If your home is in the woods or bumps up to the woods' edge, your backyard is a tick habitat and is not safe without taking one or more of the following measures:

• Cut down enough trees to move the woods' edge away from the home to give an area open to sunlight and provide enough space to create a barrier between the yard and the woods' edge.  You will need a minimum of 9-12 feet between the woods' edge and areas you want to use routinely.

• Build a very large deck or patio for play and leisure to avoid the yard and/or create a play area in the yard that is opened to the sun, will not attract deer and is mulched and/or surrounded by a large mulch or gravel barrier that is maintained with routine acaricide treatments.  (Once a month for permethrin treatments.)

 
Once you have enough open, sunny area around your home, do the following:​  

• Clear tall grasses and brush around homes and at the edge of lawns.

• Remove leaf litter, brush and undergrowth for a number of feet into the woods and keep it that way by routine maintenance or a mulch layer.

• Place a 3-ft wide barrier of wood chips or gravel between lawns and wooded areas and around patios and play equipment. This creates a drying zone that will restrict tick migration into recreational areas.  Treating the barrier with an acaricide will give best protection.

• Mow the lawn frequently. Ticks die quickly in dry, sunny areas with short grass.

• Keep leaves raked.  Do not allow children to rake leaves or play in them, since this is where adult ticks lay their eggs.

• Eliminate nesting places for mice as much as possible; dense ground cover, brushy areas, stone walls, logs, refuse piles, trash, etc…are nesting areas. Stack wood outside the 3-ft. tick barrier--neatly and in a dry area.

• Keep playground equipment, decks and patios away from yard edges and trees and place them in a sunny location, if possible.

 
Exclude deer from the areas you wish to use routinely:  
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• Put up deer fencing if at all possible.  If deer come into an area, that area is high-risk for ticks.  Deer carry up to several thousand ticks per deer.  Work to have community covenants changed.  Work to have deer fences constructed around schools and sports fields.  Support local government deer control initiatives.

• Remove plants that attract deer and bird feeders that spill seed that rodents and deer want to eat.  All are tick carriers.

• Plant deer-resistant shrubs and plants.

 
Use chemical control in yards...Acaricides and “tick tubes.” Consider hiring an experienced company to do routine yard treatments and place tick tubes. If you are going to treat your yard yourself, do your homework first and be sure to do the following:

• Treat entire yard initially in the spring.  Once the ticks have been eliminated for a couple seasons, it’s possible to treat only the edges of the lawn, into the woods edge, shrubs and garden or mulch beds, and the very important 3-ft barriers and avoid grass.  This assumes that deer are excluded, though.

• Thorough coverage is required; saturate ground cover and leaf litter from surface to soil.  Ticks lay their eggs deep into the debris.  High-pressure sprayers are the most effective.

• Homeowner preparations of acaricides provide control up to twelve weeks:  permethrin (Ortho products), bifenthrin (Ortho products), cyfluthrin (Tempo, Bayer Advanced), and deltamethrin (Bayer Advanced)

• Treat in April or May at a minimum, but consider treating mid-summer and then September to kill egg-laying adults. (Professional services will treat routinely about every 4-6 weeks from spring to fall.)  

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• Use tick tubes. Tick tubes are cardboard tubes containing permethrin-treated cotton balls.  Mice take the cotton balls back to their nests where it kills the young ticks that are feeding on the mice. Tick tubes are used in potential nesting areas in the vicinity of the home to kill ticks on the mice, since the mice can’t be fenced out!  Tick tubes are terrific, but limited in their use, since the egg-laying adult ticks are not killed in this way, not all mice may get treated and deer can always carry ticks into a yard if not kept out.  

Information taken from the Centers for Disease Control, Fairfax County Department of Health, CT Agricultural Experiment Station, and VA Lyme Disease Task Force presentation by Dr. Charles S. Apperson of NC State University. 

Kathy Meyer
Governor’s Task Force on Lyme Disease in VA 2010-13
Parents of Children with Lyme Support Network for DC Metro Area
Email: klizm@aol.com