You can still find ticks in your yard even if you mow regularly. Mowing definitely helps, but ticks concentrate in the shaded edges, garden beds, ground cover, and leaf litter, not open grass.
You mow every week and your lawn looks great. Then a day or two later, you find a tick on your leg after sitting on the patio. It doesn’t seem fair, and it’s unsettling to realize that maintenance alone can’t make tick problems go away.
Short grass definitely helps. Ticks need humidity to thrive and a closely mowed lawn dries out quickly in sunlight, which makes it inhospitable. You’re unlikely to pick up a tick walking across the center of a well-kept lawn on a sunny afternoon.
The issue is everything around the lawn. Ticks don’t live on open turf. Rather, they live in transitional areas at the edges. That could be the mulch bed at your fence, hostas bordering the patio, or ground cover beneath the trees. Leaf litter behind the shed could be giving ticks a place to live. You might have trouble in the strip between your yard and your neighbor’s property where nobody quite mows enough. These shaded, humid zones are where ticks quest, which means climbing onto low vegetation and waiting with outstretched legs for a host to brush past.
Another common issue is the presence of wildlife. Mice, chipmunks, and birds can all carry ticks. As they travel, they can shake ticks off, which means a well-mowed lawn surrounded by ornamental plantings and stone walls can still host ticks.
If you’re looking for a way to control ticks on your property, you can learn more in our video on the 6 C's of tick control. Tips include clearing leaf litter, creating dry buffer zones, and reducing the ground-level cover where ticks wait.
But if you’re a homeowner with a clean yard and you’re still finding ticks, Mosquito Squad of Southern Westchester can help. With barrier treatment, a trained professional can treat the areas where ticks hide. This can reduce the tick population by up to 90% for 3 weeks at a time.
