Post by Pacelli on Apr 6, 2018 14:17:09 GMT -5
I found this online, so I thought I would pass it on. I have personally known many who have contracted Lyme Disease, it’s horrible and debilitating. The best way to fight Lyme is to not get it in the first place. If you are a property owner, here are some simple and cheap things you can do to keep ticks out of your yard:
Ticks are nasty=fact, but not so much fun. The National Pest Management Association just released their annual report stating it will be a bad year for ticks in the northeast. What can you do to keep ticks away from your yard? Ticks like damp, dark areas with leaves, and brush. Clean up your yard and keep the grass cut short. Prune trees and bushes to let more sunlight in. Make a 3 foot wide buffer zone made of gravel, or wood chips between your lawn and wooded areas. Ticks don’t like to cross it, because it is too dry and sharp. Then plant some tick repellant plants like American beauty-berry bushes, lavender, garlic, Pennyroyal Pyrethrum (type of chrysanthemum), sage, eucalyptus, geranium, and peppermint essential oils (not safe around cats). Make sure your trash is covered, so you don’t invite raccoons and skunks. They can carry ticks. You can also make “tick tubes”. Take a bunch of fat cotton balls. Spray them with permethrin (same kind you spray on your clothes). Stuff them into empty toilet paper tubes and put them around the edges of your yard in stone walls, wood piles, wooded areas etc. Mice like dry nesting material-so put them in dry areas. Place the tubes about 10 yards apart, twice a year. For our area, good times are early May and August. Mice will take the cotton balls back to their nests and the permethrin works as a tick repellant to them just as it does humans. The ticks won’t catch a ride on the mice and it cuts down your tick population. Check your tubes after a few weeks, if they are working, your cotton balls will be gone. If the tube hasn’t been touched, move it to another area. After that, invite in the critters! Chickens and guinea hens will eat ticks, as will backyard ground feeding birds like robins. Just don’t let bird seed pile up on the ground. That invites the mice, which carry ticks. And…don’t forget the possums. They may not be the cutest animal, but in studies, possums have been found to eat more ticks than any other creature! So, enjoy the beautiful weather this weekend, clean up your yard and invite Mr. Opossum over for dinner!.