Tick Prevention at Your Residence

To prevent or help with tick control, you should maintain your yard and house. This is done by cleaning up clutter in your yard and making sure you don’t leave clothing on the ground within your home. Organize your piles of wood and other things in your yard so ticks don’t have a damp place to hide from the sun.

Make sure to do tick checks before you come into your residence, and check any pets who come back in from the outdoors. Check out tick prevention for more information with pet checks. Maintain the lawn by mowing the grass to keep it under 4 and a half inches (I recommend 1 to 2-inch long grass), and eliminate brush next to the house. If you do have an infestation, call a certified pest control agency as soon as possible, or find an eco-friendly way to get rid of the ticks. Place a 3-foot barrier of wood, mulch, or stone strip of land between woods and your property, and do the same for driveways and around houses.

The articles below say to be careful using insecticides to spray for ticks, because these sprays can cause a false sense of security. Insecticides kill most of the ticks, but not all ticks. Those who are more tolerant to insecticides can survive passing on the genetic trait to their offspring.

Using bug spray when you go outside is a great idea according to consumer reports. I would recommend you do a tick drag to find out if you have ticks on or near your property. For a tick drag you take a 5-inch white sheet with a frame attached and drag it on the tall grass or in the brush to pick up ticks. This process tells you if you have ticks on your property. You might want to do this in more than 1 spot on your yard for more accurate information on where you have ticks.

When you go out wear long pants and tuck the legs of your pants into your footwear. The other alternative, if your pants won’t tuck into your footwear, is to bring your socks up over your pants, so ticks cannot get in. You may also want to wear a long sleeved shirt and make sure your clothes are light or bright colored. This way you can see ticks on you and fling them off.

For more in formation you can check out these websites:

Yard information from CDC.gov

Outdoor safety from ticks by consumerreports.org

These pictures are good example of tick prevention. The left picture shows a neatly groomed yard, the left picture shows tick check on pet.