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As a parent, you likely do everything you can to create a family-friendly outdoor space where your kids can play freely all year round. You may well have created kid-safe areas and introduced everything from a playhouse to a mud kitchen. There’s just one thing you can’t seem to get a grip on – dreaded ticks!
These creepy crawlies, which are famed for hiding in long grass, are forever looking for a human host. And, if your kids flash even the smallest bit of skin, they could become unwilling food for troublesome ticks. As well as being a generally unpleasant experience for your children, a tick bite could lead to life-long issues like Lymes disease.
The trouble is that, often, we assume there’s nothing more we can do against ticks than simply urging our kids to cover up outside. In truth, however, there are some far more effective options for creating a tick-free garden year-round. And, we’re going to consider the best options here.
Tip 1: Maintain Your Landscaping
The more long grass you leave in your garden, the more risk there is of ticks choosing this spot to call home. This is because ticks love to hide in foliage, and they’re also pretty impossible to spot when they do. Forget needles in a haystack, try finding a tick in grass overgrowth!
As such, the first step to a tick-free garden is simply maintaining your landscaping. On the one hand, this means keeping your lawn pretty short, but you’ll also want to maintain landscaping around the edges of your borders with something like a weed eater trimmer. Cordless trimmers like these ensure you can get into all of those hard-to-reach edges to get rid of the clumpy grass growth that ticks love best.
Make sure that you also dispose of cuttings and leaf litter after your landscaping, as piles of these can also attract ticks like you wouldn’t believe.
Tip 2: Choose Repellent Plants
Luckily, getting rid of ticks needn’t see you stripping back your entire outdoor space. In truth, you can still make use of plenty of pretty foliage. Just make sure you’re opting for tick-repellent plants.
Ticks may love overgrowth, but they aren’t half as keen on the scents and chemicals released by some plants. Lavender is a great starting point here, as it smells great (to humans at least!), comes back every year, and also repels ticks like nobody’s business. This is in part due to lavender’s strong scent. Interestingly, lavender also contains an ingredient called Linalool, which is present in a lot of insect repellants.
And, luscious lavender isn’t your only option here. Other great tick-repellent plants that are deserving of a place in your flower beds include –
- Rosemary
- Marigolds
- Chrysanthemums
- Juniper
- And more
Like lavender, many of these plants have strong, tick-repellent scents, as well as insect-repellent properties like the insecticidal compound, pyrethrum, that’s found in chrysanthemums.
Tip 3: Limit Animal Access
Ticks are tiny. In fact, an unfed tick can measure as little as just a few millimetres. While these guys might be pesky, they aren’t exactly running marathons or jumping fences. So, how exactly do they get into your garden in the first place?
In truth, ticks are pretty cunning at hitching a free ride from their hosts. Just as you would unwittingly take a tick into your home after it bit you, animals will often inadvertently bring ticks into your garden. This is particularly true of cats, who tend to cover long distances and weave in and out of backyards, but birds, foxes, and deer can also carry these critters from one place to another.
While we’re not saying you entirely need to batten down the hatches from a wildlife perspective, you may want to limit animal access somewhat to reduce the prevalence of ticks. Additions like high fences and limited hiding spots can be especially useful for keeping creeping cats at bay. To make sure this doesn’t undo the environmental damage of attracting birds and insects to your outdoor space, it can be worth keeping animal-free areas where your kids can play, and making sure any wildlife sections of your garden are fully fenced off.
Tip 4: Introduce Wood Chips of Gravel
Ticks might get a bad rep, but they’re sensitive critters. At least, they are when it comes to rough underfoot surfaces like wood chips and gravel. Ticks seem to like crossing wood-chipped flowerbeds about as much as we humans enjoy walking over broken glass. In other words, not at all! As such, you can significantly reduce your number of tick visitors with these simple additions.
Luckily, these additions have some practical uses, as well as keeping ticks away. Applying wood chips outside is particularly useful for purposes like weed suppression and extending plant life. Wood chips also make a pretty good home for a lot of creepy crawlies, allowing you to do your bit for the environment and still ensure a tick-free space.
Tip 5: Conduct Regular Checks
As mentioned, ticks are pretty difficult to spot when they’re out in the wild, but there are ways you can check for an infestation. For one thing, regularly checking and treating any pets in your household is key. You’ll also want to do a once-over on kids when they come in from playing outside with their skin exposed.
You can also conduct quick checks outside by inspecting known tick habitats, such as high-traffic areas or any long grassy sections. While you probably won’t spot any unfed tiny ticks this way, a fed tick can grow significantly and will be more visible than you might expect during these rounds. Tick dragging, which involves pulling a cloth through areas where you suspect ticks, can also help here, allowing you to both catch and rehome any ticks in the area.
Takeaway
If you’re ticked off with ticks in your family garden, then it’s time to take action. Luckily, there are ways to turn your outdoor space into a tick-free zone. Simply follow these tips to make it happen.
Image Credit: depositphotos.com
