By Eric Murphy, Climate Legacy
They’re smaller than a dime, have eight legs, and suddenly they’re everywhere. Ticks used to be little more than an occasional nuisance for most Ontarians, something to check for after a hike in the woods or straying through tall grasses. Today, as a warming climate allows them to survive farther and farther north, in the warm months ticks and Lyme disease feel like a nearly-ubiquitous threat. It’s gotten so bad that many of us have gotten used to putting on long pants and sleeves any time we garden, and then doing a full tick check or even showering once we’ve finished outside. So what’s a dedicated gardener – or any outdoorsy person – to do? For this edition of the Trillium Newsletter, OHA and Climate Legacy are partnering to share some important tips to protect yourself (and your garden) from ticks.
- Wear the Right Clothes, and Wear them Correctly
Chances are you’ve heard contradictory advice about what to wear outdoors. Some recommend light clothing to make ticks stand out, and others swear by dark clothing because ticks are less attracted to it
overall. While light clothes do indeed make skittering ticks easier to spot, a 2005 study that had participants wade through tick infested woods found that test subjects dressed in light clothes came away with roughly 20 more ticks on them per person. So when it comes to overall tick prevention, dark clothes appear to be best.Regardless of the colour of your clothes, when you’re walking through an area with active tick populations, you should cover as much of your skin as possible, and tuck your shirt into your pants and pantlegs into your socks to make it harder for ticks to reach your skin. As an added layer of protection, you can wrap double-sided tape around your ankles to catch ticks migrating up from your shoes.
- Skip the Pesticides
Some gardeners take a shock and awe approach to tick management, dousing their gardens and yards in pesticides. This can be effective in the short term, though it’s not guaranteed to get every tick. You also risk endangering other creatures, from more benign insects that bring life to your garden to beloved pets. Additionally, heavy rainfall can wash the pesticides straight from your garden and into local water sources where it can cause even more harm.To lighten pesticide use, some advocate for a more targeted approach, spraying at the border between your more garden/lawn and any forest or tall grasses beyond, to create an inhospitable barrier ticks can’t cross. A greener alternative to that approach is creating a ‘mulch moat’, a three-foot stretch ideally containing woodchips, which create a hot, dry environment ticks can’t survive in. That division can also be helpful to show guests where not to cross in order to avoid ticks.
- Short Grass Helps in a Pinch, but Rewilding is Better Long-Term
As mentioned above, most ticks – including Lyme disease-carrying deer ticks – can’t thrive in a hot and dry environment. That means they love long luscious grass that provides shade and moisture. To make your lawn less hospitable to them, most recommend shearing grass down to three inches. This length makes it harder for ticks to thrive, but won’t kill your lawn like a shorter cut might.To quickly make life harder for ticks, short grass is a good solution, however, there’s a major drawback longterm, which is that short grass is the perfect environment for white-footed mice. These mice carry ticks and play a major role in spreading Lyme disease amongst them. These mice love short lawns, and many of their predators avoid turf grass for more wild, wooded areas. So in the long term, one of the best ways to reduce ticks and the vectors for Lyme is actually to rewild your yard, letting native grasses, shrubs, and trees thrive. This expands the territory of predators like foxes and possums, who not only hunt the mice but also dine on ticks, reducing the overall population dramatically over time and over a larger area, in a way that a few lots of uninhabitable turfgrass simply won’t.
- Watch out for Japanese Barberry – Instead, Cultivate Plants that Ticks Hate
Many gardeners plant Japanese Barberry for its vibrant leaves and berries. Many of us know that it’s invasive, but you might be surprised just how much ticks love it. Barberry provides an ideal humid environment for sheltering ticks and in particular deer ticks. One Connecticut study found that woods with uncontrolled Barberry had 120 Lyme-infected ticks per acre, whereas areas without any Barberry at all had only 10 infected ticks per acre.In place of Barberry, which may be turning your garden into a ticks’ paradise, consider plants that repel ticks and their host mammals. East Coast biologists at a recent tick-proofing conference recommend cultivating “rosemary, chrysanthemum, mint, lemongrass, sage, lavender, garlic, onions, marigold, petunias, brown-eyed susan, and juniper.”
- Finally, Focus on the Root of our Tick Problem; Climate Change!
For many Ontarians, local ticks weren’t a significant problem even a few years ago, but climate change is allowing them to quickly spread to once-inhospitable areas. The warmer our province gets, the more widespread they’ll become and the longer they’ll last each season. The tips we outlined above will help you reduce local ticks and better protect yourself, but they won’t matter if our province becomes more and more tick friendly year-round.To stop climate change in its tracks, we need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and the many products made with them, including unnecessary single use plastics. Turning to renewables instead, and cultivating a healthy, vibrant garden are two important steps you can take to make a difference, but there’s so much more you can do! To get started, keep an eye out for future climate-focused stories in the Trillium Newsletter, or sign up for the seniors-focused Climate Legacy newsletter, we share new stories and climate-focused events every month. Have any questions about this article, or climate action in general? Feel free to email us at .
