So my little pet ants have blazed a trail into my kitchen. I dislike using ant spray, which I think poisons me as well as the ants. So I swept them all away to their doom. But how do I wash away their scent trail so they won’t come back so fast?
I have a vague idea I read somewhere that vinegar does it. Am I remembering that right? In not that, then what?
I use Simple Green, the cleaner. Kills the little buggers too. I leave it down for awhile and it seems to do the trick.
A vinegar wash will erase the trails. What has worked great for me is those little baits that come in 4-packs. I have cats and will not use spray pesticides. Those baits, I put down when the ants show up one spring (long the floorboards and back door where I see them coming in), the ants eat the bait and take it back to the nest and they all die. So far, I’ve had to put the baits down every other year. Not bad for about 5 bucks.
I suggest you use that ant trail to your advantage and get some of those self enclosed (pet safe) ant bait traps so they can take the bait back to the colony and share it.
I think it doesn’t take much to wipe away ant trails. I was in a botanical garden once, and noticed ants zooming by on a tiny ant highway, one every few seconds. Their path was over concrete, and when I wiped my finger across their path, the next ant that came by would come to a stop and begin searching, trying to find the path again. They always found it, of course, because it was only a finger-width away. But I expect if you wiped away a few feet of their path, especially if you used any kind of cleaner like Windex or Lysol, their path would be undetectable to them.
That said, I’m with kanicbird: it’s not the trail you need to wipe out, it’s the ants themselves, or they’ll just keep coming back. I’ve used Terro before with good success. You see a few ants, you put this stuff out; a few hours later you have swarms of ants, but they’re all gathered around the bait, drinking it down to take back to the colony - and within a few days you have zero ants. The active ingredient is borax, which has pretty low toxicity for humans (e.g. they make hand soap with it).
I use standard household orange/citrus cleaners like Zep orange on 'em. Both on the ants directly and their trails.
Windex
This, sometimes. I’ve used various slow-acting poison baits, including Terro, in several places over the years, with highly varying results. Some colonies glom onto it and suck it up just like you say. Wait patiently for a week or two, and those colonies totally gone. Other colonies in other places just seem to ignore it. I set out some Terro here a few weeks ago, and they wouldn’t touch it.
A good strategy often seems to be simply cleaning up whatever they are coming for. I washed all the dishes in the sink and washed the sink. By the following day, they are mostly gone. But there are always a few scouts around. I want to erase the trail so they won’t swarm my kitchen again if I leave dirty dishes in the sink again.
I did it with vinegar this time, since that’s what I have on hand. So far it seems to be working (along with keeping the sink area clean).
Vinegar is going to be a repellant… they are quite smart and good smellers…
they know that vinegar is toxic …
Of course they cannot smell boric acid… and like the taste 
Buy some mint leaves from the grocery store and set them on the kitchen counter. Once they dry you won’t have an ant problem anymore, even if you throw them away the ants stay gone. My wife mentioned us having ant issues to some older coworkers and they told her about this (I guess) common home remedy. I thought it sounded like homeopathic woo, but it works like a charm.
Household bleach. Not only does it nuke the trail but tends to kill any scout ants that return.
There are ant trails all around the outside of my apartment. If I grow mint plants there, will it repel them? (I have some mint plants growing in a few places already, but that isn’t where the ants are. Maybe that’s why?) In general, I don’t care if there are ants all around outside. It’s where they belong.
The ants here appear to be either fat-eating or protein-eating. They swarm all over if I leave something like a piece of hamburger meat out. The Terro poison, I assume, is a sugary bait syrup, and they ignore it.
Yes, I could try plain-old-bleach too. It just so happens that I didn’t, at least not this time.
Apparently yes, along with a lesser know plant called tansy. I would first try just leaving a few mint leaves on your counter, like near your sink. It’s incredibly effective for such a marginal sounding idea.