Alan Titchmarsh urges gardeners to do one thing to keep ants away

If your is being terrorised by ants, don’t call in the exterminators just yet. presenter and national expert has some handy tips to keep them at bay.

While don’t do much damage to your garden in small numbers, a swarm of them can cause problems. They can infest your home and crawl all over your floors and kitchen countertops. Even worse, they like to burrow into wood to create nests. This means that your floors, doors and bedframes could be targets for their superhuman drilling powers.

Ants are also known to spread dirt and disease, which can make you very sick if you’re not careful. This includes spreading bacteria like salmonella and E. coli in your food.

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They’re notoriously difficult to get rid of. The tiny insects build large colonies deep underground or in hard-to-reach places like cracks in the wall, making them near-impossible to eradicate.

So what’s the solution? While you can buy chemical ant killers, these may not be the best solution for your home as they contain a myriad of unpleasant toxic chemicals.

A better idea is to look at what’s attracting ants to your garden in the first place. Ants like warm environments, which means as summer approaches they’re more likely to come out in force.

They’re also highly food-driven creatures, so any vegetation or food scraps is going to attract them in droves. This means your compost pile is also a prime target.

Not only do they like to munch on all of the leftover peels and food waste, they also like to lay their eggs in your mud pile. These are usually small, white and difficult to spot.

In a video shared by , Alan Titchmarsh revealed his fool-proof method to keep ants out of a compost heap, as reported by . He explained: "As far as your compost heap goes, if you bear to mix it up every now and again that will disturb the ants.”

This is because it will bring the tiny ant eggs to the surface, making them vulnerable. If there are any birds around, they will swoop in to feed on them – effectively doing the hard work for you.

You can also make sure to water it regularly, as ants don’t like environments that are too wet. Alan continued: "They also tend to like it dry so giving the heap a good watering will help to discourage them.”

He also added that you should cover the top of your compost pile so that heat builds up. This is because ants don’t like when their environment becomes too hot.