eChipmunks

Need ideas on eliminating ticks from outside around house?

This year is turning into a nightmare for finding ticks on our dog and sometimes on us. Every day my husband has to check the dog for ticks and usually finds one or two. He has even found a couple on himself and one day I found one in my hair after I had bent down to pet the dog. We do live next door to a quarry that is wooded, but we've lived here 20 years and have never had this bad a problem before. What is the most effective and relatively safe method to eliminate the ticks from the yard. Is it better to call a pest control company? What kind of chemicals would they use? Is there a more natural method that would work just as good to get rid of them, but that might be less toxic for us? It's only the middle of May - I'm already dreading the summer months, unless we can do something about these little blood sucking vermin!

Public Comments

1. get Frontline for your dog asap. Also you will HAVE to get your yard sprayed with a pyrethrin or permectin spray of somesort to kill the ticks
2. You can buy some spray that you can treat your yard with at Home Depot, I do it once a year and it keeps all the pest down. It's a trade off I'm willing to make.
3. just go to your local garden store and buy a bag of elimator flea, tick and ant granules and spread over your yard. How much to buy depends on the size of your yard
4. my mama used powdered or granular sulphur on her yard every year to control chiggers and ticks (oklahoma), so when we bought a house we did the same and have not ever had a problem. if our dog went into the wooded area he might get a tick, so we went to our local agriculture store and bought "cow tags" to hang from his collar. after that, he never got another tick. these are harmless, non toxic ways to rid your yard and animals of pests such as ticks, fleas and chiggers. be sure to wash hands after handling the "cow tag", as they have a type of pesticide to keep flies and other annoying pests from the animal. i hope these things will work for you. they did for us.
5. Ticks will not cross open ground. They are worried about getting eaten by birds, so will not chance it. If possible, you can clear the ground about 2 to 3 feet wide around your fence. Natural, none pesticide treatment for fleas and tick is diatomaceous earth. These are actually just billions of small diatoms, sea creatures, that are made up of calcium and shaped like a sticker burr. They are small enough, and sharp enough to pierce the exterior shell of most insects, which allows them to dehydrate/bleed to death from multiple cuts.