Protect your yard from ticks and Lyme disease with these essential tips on lawn care, barriers, and personal precautions to ensure a safe outdoor space for your family and pets.
As spring approaches, it’s time to start getting the yard ready for gardening, playing, and grilling. That means it’s also time to make the yard tick-safe, so that you, your children, your pets, and your guests can enjoy time outside with proper protection. The more ticks you keep out of your yard, the less chance you’ll have of getting Lyme and/or another tick-borne disease right outside your home.
Here are some steps you can take:
- Keep your lawn short. Ticks love long grasses and reach from them to humans or pets walking by.
- Move the swing set. Ticks like to live in moist, shady places like the perimeter of the yard, where it might back up to shrubs or woods. Put your kids’ swing set, playscape, sandbox, or water table in the center of the lawn, away from the perimeter and in a spot that gets lots of sun.
- Move the patio furniture. Rather than lounging in a hammock between trees, put chairs, tables, and loungers on patio surfaces away from grass and shrubs.
- Rake and dispose of brush and leaf piles. Fun as they can be to play in, they’re also where ticks like to hide out.
- Trim weeds, shrubs, and bushes. Keep moist, shady vegetation to a minimum, allowing as much sunlight into the yard as possible.
- Remove ground cover. Ticks are known to live in pachysandra and Japanese barberry. While these plants may look pretty, they also can be a ripe nesting ground for ticks.
- Create a barrier. A three-foot barrier of wood chips or mulch between the edge of the yard and the area you spend time can help keep ticks away.
- Seal stone walls. Make dark, wet spots among stones uninviting to ticks.
- Spray your yard with acaricides. A professional pest control company or landscaper can spray acaricides, which kill ticks, around your yard. Most work for six to eight weeks and then need to be reapplied. You can also spray your yard yourself.
- Consider tick mitigating plants and shrubs. Specific plants such as lavender, rosemary, garlic, and others can enhance garden aesthetics while reducing the risk of tick trespass into your space.
- Install tick tubes. You can buy (or make) tubes filled with permethrin-soaked cotton. Mice, which are carriers of black-legged ticks, will take the cotton and use it to build nests. The permethrin will then kill ticks that feed on mice before they can get to you.
Taking these steps can help reduce the number of ticks in your yard, but of course it only takes one tick bite to change your life. Therefore, in addition to protecting your yard, it’s most important to continue to protect yourself from tick bites. You can do this by being Tick AWARE:
- AVOID areas where ticks live such as wood piles, leaf litter, long grass, beach grass, stone walls, and perimeters where the lawn meets the woods.
- WEAR light-colored clothing to spot ticks more easily, like a long-sleeved tucked in at the waist, long pants tucked into high socks, closed-toed shoes, and a hat with your hair tucked in.
- APPLY EPA-approved tick repellent (such as picaridin or DEET) to skin and insecticide (such as permethrin) to clothing and shoes, as directed.
- REMOVE clothing upon entering the home; toss into the dryer at high temperature for 10-15 minutes to kill live ticks (putting them in the washer won’t work).
- EXAMINE yourself and your pets for ticks daily, feeling for bumps in areas like the back of knees, the groin, the armpits, in and behind the ears, in the belly button, and on the scalp.
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