I live in rural area of the Ozarks where there are a lot of ticks. Treating shoes and clothes with permethrin is the most effective way to keep them off you.
And doing "tick checks" when you come inside your home is a habit here. Getting them off you fast is the best way to keep from getting lyme disease.
And either burning off or grinding up and piling up all the leaves to make compost this time of year is the best way to get them out of your yard.
I learned this the hard way. Here's a video of how bad they can get here and one of my first attempts at trying to get rid of them. It didn't really work very well:
I have never seen anything like that up here in New England. That towel has more ticks on it than I've seen in my life, and we're not exactly a low-Lyme area.
I did end up nuking the yard with pesticide that year.
Since then I've ground up the leaves this time of year and pile them up to compost them. In spring and summer I bag grass clippings and stuff those into the pile of composting leaves and it's amazing how hot those clippings get. Hot enough to roast any ticks in there for sure. So for the past few years we've had almost no ticks at all during the warm season. And I haven't had to use any pesticides.
And possums! When I learned 1) how utterly harmless possums are and 2) how voraciously they love to eat ticks, they became my favorite backyard visitors.
If you find a possum in your yard, leave ‘em be and count yourself lucky.
We have possums here too, and they occasionally come up to our front porch to eat our dogs food.
We also have a lot of deer here and they carry ticks that get huge on them, so they're spreading them around wherever they go. We're surrounded on 3 sides by Army Corp land that's forest and filled with critters that spread them around.
Yeah we've had quite a few chickens over the years, but we also have a lot of raccoons and fox and coyotes other chicken eating predators here. Just a couple years ago I was cleaning our coop and heard the chickens squawking like crazy and I ran outside to see what was causing the commotion and there was a Golden Eagle that had one of our chickens in it claws trying to fly off.
I'd never seen a Golden Eagle before and it is by far the biggest bird I've ever seen. They're huge! I yelled at it and waved my arms (trying to look big) and it finally let go and flew off.
Seconded. I grew up in southwest Missouri. When we came in from the woods or fields, the question was how many ticks you’d have to pull off you. It was guaranteed you’d have at least a couple.
I’m glad Lyme disease wasn’t as pervasive when I was a kid. At 2+ tick bites a day, every day, all summer, we couldn’t have beat those odds.
Well you for sure know what's it like here. We live on a ridge above a horseshoe bend on Bull Shoals lake and are surrounded hundreds of acres of public land that's forested.
And doing "tick checks" when you come inside your home is a habit here. Getting them off you fast is the best way to keep from getting lyme disease.
And either burning off or grinding up and piling up all the leaves to make compost this time of year is the best way to get them out of your yard.
I learned this the hard way. Here's a video of how bad they can get here and one of my first attempts at trying to get rid of them. It didn't really work very well:
https://youtu.be/TFVDv8swzxQ?si=C4R064iTgRjdvSwv