How to Get Rid of Ticks in Your Yard on Long Island

1. Clear the edge. Rake leaf litter and cut back brush along every line where lawn meets woods, fence, stone wall, or planting bed. That strip is where most of the ticks are.
2. Lay a barrier. The CDC recommends a 3 foot wide barrier of wood chips or gravel between lawns and wooded areas to restrict tick movement into the areas you use.
3. Mow and let the sun in. Ticks dry out fast in direct sun. The CDC's list is mow frequently, remove leaf litter, and clear tall grass and brush at the edge of the lawn.
4. Move the living space. The CDC says to keep playground equipment, decks, and patios away from yard edges and trees. On a small Nassau lot that can mean sliding the swing set ten feet toward the house.
5. Fix the woodpile. Stack wood neatly in a dry area, off the ground and away from the house, which also discourages the rodents that carry ticks.
6. Deal with the hosts. The Connecticut handbook calls the white-footed mouse the principal reservoir for the Lyme bacteria. Seal the house against mice, and stop feeding deer with hostas and arborvitae planted at the wood line.
7. Treat the perimeter. A licensed applicator treats the lawn edge, the first several feet into the woods, stone walls, beds, and around the woodpile, in spring and again in fall.

In the shade at the edge. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station's work on residential lawns found 82 percent of deer ticks within 9 feet of the lawn edge, especially next to woods, stone walls, and ornamental plantings. Sunny, mowed turf in the middle of the yard holds very few.

Ticks cannot fly or jump. They climb onto grass and low vegetation and wait with their front legs out for something to brush past. That is why the strip along the woods, the groundcover under the shrubs, the leaf litter that never gets raked, and the stone wall you sit on all matter more than the open lawn. If you have twenty minutes and a rake, spend them on the edge.

Yes, when it is aimed at the edge and timed right. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station reports that a pyrethroid-based insecticide gives 85 percent or better suppression of blacklegged ticks, and that a single application of most acaricides is sufficient for the summer tick season. The station's fact sheet puts the optimum application for nymphs at mid-May to early June.

What spraying does not do is fix the habitat. Treating a yard that is still buried in leaf litter is paying to treat tick habitat you could have removed. The CDC's guidance is a combination of landscaping and treatment, not a spray alone, and that is how we quote it.

Spring and fall, matched to the two stages that bite people. The New York State Department of Health says nymphs, the poppy seed sized stage, are active from mid-May to mid-August, and adults are most active from March to mid-May and from mid-August to November. Our tick yard treatment runs in spring for the nymphs and again in fall for the adults.

Ticks do not disappear in winter. The Department of Health notes that ticks can be active any time the temperature is above 45 degrees, and the CDC says adult blacklegged ticks may be out looking for a host whenever winter temperatures are above freezing. A mild January afternoon on the North Shore is a tick afternoon.

Four that bite people. The blacklegged or deer tick carries Lyme disease, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, and Powassan virus. The lone star tick, according to the CDC, transmits ehrlichiosis and tularemia, and growing evidence suggests alpha-gal syndrome, the red meat allergy, may be triggered by its bite. The American dog tick transmits Rocky Mountain spotted fever and tularemia. The Asian longhorned tick, which the state announced was found in Westchester County in 2018, is now on Long Island and is mainly a livestock and deer pest.

Lyme is the one to take seriously here. In the state's 2024 communicable disease counts, Suffolk County reported 3,152 Lyme disease cases, more than any other county in New York, and Nassau reported 521.

For a while. The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station's fact sheet says products with rosemary and peppermint oil or garlic juice have been shown to control ticks or suppress activity for 2 to 3 weeks, compared with a single conventional application being sufficient for the summer season. So botanicals are not nothing, but you are re-applying every few weeks to get what one treatment does. Ultrasonic devices have no evidence behind them for ticks. Sun and dryness are the natural controls that actually work, which brings you back to mowing and clearing the edge.

The hosts bring the ticks. The Connecticut handbook identifies the white-footed mouse as the principal reservoir for the Lyme bacteria; the ticks pick it up feeding on infected mice. Deer carry the adults. In Connecticut work cited by the station, deer tick larvae, nymphs, and adults were reduced by 100, 85, and 74 percent respectively within an area surrounded by an electric deer fence, though the station notes fencing smaller areas probably would not be as effective without other measures.

On a typical Long Island lot the practical version is: keep mice out of the house with sealed gaps and locked exterior bait stations, plant things deer do not browse at the wood line, and let the perimeter treatment do the rest.

Take it off correctly and note the date. The CDC's method is to grasp the tick as close to the skin as possible with clean fine-tipped tweezers and pull away from the skin with steady, even pressure, without twisting. Do not use petroleum jelly, heat, nail polish, or other home remedies, which the CDC says can force infected fluid from the tick into the skin. The New York State Department of Health says that in general a tick must be attached for 36 to 48 hours or more to transmit Lyme, so a tick found and removed the same day is a low risk.

For a dog, the same tweezers technique works. Then check the dog's ears, between the toes, and under the collar, since those are the spots ticks ride in on.

The quote depends on the length of the wooded or brushy edge, how much stone wall and bed line there is, and whether you want a single spring treatment or the spring and fall program. Ticks get a free estimate. We walk the property, mark the zone that will be treated, and put it in writing with a short list of landscape changes specific to your yard. There is no guarantee on tick treatment, because a yard cannot be sealed the way a house can, and we say that up front. See our tick control service page for the full scope.