We've had more seed ticks this summer than any other we can remember. Sometimes I'll pick up to 4 of them off me, before I shower, and then another one or two after showering.

I use a deet based insect repellent, spraying the tops of my shoes, socks and pants cuffs. I then spray around my waist, mostly avoiding contact with my skin. This tends to work wonderfully, except when I am outside for an entire day and the repellent wears off. I forget to re-apply it.

I think the seed ticks are in the vegetation. Sometimes I will find them crawling on my arms after I hoist a large bundle of weeds and carry them to feed to animals.

George

Seed ticks are just the larvae (small ticks) of various tick species and they are either being born on your property or being carried onto it by some sort of wild animal---could be deer, for example, or could be field mice, voles, gophers, squirrels, etc. I think often the seed ticks are on the field mice. Then, once they are on your property and looking for a host, they hang out in vegetation, compost piles, brush piles, etc. waiting for an unsuspecting animal (including human beings) to come along so they can attach themselves to their new host. Ticks always seem worse to me in years with plentiful moisture than in years with low moisture.

When ticks are bad, I spray my clothing and shoes like George does, and I use the insect repellent with the highest percentage of DEET that I can find. I don't like spraying it on my skin, though, and try to avoid that. We normally don't have much of a tick issue here because we have free-range poultry that are tick-eating machines, but there is a point every year where I do start seeing ticks and have to spray my shoes, socks, pants legs, waistband, etc. with DEET for at least a couple of weeks. It normally doesn't take our chickens long to take care of the tick population on their own and after that the ticks normally aren't a problem for us for the rest of the year.

On the linked document, check out Suggestion #6. I haven't tried it but I think it would work, and might be a good way to battle the tick population in bad years when there's lots of them around.

How To Get Rid of Ticks

We've never had to spray our property to get rid of ticks, but if I had to do it, I'd use a pyrethrin or permethrin product, and then I'd keep the kitties inside for a couple of days after that because of the side effects such products can have on them.

I got these in my house once. It was horrible. One must have laid eggs, carried in by my dog. They crawl up to the ceiling. Actually the Pest Control guy said ticks in the house is easy compared to fleas because fleas hide under all kinds of things and are hard to get rid of, still it just grossed me out and I felt itchy all over for days even after they sprayed which did get rid of them. This was years and years ago and I hope no one else ever gets that. I've never seen them in my yard here in OKC and no longer have a dog but when we go to the farm in winter, which is the only time we go, they are out there and active. In January. I've come home with some. I saw them crawling up a tree, hundreds of them.

I could swear they are always concentrated around or in trees! We use some type of repellent, like Deet.

If they are truly seed ticks, the very smallest ticks, just hatched out, you were lucky to get as few as you did. If you happen to step into a spot where they've just hatched you can get up to a hundred on you at once. They are the very tiniest ones, smaller than the period at the end of a sentence. Once they've fed on an animal and fallen the next size gets dispursed around more, dropping off as they get engorged. Those are the ones that usually come by the twos, fours, sixes. Both of these sizes almost always get on you by crawling up your legs. We always spread tick granules around the house and down all the pathways we walk at least once in late spring. Then in seed tick season we use the deet sprays. But this year, we have had very few ticks and so far no seed ticks. We keep our dogs treated since they roam the woods around the house.

Forgot to say, the nightly tick check has been a ritual in our house for years. The last thing we do before we go to bed is look over each other's bodies well for the little devils and remove them with a pair of tweezers.

My husband had Lymes two years in a row several years ago, not good. We do the nightly checks also. Since the tornado took all of are trees we don't have a problem around the house but we have a lot of land with creeks and some of it runs along the river so we are in tick territory all the time. I use Deep Woods Off not taking any chances. Hate the smell but hate Lymes more.

I have read that in order for Lyme's to be transmitted the ticks must remain attached for 24 hours. True or not?

Ticks have not been bad down here this year, but there have been some years when they were so bad that I hated to go outside. I think the free-range poultry mostly control them for us, because if the cats roam off into the deep woodland or into unmowed pastures, they bring ticks home. However, even the cats haven't come home with many ticks this year. It sounds like they have been a lot worse for some of you this year than they have been for us. In the bad years, we do always check ourselves for ticks, but in the good years we don't even have to think about it. This has been a really good year so far (knock on wood).

I suggest keeping pants tucked in to socks and shirt tucked in to pants, then spraying deet on socks and bottom half of pants. Anything that gets past that has to have time to get to your neck before you are done working and drop the clothes in the washer. Deet has damaged the surface of my shoes so I don't spray shoes any more.