Skip The Pesticide: Consumer Reports Recommends A Better Way To Keep Ticks Out Of Your Lawn

Ticks are a huge problem. They carry all sorts of diseases and can make you, your family, and your pets sick. Unfortunately, they're tiny as well, and it makes them rather difficult to keep out of your lawn. Pesticides are thought to be a strong opponent against these little creatures, but they may not be as effective as you would hope. Ticks tend to hide in cool, moist areas, like leaf litter, which means your pesticide spray might not reach them. It also has the downside of harming your good insect visitors, like bees and butterflies.

Thankfully, Consumer Reports has suggestions on an alternative to pesticides to reduce the number of ticks that visit your yard — mowing. Despite these little animals often being found in hot environments, they don't enjoy staying directly in the sun. So if you want to keep ticks out, you need to reduce the shady places they can hide. Though you may not think about it, one of the best sources of shade for these little pests is actually grass. If your lawn gets too tall, it has a shady path throughout almost the entirety of your lawn. In fact, overgrown lawns are one of the common things in your yard that could be luring ticks. You can't just use a mower to catch the majority of the area, though. You also want to get the edges and hard-to-reach places with string trimmers or something similar.

 "Ticks like to climb to the top of tall grass blades and look for questing opportunities—the chance to grab on to animals like deer or humans," Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, New York's Integrated Pest Management Program coordinator at Cornell, stated when talking to Consumer Reports, confirming that keeping your yard maintained can be useful to repel ticks. Though you need to keep your grass short for this pesticide alternative, you don't want to go too low. It's more important that you keep it regularly trimmed. Let the grass get to a little over 4 inches tall, then mow it down to about 3 inches. Focus on doing these regular, small cuts about once a week, which is generally how often you should mow your lawn during the growing season anyway.

When cutting back your lawn, you also want to make sure you clean up all your grass and weed trimmings. It might be good for the soil to leave the nutrients, but these patches of grass clippings also create shade for ticks. Consumer Reports recommends using a bagging attachment with your mower to be safe, especially if you've let your lawn grow a little taller than it should have. In addition to keeping your grass and weeds maintained, you can also help naturally keep ticks away from your home by growing wormwoods (Artemisia absinthium).