logo
Cheap 16p hack helps to repel ants from your garden this summer – but be careful to avoid an easy mistake

Cheap 16p hack helps to repel ants from your garden this summer – but be careful to avoid an easy mistake

The Sun01-06-2025
A SIMPLE step can help protect your plants from an ant infestation this summer.
And you won't have to worry about your flowerbeds because this hack is all-natural and budget-friendly.
Adding this affordable item to your garden can help to repel unwanted pests all summer long.
The scent of bananas is said to work as a natural repellant for insects such as aphids.
According to the experts at The Cool Down, placing banana peels in the soil around your plants can work as a barrier for ants.
They recommend simply covering your peels with a thin layer of soil for this hack.
Alternatively, you can cut the peel into small pieces and evenly distribute them throughout your garden.
And since you can pick up bananas for just 16p a-piece from Sainsbury's, this step won't break your budget.
There are important steps to remember when carrying out this unique hack.
When burying banana peels, make sure to fully cover them in soil so as not to attract animals to your garden.
You should also make sure not to leave the peels exposed as it can attract flies to your garden.
As well as burying the peels, you can also use them to create a banana water spray.
Top Hacks to Keep Foxes Out of Your Garden
First, place a banana peel in five cups of water and bring the mixture to a boil.
Once the mixture has cooled down, add it to a spray bottle and spritz the mixture directly on the leaves and stems of your plants.
Severe infestations can cause plant leaves to turn yellow and die as aphids transmit viruses from plant to plant.
You can also use soap and tights to repel flies from your home this summer.
Tips for keeping pests from your garden
Plant companion plants such as peppermint to repel rats.
Place Garden Netting Pest Barrier, over your flowerbeds.
Fill open-top containers with beer and place in soil to repel slugs.
Spray plants with Neem Oil, to repel ants, flies, and spiders.
Dust your flowerbeds with Diatomaceous Earth.
Mix 1 tablespoon dish soap, 10 drops peppermint oil, and 4 cups water and spray on flowerbeds.
Place eggshells around your plants to protect from slugs and snails.
You can also use a £1.40 household item to deter ants from entering your home.
A 49p hack helps to keep wasps from your garden, but you'll want to act soon.
Another trick prevents squirrels from digging up your garden and all you need is a kitchen staple.
And common storage mistakes may be attracting rodents to your garden shed.
A £7 Waitrose buy helps to repel insects from your garden while keeping you cool at the same time.
2
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Streeting's NHS plans are baby steps in the right direction
Streeting's NHS plans are baby steps in the right direction

Telegraph

time10 minutes ago

  • Telegraph

Streeting's NHS plans are baby steps in the right direction

Some 28 years after Tony Blair told British voters there were just '24 hours to save the NHS', Labour Party leader Sir Keir Starmer is telling the public that it's now ' reform or die ' for the health service. Blair was evidently wrong. Sir Keir, on the other hand, may well prove to be right. A post-Covid productivity slump, combined with a spiralling funding bill, an ageing population, and a mountainous backlog of cases awaiting care, have combined with the existing flaws in the structure of the health service to produce a serious threat to its continued viability. These trends are not new. The Conservative Party, over its 14 years in office, largely elected not to deal with them, kicking the can down the road rather than face the opprobrium that would come with reform of an institution so riddled with vested interests and political controversy. Health Secretary Wes Streeting, then, deserves credit for being willing to come out swinging when so many before him have meekly elected to decline the double-edged opportunity of reforming the NHS. The Government's new 10 year health plan recognises that there is no route forward for the status quo, and in its attempt to reckon with this has come up with some promising ideas. Ending the 8am rush for GP appointments by training more doctors, focusing on the prevention of illness as well as its treatment, making use of new technology to improve productivity, and publishing league tables that show which parts of the service are failing are all steps that would be welcome if implemented successfully. That, however, is the catch: 'if'. The idea, for instance, that the NHS should have a Single Patient Record to 'bring an end to the frustration of repeating your medical history to different doctors' is a good one. It was a good one, too, when the National Programme for IT in the NHS was launched in 2002, spent vast sums attempting to implement it, and then failed amid bitter recriminations. Similar things could be said of other ideas. The history of the NHS, to borrow from Adam Smith, has too often been a 'conspiracy against the public' on behalf of those providing health services. Sir Jim Mackey's comment last week that the NHS sees patients as an 'inconvenience' aptly summarised the attitudes and culture that must be shattered. Having spent the last year pulling together its plan, the hard work for the Government begins now.

NHS app will be ‘indispensable part of life', vows Keir Starmer
NHS app will be ‘indispensable part of life', vows Keir Starmer

Times

timean hour ago

  • Times

NHS app will be ‘indispensable part of life', vows Keir Starmer

Sir Keir Starmer promised patients 'a doctor in your pocket' as he made the NHS app the centrepiece of his plan to reform the failing health service. Putting a consumer revolution in health technology at the heart of Labour's pledge to rescue the NHS, the prime minister said the app would become 'an indispensable part of life for everyone'. Every patient in the country has been promised a unified medical record on the app within three years, which will become a part of the 'national critical infrastructure' in Britain, according to Wes Streeting, the health secretary, writing in The Times. • Wes Streeting: Patient records shake-up will improve our experience of the NHS A ten-year plan for the NHS published on Thursday set out a vision of a 'neighbourhood health service' where far more services are available in local clinics, with health chiefs seeking to raise private finance to build dozens of new health centres. The plan says the NHS is on 'an existential brink', on the path to failure and shrivelling into a 'poor service for poor people'. After a £30 billion boost at the spending review, NHS staff are warned that the answer to the health service's problems 'cannot simply be more money, especially when more money is a fiscal fantasy'. Condemning a system where extra cash has not improved results, the plan insists that only a radical reinvention of how the NHS works will save it, promising to rewire the allocation of a £200 billion NHS budget to pay organisations for better results, rather than care as usual. The new NHS app will offer 24/7 health advice and will constitute the 'front door' to the health service, providing 'seamless access for health professionals to the right information no matter where they are', Streeting said. He said the single patient record, which would be available on the app, would remove the 'constant admin' and 'trauma' caused by patients having to repeat themselves at every appointment. The single patient record, which will give each patient access to their medical data via an app, was a key suggestion from The Times Health Commission last year. It will be 'designed and treated' like a 'national critical infrastructure', the personal information it contains 'protected with the highest levels of security and robustly safeguarded', Streeting added. Starmer told an audience of frontline staff in east London: 'Look at your phones, look at your apps — because what you see on that screen is that entire industries have reorganised around apps. Retail, transport, finance, weather — you name it. Why can't we do that with health?' He said: 'We will transform the NHS app so it becomes an indispensable part of life for everyone. It will become, as technology develops, like having a doctor in your pocket, providing you with 24-hour advice, seven days a week.' Starmer said services on the app would include 'booking appointments at your convenience, ordering your prescriptions, guiding you to local charities or businesses that can improve your wellbeing'. This is promised from 2028, and the plan sets out far more ambitious goals of using the app to message staff involved in your care, offering video calls with consultants, AI advice on symptoms and personalised lifestyle advice and health coaching. The app is also being adapted to show hospital league tables so patients can shop around for the shortest waits or best care, while allowing them to self-refer for services such as mental health therapy and podiatry without the need to see a GP. Personalised genetic risk scores that highlight propensity to certain diseases are also promised. Smartwatches, glucose monitors and intelligent fabrics that monitor vital signs will also be able to feed data to the app for use in care and monitoring, the plan promises. Wearable devices will be given out free in poor areas with high health needs in an effort to prevent illness. 'Ambient AI' will summarise consultations to avoid the need for doctors to type up notes. • Political Sketch: Rachel Reeves smiles 'appily through surreal NHS strategy launch While the vision has been broadly welcomed across the health service, it has also attracted scepticism given the NHS dire record in large-scale IT programmes. Ministers say a £10 billion technology fund is part of the answer, stressing that Labour's fiscal rules mean that unlike in the past this cannot be raided to top up day-to-day budgets. Kamila Hawthorne, of the Royal College of GPs, said: 'Major AI developments still feel a long way off when many GPs are reporting that their basic IT systems are slow, inefficient and can't communicate with one another.' Sarah Woolnough, chief executive of the King's Fund think tank, added: 'There are more than 150 pages of a vision of how things could be different in the NHS by 2035, but nowhere near enough detail about how it will be implemented.' Others criticised a lack of a plan for social care and a decision to strip out tougher-edged public health measures such as a ban on alcohol advertising. Plans for mandatory health warnings on bottles are included, however.

Growth in NHS appointments continues to slow under Labour despite Starmer's claims of success
Growth in NHS appointments continues to slow under Labour despite Starmer's claims of success

Sky News

timean hour ago

  • Sky News

Growth in NHS appointments continues to slow under Labour despite Starmer's claims of success

Sir Keir Starmer and his health secretary, Wes Streeting, often trumpet the number of extra NHS appointments since they took office as an example of their success, but the figures tell a different story. The prime minister today highlighted that four million additional appointments have been made in their first nine months in office - overachieving on their target of two million in a year. But Sky News and fact-checkers at Full Fact have previously shown that the number of extra appointments is slowing under Labour, and our analysis of the latest figures shows that this trend has continued. The four million extra appointments that Starmer describes is equivalent to an 8.0% rise since Labour took office. This is a smaller increase compared with the 10.6% rise under his predecessor Rishi Sunak during the same period last year, when five million additional appointments were made. The rate of increase has also slowed since Labour took office. As we reported earlier in the year, the government's original target of two million new appointments was never ambitious - and exceeding it is hardly the boast the government claims. Full Fact says the pledge "appears very modest", adding "if [the government] achieved a rise of two million in its first year in office, it would be by far the smallest rise since the pandemic". The number of appointments, currently in the region of 75 million annually across England, tends to increase every year, as the population size and level of demand rises. So, increasing the number is not remarkable itself, but whether the pace of increase can meet unmet demand and help chip away at the long treatment waiting list is what really matters. Two million extra appointments are equivalent to less than 3% of the almost 70 million carried out in the year to June 2024 - significantly lower than what has been achieved in recent years. The prime minister also seemed to suggest that the four million appointments added was a record. "At the last election a year ago, we promised two million extra appointments in the NHS in the first year of a Labour government. "We have now delivered four million extra appointments and that's thanks to your hard work and that of your colleagues. "4 million. That's a record amount for a single year ever," he said at Thursday's press conference, addressing NHS staff. We put to the Department for Health and Social Care that this did not constitute a record, and they clarified that the prime minister was referring to the fact that the extra appointments contributed to the highest level of appointments in a single year - rather than the four million appointments being a record number of additional appointments, which would be inaccurate. We asked the government whether the prime minister's remarks were arguably misleading, but they did not comment on this in their response. Leo Benedictus, journalist at Full Fact, said: "While the total number of appointments may be at a record high, the actual rise in these appointments under Labour is significantly lower than it was the previous year. "Historic data - which Full Fact had to obtain under the Freedom of Information Act - shows that while the government may hail the four million figure as a great achievement, the numbers have been rising at a similar rate for years. "It still isn't entirely clear exactly which sorts of activity the Government is claiming is at record level, because for these appointments alone that just isn't true. "No voter thinks improving the NHS is simple or easy, but in a time of historically low trust in politics, it is even more important that the Government is transparent and honest about their data and its significance."

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store