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You are here: Home / General Gardening / Garden Pests / How to Keep Ticks Out of Your Yard and Garden

How to Keep Ticks Out of Your Yard and Garden

13 Comments

Keep ticks out of your yard and garden

We live deep in tick country.

Fully half of the ticks here can infect a person with Lyme disease and they are out in force if the weather is halfway decent. If you’re planning to be outside and enjoy the summer, it’s just a battle you have to fight.

That adds a rare element of danger to our vegetable gardening.

My wife had undiagnosed Lyme disease for 15 years. That’s the kind of thing that can make you feel like you’re going to die. Some people do.

And because of climate change ticks—and Lyme disease—are spreading like wildfire into many areas of the U.S. and the world. Most gardeners should be wary of them whether they realize it or not. All it takes is one bite to change your life in a very bad way.

Years of fighting to keep ticks out of our yard and garden, plus a lot of web research, have given us the tools to fight these nasty critters so I want to pass the knowledge on to you. You can keep ticks at bay if you’re diligent and informed.

Establish a perimeter

The first step to keeping ticks out of your garden is proper landscaping. Ticks need high humidity to live and they love wood piles, leaf piles and any other yard waste. Gardeners often have this stuff lying around because we need “brown” material for compost. However, you need to separate it from your main gardening area or get rid of it to keep the ticks at bay.

We have a 3-foot wide perimeter of cedar mulch around the entire yard and garden area. If you keep the grass cut short and the yard clear of waste, this acts as a perimeter defense against ticks. Like many insects, ticks hate cedar and we’ll use that against them (as you’ll see below).

tick on paper

Toss some tick grenades

In April and July (in the U.S.) we put out tick tubes every year to reduce the tick population. These are just cardboard tubes stuffed with cotton balls that are laced with Permethrin, a potent insecticide. You drop these just outside your yard, one about every ten feet until you encircle the area you want to protect.

The mice in the area will take the cotton balls to make their nests, which kill the ticks in the nest. Mice are key carriers of ticks because they travel close to the ground and don’t groom themselves very well. Ticks are very slow moving on their own, but mice can easily transport them into your garden area. You can buy tick tubes on Amazon but you can also easily make them yourself, here’s a thorough tutorial.

Beware of covert agents

Mice aren’t the only animal that can carry ticks of course. Just about any animal you’d want to keep out of your garden will also carry ticks. Chipmunks, voles, squirrels and of course deer are all animals that can serve to carry ticks from the forest into your yard or garden area. It’s almost impossible to keep everything out of your yard, but you can use repellents for smaller animals and fencing for larger ones.

Chemical warfare

This is all-natural chemical warfare of course, but one of the more effective methods we’ve found for keeping ticks at bay is to liberally use cedar oil. Cedar oil is both a contact killer and an effective repellent of ticks. You can get it formulated in different ways. We use the lawn version in a hose end sprayer to treat the yard and garden every couple weeks during the summer. Cedar oil goes around the gardens though, I don’t spray it directly on the plants.

We also use a different formulation directly on our skin and clothing per the directions. Cedar oil is completely non-toxic to humans and it doesn’t bother beneficial insects like bees and butterflies, which is quite a trick on the part of Mother Nature. If you want to learn more about cedar oil and how to use it, see this comprehensive article. If you’re sold on the idea, you can go here to get a discount on cedar oil products.

Lastly, if you find that you have been bitten by a tick. The best thing is to pull it directly off. There are a number of tick removal tools on the market and it’s handy to have one of those around when you need it.

Those are my best tips—if you follow them closely you should see a dramatic reduction of ticks in your garden area this summer. What are your methods for keeping ticks at bay? Let us know in the comments below!

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Filed Under: Garden Pests, Landscaping

Comments

  1. Can't says

    May 27, 2017 at 6:06 pm

    My hens cannot tolerate cedar chips, but I haven’t seen any ticks this year. We have a big flock of wild turkeys around as well as my chickens.
    I usually find a few in the spring on the dogs or me, but none yet.
    (Port Huron area, Michigan)

    Reply
  2. Bev says

    July 3, 2017 at 8:16 pm

    If heard backyard chickens will gobble up ticks like nobody’s business.

    Reply
    • Cj says

      July 15, 2022 at 6:12 pm

      It’s true. We have a flock of 30 free roaming chickens and I haven’t seen a tick yet this season

      Reply
  3. Milica Chatraw says

    August 10, 2017 at 1:42 pm

    We are in southwest Georgia and my husband is bitten couple of times.
    thank you for good advices

    Reply
  4. Frustrated says

    April 11, 2018 at 5:30 pm

    Guineas help a LOT, if you can stand how they look and their infernal noise. I heard that the females are quiet, but haven’t gotten the nerve to have them again in a decade. They did help with the ticks, though. Supposedly chefs love them for fancy restaurants—if you can catch them.

    Reply
  5. J.C. says

    April 13, 2018 at 3:24 am

    Possums are natures best tick control. They eat ticks almost exclusively and are immune to rabies and are North Americas only marsupial. They naturally clean our environment.

    Diamataceous Earth is another great natural option against these nasty bloodsuckers…

    Reply
  6. Richard Plante says

    April 14, 2018 at 12:26 pm

    Does ash from our wood stove help?

    Reply
  7. Maria Smith says

    May 22, 2018 at 1:38 pm

    Guinea fowl for eating ticks and fleas. Never been a problem with since having them on my friend’s farm. Peppermint oil will bring a tick straight out of your skin without touching it and risking any poison entering your bloodstream.

    Reply
    • Deborah says

      May 27, 2018 at 10:23 pm

      Remove any tick with pointy tweezers. Promptly and with a strong pull. They cement themselves to you. Don’t worry it won’t hurt. They anesthetize you too.

      Reply
    • Tracy says

      May 8, 2019 at 4:21 pm

      What do you do with the peppermint oil to get the tick off?

      Reply
    • Susan Hoyt says

      May 10, 2019 at 7:55 am

      ✳️ NEVER EVER make a tick back out of your skin by applying something to it, such as peppermint oil or ANYTHING! They will excrete a substance into you to dissolve the “glue” they had already secreted to stay attached to you! That substance that melts the “glue” can give you Lyme or one of the CO-INFECTIONS that they can ALSO carry! ONLY PULL a tick straight up and out or have a doctor do it!
      PASS THE WORD!

      Reply
  8. Betsy says

    May 27, 2018 at 8:34 am

    I have possums and they eat the ticks. I welcome the possums when they show up on my porch to eat leftover cat food.

    Reply
  9. Becca says

    March 25, 2020 at 6:06 pm

    Guinnea birds are also great for eating all kinds of yard/garden bugs but they won’t destroy plants.

    Reply

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