You can reduce your tick exposure through yard maintenance and personal precautions, but fully eliminating ticks from your property on your own is not realistic. Ticks are continuously reintroduced by deer, rodents, and birds, which means the population replenishes even after you've addressed the habitat.
You are probably already tired of finding ticks on yourself, your kids, or your pets. So you’re wondering what you can do to get rid of them. There are a lot of things you can do to reduce your tick exposure, even if getting rid of them entirely is not feasible.
If you want to get rid of ticks, you need to start with their habitat. Ticks dry out in the hot sun during the day, and they have to hide in shaded and moist places to survive. You can remove a lot of those places by keeping grass short, clearing leaf litter, trimming overgrown vegetation, and removing brush piles. This alone will open your yard up to sun exposure and airflow, letting nature work in your favor.
A lot of homes in the Rockford area are close to wooded lots. The areas where wooded lots meet open lawns—called transition zones—tend to be especially bad for ticks. What you can do about this is lay down a three-foot barrier of gravel or wood chips between your lawn and the tree line. Ticks will be reluctant to cross the barrier, and those that try will likely dry out in the sun.
Beyond this, you can also take personal precautions. It’s wise to wear long pants tucked into socks in tick-heavy areas and also to use tick repellents with DEET or permethrin. Then when you come back inside, do a tick check to remove any ticks that still manage to get onto you.
Where DIY efforts hit a wall is population control. You can make your yard less attractive to ticks, but you can't stop deer from walking through, mice from nesting under the shed, or birds from dropping tick larvae in your grass. Without a residual treatment on the vegetation and ground cover where ticks wait for hosts, the population will likely rebuild on its own despite your efforts. Professional treatment goes a long way.
If you are tired of dealing with ticks on your Rockford property, Mosquito Squad of Rockford can help. A technician can walk your property and find out where ticks harbor. Then they can come up with a custom treatment plan and treat accordingly. You can expect a reduction in the tick population by up to 90% with re-treatments every 21 days to keep your coverage steady.
