- 1 day ago
By the time you feel a tick, it is usually already buried in the one place you cannot see — and the way most people dress for the woods makes that worse, not better. In this video I show you the way my mother and grandmother kept ticks off our family on the farm, long before anybody could buy a thing in a bottle: why bare skin is your best warning system, the evening check that catches them before they bite, the sticky-tape trick for the ones you find crawling, and how to make your own dooryard a place ticks do not want to be — using the sun, the short grass, and even the mice themselves. None of it costs much, and most of it costs nothing but attention.
I've written all of this household knowledge down plainly in a little book over at eliasyoder.com, the kind of thing that used to pass from one woman to the next at the kitchen table.
Try the evening check and the dry sunny strip this season, then tell me in the comments: did the ticks pull back from your house? And tell me the county you live in and how old your house is — the old places hold their own wisdom, and I learn as much from you as you do from me.
0:00 — The tick you find in bed (hook)
1:05 — The tick isn't the real prob
I've written all of this household knowledge down plainly in a little book over at eliasyoder.com, the kind of thing that used to pass from one woman to the next at the kitchen table.
Try the evening check and the dry sunny strip this season, then tell me in the comments: did the ticks pull back from your house? And tell me the county you live in and how old your house is — the old places hold their own wisdom, and I learn as much from you as you do from me.
0:00 — The tick you find in bed (hook)
1:05 — The tick isn't the real prob
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Right now, while you are standing in your own garden pulling weeds, or walking the children back from the mailbox,
00:06there is a thing the size of a poppy seed that has hooked onto the top of your shoe and
00:12started climbing.
00:13You will not feel it. It does not bite where you can see.
00:17It crawls up, past your sock, past your knee, and it keeps going until it finds the one place you
00:24cannot watch.
00:25The back of your neck, the edge of your hairline, behind your ear where your fingers never think to check.
00:33And by the time you find it, if you find it, it has already had its supper.
00:38I have pulled more ticks off children and grandchildren than I can count.
00:43Off the dog. Off myself.
00:46And I am going to tell you the truth that took me half my life to understand,
00:50because my mother understood it, and her mother before her,
00:54and I was too busy being afraid of the woods to listen.
00:58The thing you are afraid of is the woods.
01:01The forest behind the house, the deep grass at the field's edge, the place where the deer bed down.
01:08You think, I will stay out of there and I will be safe.
01:12And that is the mistake.
01:14That is the thing that gets people bitten.
01:17Because ticks are not in the woods waiting for you to wander in.
01:21Ticks are at the edge.
01:22They live where the mowed lawn meets the tall grass,
01:26where the garden meets the fence line,
01:28where the shade of the old maple keeps the ground damp through the afternoon.
01:33They live exactly where you live and work and let the little ones play.
01:37The forest is almost the safest place, because that is not where you spend your day.
01:43The dangerous ground is the six feet between your back door and your tomato beds.
01:48My grandmother, my mother's mother, who kept a kitchen garden until she was past 80,
01:54used to say something I did not understand as a girl.
01:57She said,
01:58The tick does not come to find you.
02:00The tick waits to be found.
02:02And then she would tell me about the questing, though she did not call it that.
02:07She would hold up one finger and wiggle it and say,
02:10This is how the tick stands.
02:12It climbs to the top of a blade of grass,
02:14and it lifts up its front legs, and it just waits.
02:18For days.
02:19For weeks, if it has to.
02:21Waiting for something warm to brush past so it can grab hold.
02:25It cannot fly.
02:27It cannot jump.
02:28It cannot chase you.
02:29The only way it ever touches you is if you walk past the blade of grass where it is standing
02:35with its arms up.
02:36That is its whole strategy.
02:38Patience and a low blade of grass.
02:41And once you understand that, that the tick is standing low, waiting, at the edge of where
02:46you walk, then everything about how you protect yourself changes.
02:50You stop fighting the woods and you start managing the edge.
02:53Now, before I show you the methods my family has used for generations,
02:57I want to tell you that I have gathered all of this, the seasonal garden remedies,
03:03the old preservation ways, the household knowledge my mother and grandmother handed down,
03:08into a book over on EliasYoder.com.
03:11My husband keeps the place running, I keep the kitchen and the garden,
03:15and that book is where I have written down the things I am afraid will be forgotten when I am
03:20gone.
03:21It is there if you want it, but you do not need it for what I am about to tell
03:25you.
03:25Everything here costs almost nothing, and most of it you already have.
03:31So, the edge.
03:33Here is how you take it back.
03:35The first thing, and the cheapest thing, is your lawn.
03:38A tick cannot stand its questing post in short, sunny grass.
03:42It dries out.
03:43It needs damp and shade to keep from withering,
03:46and a mowed lawn in the afternoon sun is a desert to it.
03:50So, the strip of ground closest to your house, keep it short, keep it cut.
03:55And where the lawn meets the wild edge, the fence row, the tree line,
03:59that is where you want to make a hard border.
04:02The old way, and it still works, is a band of something dry the tick will not cross.
04:07We have always used a strip of wood chips, or dry leaf mulch raked clean,
04:11about a forearm wide, between the mowed grass and the tall stuff.
04:15The tick will not crawl across that dry, hot band to get to your lawn.
04:20It is a moat.
04:22You are not killing anything.
04:23You are just making the last few feet uncrossable.
04:27So, the tick stays out where it belongs, and your children play where they belong.
04:33The second thing is your feet, because that is the door the tick comes in through.
04:38It grabs your shoe first, always your shoe or your lower leg, because it is standing low.
04:45So, that is where your guard goes up.
04:47In the old days, the women would rub a little of the strong herbs on the children's shoes and stockings,
04:54before they went to the berry patch.
04:56Penny royal, my grandmother used, though I will tell you plainly,
05:00you keep penny royal away from any woman who is carrying a child,
05:05and away from the little one's skin, because it is strong and it is not safe taken in.
05:11On the shoe leather only.
05:13These days, if you want something more certain,
05:16there is a treatment for clothing and shoes made from a flower.
05:20It comes from the chrysanthemum, the same family as the daisy in your dooryard,
05:26and you spray it on the shoes and the cuffs of the trousers,
05:29let it dry all the way, and it lasts near a month.
05:33It is not for your skin, it is for the cloth.
05:36The tick climbs onto a treated shoe, and it does not want to be there, and it lets go.
05:42You have closed the door before it ever opened.
05:46Now, here is the piece almost nobody gets right,
05:49and it goes against what you have been told.
05:52You have been told,
05:53tuck your trousers into your socks,
05:56button up to your neck,
05:58cover every inch.
05:59And I understand why they say it,
06:02but think about what the tick does.
06:04It climbs up looking for skin.
06:07If you have sealed yourself up tight from ankle to throat,
06:11the tick just keeps climbing,
06:13looking and looking,
06:15and the only skin it finds is the top of your head and your hairline,
06:20the one place you will never feel it and never see it.
06:24You have funneled the thing straight to the worst possible spot.
06:28My mother did it the other way,
06:30and I do it her way still.
06:32When I am working the garden edge or walking the fence,
06:36I wear my skirts and sleeves as I always do,
06:39but I do not seal myself into a fortress.
06:43I let myself feel.
06:45Because a tick crawling on bare skin or over a stocking,
06:49you will feel it,
06:51that little tickle,
06:52that wrong feeling,
06:53and you will brush it off before it ever reaches your hair.
06:57Your own skin is the alarm.
07:00Do not muffle the alarm.
07:01The point is not to make yourself a sealed sack.
07:06The point is to feel the thing the moment it is on you,
07:10while it is still low,
07:11while you can still get it.
07:13Which brings me to the most important habit,
07:16and it is free,
07:17and it is the one my grandmother never let any of us skip.
07:21At the end of every day spent outdoors in the warm months,
07:26you check.
07:27Every child,
07:28every evening,
07:29before bed.
07:30We made it part of the washing up.
07:33You look behind the ears,
07:35along the hairline,
07:36the back of the neck,
07:37behind the knees,
07:39anywhere it is warm and folded and hidden.
07:42The reason this matters so much
07:44is something most people do not know.
07:47When a tick bites,
07:49it puts a kind of numbing into your skin,
07:51the way the dentist numbs your jaw,
07:54so you will not feel it digging in.
07:56That is why people wake up with a tick already fastened and never felt a thing.
08:02So you cannot wait to feel the bite.
08:05The bite is silent by design.
08:08Your only good chance is to find it crawling before it settles,
08:12or to find it the same evening before it has had long to feed.
08:17A daily check is not fussing.
08:19It is the whole battle.
08:21Now,
08:22what if you find one already hooked in?
08:25Do not panic,
08:26and do not do what everyone's instinct tells them.
08:29Do not grab it with your fingers and squeeze,
08:32because squeezing the body pushes its insides back into the bite,
08:36and that is the very thing that makes people sick.
08:40Do not burn it.
08:41Do not smother it with grease,
08:43no matter what your neighbor swears by,
08:45because a distressed tick spits more back into you,
08:49not less.
08:50What you want is a fine pointed tweezer,
08:53or one of those little notch removers they sell for a dollar or two.
08:56You slip it down close against the skin,
08:59right at the head,
09:00and you pull straight up,
09:01slow and steady,
09:03no twisting,
09:04straight out,
09:05the way you would pull a splinter you want to keep whole.
09:08Then,
09:08you wash the spot with soap and water.
09:10And here is a thing worth doing.
09:12Take a bit of clear tape and press the tick onto it and fold it over.
09:17And write the date on it and keep it.
09:19Because if anyone takes a fever or a strange spreading rash in the weeks after,
09:24that little tick taped to a card tells the doctor exactly what to look for.
09:29That is not an old wives notion.
09:31That is plain sense.
09:32And I will say this clearly,
09:34because honesty is the only thing worth anything.
09:37A tick bite is not a thing to home doctor and hope.
09:40If a tick has been fastened on you,
09:43and especially if a rash comes,
09:45or a fever,
09:46or aches like the flu out of season,
09:48you go see the English doctor.
09:50There are sicknesses that come from these bites that we have no garden remedy for,
09:55and that the doctor can stop early and cannot stop late.
09:58I keep the old knowledge for a hundred things.
10:01This one,
10:02I send you to the doctor,
10:04and I am not ashamed to say so.
10:06Keeping you well matters more than keeping the whole story under my own roof.
10:11Now I want you to think about why nobody taught you any of this.
10:14Why you grew up afraid of the deep woods,
10:17and never once heard that the danger is at your own lawn's edge.
10:21Why the only answer you were ever sold was a bottle to spray on your body,
10:25and a worry that never lifts.
10:28It is not that anyone sat down and decided to keep you ignorant.
10:32It is worse than that,
10:33because there is no one to blame and so nothing to fix.
10:37It is just that there is no money in a moat made of wood chips.
10:41There is no profit in teaching a mother to check her children behind the ears every evening for free.
10:46There is no company that grows rich off you keeping your grass short,
10:51and feeling the tickle on your own arm and brushing it away.
10:54The money is all in the fear and the bottle.
10:58So the simple things,
10:59the things that actually keep the tick off you,
11:02the things every farm grandmother knew,
11:04they just quietly stop being passed down.
11:07Not hidden,
11:08just not worth anyone's while to remember.
11:11And a thing that is no one's job to remember
11:13is a thing that gets forgotten.
11:16So let us not forget it.
11:17Let me ask you to do two things.
11:20First, this evening, before you turn in,
11:23check yourself and check your little ones.
11:25Really check.
11:26The hairline and behind the ears.
11:28And start making it the habit it used to be in every house.
11:32Second, I want to know about your ground.
11:35Tell me in the comments what county you garden in
11:38and how old your house is,
11:40because the old places and the new developments have different troubles,
11:44and I read these and I learn from them.
11:46Tell me what your mother or your grandmother did about ticks,
11:50if you remember,
11:51because someone reading needs to hear it,
11:53and I want to gather it before it is gone.
11:56Next time, I am going to take you out to the herb bed
11:59and show you the three plants my grandmother kept
12:02right by the kitchen door.
12:03Not one of them for ticks,
12:05but every one of them for the small hurts and fevers
12:08of a house full of children,
12:10the things you reach for at midnight when the doctor is far.
12:13Bring your spade.
12:15There was a wisdom in keeping close watch
12:17over your own small patch of ground,
12:20knowing its damp corners and its dry edges,
12:23knowing what waits at the border
12:25and how to keep it there.
12:26The women who raised families on land like this
12:29were not afraid of it.
12:31They simply knew it, foot by foot,
12:33and that knowing was its own kind of protection.
12:36We would do well to learn it again.
12:38We would do well to learn it again.
12:38We would do well forətə əbə əla,
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