do not need a heap, a thin line does it.
04:35But here is the honest part, the part the bottle sellers always leave out.
04:40It does not last.
04:42The first damp morning, the first rain, the first time you mop near it, it is undone.
04:48And you lay it down again.
04:50It is not a wall that stands forever.
04:53It is a chore that you repeat.
04:55And I will not dress that up for you, because keeping a house has always been a thing you repeat.
05:01The bread does not bake once for the year.
05:04The garden is not weeded once and done.
05:07This is the same.
05:08It is humble, repeating work.
05:10And it costs almost nothing.
05:12And it asks a little of you every week.
05:15That is the honest shape of it.
05:17Now, the third use is the trap.
05:19And I want to be especially plain here, because this is exactly where the tall tales live and breed.
05:26You have surely heard it, that you mix baking soda with sugar, and the ants carry it home and eat
05:32it.
05:32And a gas builds up inside their little bodies, and that is what kills them.
05:37I want you to hear me clearly.
05:39That is not so.
05:40I have stood and watched ants walk straight across that mixture, pick out the sugar, carry it home to the
05:46nest,
05:47and thrive.
05:48The soda does not gas them.
05:50It is a story that sounds clever, and is simply false.
05:54And if you build your whole defense on it, you will be back at that shelf of bottles by August,
05:59frustrated and out the money.
06:01Here is what actually catches the small flyers.
06:03In canning season, with overripe fruit and tomatoes on the counter, you will get fruit flies and gnats.
06:10It is nearly a law of nature.
06:12What truly catches them is a little apple cider vinegar in a shallow dish with one single drop of dish
06:18soap stirred in.
06:19The vinegar smell draws them down to it, and the drop of soap breaks the surface of the water,
06:25so they cannot stand on top the way they normally could, and they sink.
06:30That is the whole of it, and it works beautifully.
06:33You can put a pinch of soda in if it pleases you,
06:35but I will not stand here and tell you the soda is what did the catching,
06:40because the vinegar and the soap did the catching.
06:42I would far rather you know exactly which tool earned its bread,
06:46so that when you are short on one, you know which one you actually needed.
06:51And here is one more that is genuinely true,
06:54for the worst-tempered pest of all, the fire ant.
06:57And I know my northern neighbors are spared this misery,
07:00but my southern viewers will know it well.
07:03You pour a good cup or two of plain vinegar straight down onto the mound,
07:07and you follow it with a scoop of baking soda,
07:10and it foams up and floods down through their tunnels and galleries,
07:14and they will abandon that mound and move along.
07:17But understand me plainly.
07:19The way I have tried to be plain all the way through,
07:21it is the vinegar flooding the nest that does that work.
07:25The soda makes the foam, and the foam helps it travel,
07:28but do not credit the soda with what the vinegar earned.
07:32Honest is honest, even about a fire ant.
07:35Now I owe you the other half,
07:37because a woman who tells you only the good half is not teaching you.
07:41She is selling you.
07:42So here is plainly what baking soda will not do,
07:45and you must hear all of it.
07:47It will not kill a cockroach by gas in its belly.
07:50It will not poison a mouse,
07:52and please, please do not trust your house to that one.
07:55A mouse will eat baking soda and be perfectly fine,
07:59and go right on chewing through your cornmeal and your good flour.
08:02It will not rid you of bedbugs,
08:04and bedbugs are a real misery that wants doing properly,
08:08not with a sprinkle of powder.
08:10It will not handle termites,
08:12and if you ever see termites working in the beams of your house,
08:15you do not reach for the baking soda.
08:17You call a man who knows them,
08:19and you call him today and not next week,
08:22because that is your home holding itself up.
08:24And it will not clear a wasp nest or a hornet nest.
08:28I would not for anything have you standing up under a nest
08:31with a little spray bottle of soda water,
08:33trusting your safety to a thing that does not work,
08:36while angry wasps decide what to do about you.
08:39That is a job for stronger help,
08:41or for someone who knows it well.
08:43There is no shame in any of that.
08:46Knowing the limit of a tool is not a weakness of the tool.
08:50It is the beginning of real wisdom about it.
08:53The woman who knows exactly what her box of soda can and cannot do
08:58is far better armed than the woman who was promised it does everything
09:02and finds out too late and too infested that it does not.
09:07Now let me ask the question I think you are owed.
09:11Who profits from you not knowing all of this?
09:14And I will not tell you there is some room full of men plotting against your pantry,
09:19because that is not how it works,
09:21and I will not lie to you even in that direction.
09:24It is worse than a plot, in a way,
09:26because no one ever has to plot it.
09:29There is simply a whole industry built upon the bottle,
09:33built on you believing that the one thing
09:35standing between your family and the bugs
09:37is something you must go and buy again every single season,
09:42keep locked up high,
09:43and smell on your hands afterwards.
09:46The plain box of soda on your baking shelf
09:49does a few real, honest jobs cheaply and well,
09:52and there is not one salesman anywhere
09:55who makes a dime from telling you so.
09:58So nobody tells you.
09:59The forgetting itself is the product they are selling.
10:03Nobody had to coordinate a thing.
10:06The silence pays for itself.
10:09The women in my family knew this powder for a hundred small uses,
10:13and the pests were the least of them.
10:16The midwife in our district kept the box of it in her bag.
10:19My mother kept one in the kitchen by the flower
10:22and another down in the cellar.
10:24And the thing I want you to notice
10:26is that they never once pretended it was the answer to everything.
10:30They knew precisely which jobs it was good for,
10:33and they used it for exactly those.
10:36And for the rest, they reached for the right thing instead.
10:39That is the whole of the inheritance.
10:42Not a magic powder,
10:43but the good sense to know what a humble tool is actually for.
10:48So here is what I would ask of you.
10:50Go and try it on the slugs after the next good rain,
10:54and watch what it does.
10:56Lay your barrier line at the cellar door
10:59and see, over a week,
11:01whether the silverfish thin out.
11:03And then come down to the comments
11:05and tell me how it went.
11:06And when you do, tell me your county,
11:09and tell me how old your house is.
11:11I ask that for a real reason.
11:14An old house has its own pests
11:16and its own damp corners and its own ways,
11:19different from a new one,
11:21and different again from one county to the next.
11:24I learn as much from your houses
11:26as you could ever learn from mine.
11:28So tell me what crawls in your part of the country,
11:31and tell me what your own mother
11:33or your grandmother used against it,
11:35because that knowledge is worth keeping,
11:37and far too much of it
11:39has already been quietly let go.
11:41The bottle on the store shelf
11:43will always be there next season,
11:45waiting, asking for your money all over again.
11:49The box of soda on your shelf
11:51asks once and then serves for a year.
11:54My mother kept hers right beside the flower,
11:56and she kept her good plain sense right there beside it.
12:00And of those two things,
12:01it is the second one I most want to hand down to you today.
12:04I'll see you in the next one today.
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