I thought the way the borax/diatomaceous earth worked is that it is very sharp on a micro scale, so it effectively cuts holes in the exoskeleton and the cockroaches die. Since its not an ingested poison, they can't bring it back for the other roaches to eat...

Thank you for putting the picture of the guys in their costumes...I would have been way to repulsed by a real picture!

The borax does make holes but from the inside and then the other roaches will eat anything including their own. I think the hardest part of any of these pests is that you can be immaculately clean and they will still live. A friend and I moved into this apt which already had the tiny cockroaches and we tried being ultra clean and running after the things with a shoe when the lights were flicked on. Ultimately we just moved out for a few months entirely---the AC was bad anyway. We left baits etc but everything was spotless. When we came back most everything was dead but there were still some survivors---I have no idea what they were eating and there were only a few left which we smashed in the next few weeks but still these things are made to survive. After that I don't really suspect the cleanliness of the people who are plagued by these things.

a trick i learned was to mix enough water into the borax and flour to make a paste. apply like grout on problem areas.

You can have no food at all in your house and still get roaches coming in for water during droughts or hot summers. They also like the glue on cardboard boxes (if you put anything in storage, watch out what you bring home), and are prone to living in dense vegetation or woodpiles, which make a convenient entry vector if you have either right next to your house. Some parts of the country are just roachy, it doesn't matter how clean you are, the trick is to make them prefer to live somewhere else.

Keep anything even remotely edible in glass or rigid plastic containers with snug fitting lids - and get rid of the cardboard or whatever packaging the stuff came in.

Cleaning includes scraping all bits of gunk out of cracks (like under baseboards and between the sink and counter-top).

One other thing - take out the garbage every night.

Probably the best to hope for is control rather than eradication, if you have a bad infestation or live in a roach-prone area.

Though I did manage to pretty much get rid of all the critters in an apartment with an assortment of insect inhabitants using just these methods.

Roaches will basically eat anything carbon-based and can go for quite a while without food, so once you have them being really clean won't cut it. The borax method is pretty good, but another thing that helps is to make sure that everything is really dry - roaches need water more often than food (kindof like people). Make sure there's no water around your drain or in the sink, dry all dishes completely right after you wash them and fix any leaky pipes. Then, if you make a paste with the borax and flour they will be more likely to eat it since they need the water.

I live in NYC, and even immaculate apartments get the occasional large foraging roach. I've heard the smaller ones are harder to get rid of.

One more solution - get a cat! Our cats are great little cockroach hunters.

Anyone who's ever lived in or even visited New Orleans can vouch for the fact that there is NO way to eliminate cockroaches, and all the posts that say cleanliness makes no difference are correct. Dead messy people give these pests and open invite, but spotless, uninhabited places get them, too, for roaches will eat such things as clothing, table and bed linens...and I don't mean just soiled ones. I know this sounds ecologically suicidal, but the only reasonable solution I've found is to have an exterminator do a major league fogging before you move in, and then treat once a month...and hope and pray your neighbors are doing the same.

BTW, if you already have infestation, borax and other such "safe" treatments really don't work very well at all. Every roach you want to die has to eat some of the borax paste. That's a lot of paste.

You also are going to have a hard time eliminating water from your sinks since there is always water in the pea traps of your sinks and you cannot reasonably seal your toilet (eww I know).

Catnip!!

Catnip can be used as a roach repellent. From Science Daily! Proven to be effective:
Researchers have confirmed an old wives' tale: Placing catnip around the house helps keep cockroaches away.

Today at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society, Iowa State University researchers Chris Peterson and Joel Coats, Ph.D., reported that cockroaches are repelled by catnip - specifically, two forms of the chemical called nepetalactone, found in the catnip plant. Their findings could lead to the development of new natural insect repellents that could be sprayed along baseboards to keep roaches from coming out of the walls.

"There are really no commercial cockroach repellents," said Peterson. "Most are insecticides designed to kill roaches. People don't seem to just want them to go away, they want them dead."

I can also say that it has worked for me in the past. Of course you are then also possibly attracting cats.

Boniva: "Of course you are then also possibly attracting cats."

Sounds great to me! No more roaches, lots of kitties! :)

I love how we're talking about getting rid of cockroaches naturally—and there's a Terminix ad on the page. Oh, the irony.

Thank you so much for not picturing the real thing on this page.. they're the one thing I'm terrified of!

hmmm, Gregor Samsa for Halloween, what a good idea.

i love the costume, too! :)

so i've had bad roaches before in texas where EVERTHING is bigger, including the roaches! i swear to you this one huge roach that was living in the loft of our log cabin was the size of my hand! i know because i eventually killed it! it was all out war! it was a hissing roach, because when i tried to smash it it would hiss at me and run down inside the walls! it would come out at night and no amount of bait or poison natural or otherwise could stop it. i had to plan an attack. i stayed up all night one night with the lights out waiting to hear the hissing noise then flung on the light and started pounding at it. it took a while because it was fast but i didn't let up chasing it and eventually got it. it was so big i saved it and showed it to all my friends and they couldn't believe the rat size roach that was living in our house.
ewwwwww.
yeah, had to share that story. :)

oh, and also, does anyone know if dried catnip works, or is it only the live plant?

vintage,
I wanna see a picture of this roach.
crafty.

I used a combination of Boric acid and vinegar to eliminate or at least hold a bay, an invasion of roaches of all sizes in my old apartment.

Both Boric acid and diatomaceous earth work to dehydrate roaches, but they can be slow to kill the colony. As for vinegar, it won't kill roaches, but they seem to be put off by the smell. Of course you may also find the smell objectionable. I wiped down my bathroom and kitchen counters with plain white vinegar daily and left a bowl of vinegar on my stove.

After about a month they moved on, but I continued to apply dry Boric acid to their hiding places and I keep a small dish of vinegar on the stove just in case.

Oh, vintagedress, when I lived in Georgia there were absolutely GIANT roaches called palmetto bugs. I only saw them in the flesh once when I was on the patio of a bar in Atlanta. I would have died if I had ever seen one in my home! I'll bet that's what you have in Texas.

I live in Hawaii now, and I know there is no way to totally eliminate them. I'm immaculate about housekeeping. Flour, cereal, etc. all goes in the fridge in a ziplock. But they are all over the yard an every once in a while one will make it into the house. I have to hunt them down and kill them or I can't sleep.

"BTW, if you already have infestation, borax and other such "safe" treatments really don't work very well at all."

I agree with that. I had an infestation (in NYC) and we tried EVERYTHING, for months. Sealed everything up, cleaned everything, the paste, catnip, etc. Roaches were still there.

Finally we just bought one of those room foggers. Took all the dishes and food out of the kitchen, hung tarps over the entrances to it. Locked the cat in the bedroom. Went for a long walk to the bookstore, dinner, the movie theater, and dessert. When we came back we vacuumed up all the dead roaches, cleaned the kitchen like our lives depended on it (neither of us were keen on using the fogger in the first place), and moved everything back in, washing all dishes and containers along the way.

That was a year ago. I haven't seen a roach since. Sometimes you really do need to bring in the big guns. I'm not a fan of it, but that's been my experience.

I experienced a roach problem years ago in my first apartment. It is important to understand that they are a tenacious pest and because they tend to emerge in the dark you are never sure of the size of your infestation, which I learned the hard way. Therefore, my suggestion is use boric acid, a more refined version of the borax. The compound is purchased in power form which you spread with a squeeze bottle in a fine line of dust along the interior and exterior perimeter of the kitchen and bath cabinetry and and any other cabinetry, large appliances, large furniture pieces, and ALL of the baseboards. Leave the boric acid in place permanently, where it will act as a deterrent to further infestation and will kill off the existing problem.

Another safe and effective method is the "Las Vegas Roach Trap." I don't know how keen I'd be using this indoors, but my entire roach problem is outside (thank God), although nothing quite says "welcome home" like a bunch of roaches scurrying around on the porch and garage door! Yuck! I used the cocoa/flour/borax "kill powder" in my garage last year and rarely get them inside at all anymore.

For outside, I use the LV Roach Trap, which is simply an old jar, like a large pickle jar (I've found the larger cans that pre-ground espresso come in work great, too) with wet coffee grounds in the bottom. Lean it against a wall on the ground at such an angle that whatever crawls in can't crawl out and you'll be amazed at how many of the bastards you trap in there. They usually drown or just die from heat/starvation.

Change the grounds and rewet them every few days and you have a very effective trap that it completely non-toxic. The roaches are VERY attracted to the dampness of the grounds, so even if they aren't hopping in there too readily, you'll see them all congregated around it instead of running around.

I still think I'm going to have an exterminator out, though. They live behind the concrete slab that makes up my front entryway, I think, as well as in some rotted wood railroad ties that the previous owner used for landscaping.

Ultimately what I need to do, I think, is nuke and try to seal around the concrete at the door and then nuke the area where the landscaping is, then after a few weeks remove all that wood, use brick/block of some sort, and re-nuke. That should hopefully do it. What I don't want to do is drive them inside!

I've found baits to be extremely effective at dealing with roach infestations. To me, baits are preferable to foggers b/c they don't coat your counters with icky stuff, and they don't leave the floor littered with dead bugs. The caveat is that you have to use 2 or 3 times as many baits as the box tells you to. Never mind this 4 in the kitchen, 2 in the bathroom nonsense. Carpet the place with them. 2 or 3 under the sink, 2 or 3 under the fridge, several stuck to baseboards... When the infestation is under control, you can go back to using a normal amount for maintenance.

vintage - sounds like you might have had someone's escaped pet. Gross as it is to me, people keep those giant, hissing roaches as pets. They are called Madagascar roaches, which I assume means they are native to Madagascar, or maybe it's just a catchy name to increase their appeal.

Frum took the words out of my mouth. Roach baits / roach motels work, and work well. Believe me, I lived with a roach infestation for many many years. What ultimately worked after several failed attempts was putting out LOTS of roach motels. For my small apartment (where roaches were only in the kitchen and bathroom, thankfully) I bought at least 5 or 6 boxes, meaning we put out dozens of them all over (to add to suggestions above, I'd recommend putting them in/above cabinets, behind kitchen counters if you can, and around pipes/radiators). Yes, it's going to be aesthetically displeasing, but it will be worth it. And then once they're gone, as frum said, keep several around for maintenance.

We haven't had a problem since except when the first batch must have expired and a few came back; as soon as I put out new ones, they left. An yes, they're toxic, but it's enclosed within the plastic enclosure, and nowhere near as harmful/inconvienent/expensive as fumigating. Honestly, I could write a love poem to roach motels; they've seriously upgraded my quality of life.

In my building in Jersey City we have Palmettos- giant, flying 3-inch "Palmettos" (American cockroach - Periplaneta americana). They come into my apartment through a gigantic hole behind the water heater. My water heater is large and square like a dishwasher and because it is filled with water, probably weighs about 300 lbs. I can't move it to get behind it and put up plywood to seal off the hole. I can see the hole with a flashlight and a mirror but I can't reach it. The landlord has already politely refused to seal it up. What can I do to seal this up? Help!

Roach colonies live in your walls. To get rid of them means being able to fill any cracks where they may be getting in and then dealing with what is living in the wall spaces.

Obviously apartment living curtails a lot of this but it is possible to drill a hole large enough to pour in boric acid powder, fill and paint over it. If you are treating what you see in the rooms you are only killing the tiny front lines.

You can also buy double sided carpet tape and it can do a good job on smaller bugs. Between carpet tape, boric acid, roach motels and those little bait things for places you don't want to lay out powders you can usually keep them to a small invasion. The only way to eradicate them is by repairing outside walls and treating inside the walls.

There is a system of relatively safe pest control that has been developed to deal with all kinds of pests. I worked in a building that used this method to treat for cockroaches and mice and it worked very well. It took about 6 months, but considering there were two restaurants in the building, as well as offices, that was a damn good outcome. It's called Integrated Pest Management. Here is a link that describes the premise -
http://www.epa.gov/opp00001/factsheets/ipm.htm

Why oh why did I google image Madagascar roach?

Continuing in the cat line, I've learned to tolerate the roaches outside (and only because they are outside.) I guess Callisto is a locavore.

1. Thanks for the costume picture - so much better than the real thing.

2. Luz, please do write a poem about roach motels. I would hang it in my house.

3. Adopt a dog (or cat, if you must) from the animal shelter and train it to do the job for you. If it can't, well at least you have a dog :) or cat.

I just left an apartment where I had a war with roaches. My experience was a nightmare and so stressful it was what pushed me out (that and my rent being raised an unreasonable amount).
I did a lot of research and pleaded with the management to help with the pest control. We had several species all coming from outside. I know there was plumbing issues (you can tell when the bushes above the pipes are totally dead and won't come back to life). Also they used mulch EVERYWHERE which was basically an open house party for the nasty things. Most of the roaches were 2 inches in length and would crawl in through the front and back door. The management wouldn't have the doors sealed properly and insisted the monthly pest control service would take care of the problem in time. First of all, the pest control was never seen spraying outdoors, secondly I don't think they even sprayed in doors. We also had a bad spider problem. Once they knocked when I was home, I asked if they could return in 10 minutes and they never did.
*Keep your recycling outdoors no matter what. They also love beer and cardboard.
I moved about 3 weeks ago and my favorite feature of the current place is NOT seeing my front porch covered in roaches when I come home every night.

I'm allergic to wheat--finally something I can appreciate about my condition.

IMPORTANT WARNING:

ONLY "food grade diatomaceous earth" is safe to use! The stuff you can buy for pool filters and the like is TOXIC. For people, for pets.

If it is not clearly labeled "food grade diatomaceous earth, it is NOT!

Please edit the article to include this information...readers may not always get to comment #33 before deciding to follow your advice!

Big guns and cats.

By big guns I mean exterminator.

I live in Florida and roaches love it here as much as retirees from NY do.

I think those borax concoctions are a waste of time if you live in an area prone to roaches. What I suggest:
Buy BENGAL spray.
Empty out your kitchen.
Spray every single crease, seam, corner, crack you can find. Wait.
Roaches appear, crippled and then they will die. It's a bit daunting.
Clean them up the dead roaches.
Clean all the surfaces, handles, backsplashes, etc. and throw out the sponge. Put everything back in your kitchen. Make a habit of keeping your kitchen clean: trash cans with secure lids, no standing water or dirty dishes in the sink, no crumbs nowhere.
Live in peace!

50/50 mix of baking soda and sugar. They will taste the sugar and eat it, the baking soda will get into their stomachs and mix with their acid, while they go back into your walls and they will explode

The best thing to get rid of cockroaches is to keep your house clean, specially your kitchen. Cockroaches loves food, so make sure that you clean the kitchen after using it.
hiSunglasses

I did pretty much all the things you can think of to get rid of roaches. My cats became immune to them - I'd physically pick kitty up, show her the roach, she'd pretend she didn't see anything. I finally was able to afford an exterminator and we sealed up every inch of the apartment except for underneath the radiators. So far, so good...and 3 months counting....

From what I've read, diatomaceous earth is VERY harmful for your lungs, so I'm not sure this is the best advice. Food-grade is the best kind, but it is still very bad for your lungs.

I also live in New Orleans where roaches are a constant problem, especially in the summer. The past few months I have been battling an infestation that got worse and worse. I keep my apartment very clean, keep food in plastic & glass containers, sealed up cracks, etc. I tried boric acid and roach motels and honestly, neither seemed to do anything. It got to the point where I was seeing a couple dozen every night -- I'd open the dishwasher and there'd be several running around in there, they'd be in my cat's food bowl, sometimes one would run across the shower wall when I was in there. The kitchen had so many that I basically stopped preparing food there. It was bad! My landlord sent over a handyman a couple of times last month who sprayed something -- smelled like Raid or similar -- and that did absolutely nothing either. I was at wit's end! Those of you who have dealt with a similar problem know that feeling of anxiety you get when turning on the kitchen light at night ... it's awful.

So, after some research online I ended up ordering 2 products: MaxForce gel and Gentrol Point Source growth regulator. So far I've only used the MaxForce and it is AMAZING. It's a poison that is also a bait and roaches go crazy for it. I put some around my kitchen, bathroom & hallway 2 days ago. Literally within 10 minutes of putting it out, the roaches started coming out of hiding to eat it. I was stoked. The next morning -- 12 hours after putting it out -- I found many dead & dying roaches. It was like the confederate hospital scene in Gone With the Wind. I know that sounds gross, but if you've ever dealt with an infestation you know the feeling of glee you get when seeing a dead roach! Now it's been 2 days and already there's been a huge drop in the number of roaches I see around the apartment. None in the hallway, just 1 or 2 in the bathroom and a few in the kitchen. This is just in 2 days! The directions say it takes a month to completely get rid of the infestation, so I am on cloud nine that this seems to be working, and working so quickly. Also there are more & more bodies everywhere -- morbid but satisfying. I really, really recommend this product. And no, they have not paid me to say that :)

Yes, it can be tough to get rid of these especially in a high volume roach area. You just have to stick with it. I also use diatomaceous earth, boric acid and even glass jars with oil around the top or the inside and a piece of banana inside. I have also seen it recommended to use a gel bait in the back of cabinets in several places in small BB size amounts. But make sure you have all the entry points sealed off first or they will just keep coming. Good Luck!
Epete_us

Yes, it can be tough to get rid of these especially in a high volume roach area. You just have to stick with it. I also use diatomaceous earth, boric acid and even glass jars with oil around the top or the inside and a piece of banana inside. I have also seen it recommended to use a gel bait in the back of cabinets in several places in small BB size amounts. But make sure you have all the entry points sealed off first or they will just keep coming. Good Luck!
Epete_us

if you have a children, dog or puppy in the house be very careful with the baits. I had a puppy eat one and didnt notice he had it until it was too late. He died overnight while we were sleeping. We had a neighbor knock on the door at 5am to let us know our puppy had passed away in the back yard and he wanted to give us the chance to take care of the puppy before our children woke up and noticed. He was an outside puppy but would sneak in when the kids would go outside. he was scooted right back out the door but grabbed the bait without us knowing. We only know thats how he died because we found the chewed up bait in the back yard while searching the back yard for clues as to how he passed. Please if you have animals or children keep the baits out of reach (under a fridge etc)

I guess it's going to be kinda tough, then, to empty the toilet.

I have a problem with big ol nasty American cockroaches-about once a month. They are hardy little bougars. Recently I sprayed one and managed to get into a dustpan and ran to the toilet. I was overjoyed bc I HATE dealing with their creepy tennacly corpses. Anyway, I flushed, but somehow Big Bob ended up between the jets, and was still running up the bowl- all the while I was spraying about 1/2 a cup's worth of Raid in a steady stream. I couldn't believe how fast his little legs were going. I didn't know if the Raid would hold out. Finally I was able to flush again, and the hideous little jerk went down this time.