Mosquitoes can ruin your summer nights outside and their bites can ruin your sleep with all the itching. The good news is you can take action and protect yourself with these ways to keep them away!
Basic Home Defense
You may have heard before that the best offense is a good defense, and the same is true for protecting yourself from mosquitoes.
Make sure that your screen doors and window screens do not have any holes to let in mosquitoes. Check window frames for small holes and cover them with mesh patches. Add weatherstripping to your doors to close off places mosquitoes can slip through and keep them closed.
Cover any air vents leading outside your home with fine wire mesh about as fine as your screen door mesh. Ask a hardware store employee which product to buy if you are unsure. Add wire mesh to the vents from the outside as well; redundancies are good in this case. Check places such as your chimney top and vents for air conditioning and the dryer.
Defensive Gardening
Another way to keep mosquitoes away is with defensive gardening. Try growing plants known to repel mosquitoes, such as lavender, ageratum, rosemary, basil and mint.
Plant basil and peppermint in pots or planters and grow them near your windows. Grow them on either or both sides of the window to keep mosquitoes from entering. Be careful with plants in the mint family; if left unchecked, they can easily take over a garden. But these plants can serve you in more than one way, as rosemary, basil and mint are also excellent additions to your kitchen to add fresh flavors to your meals.
Rosemary, ageratum, and lavender also help in repelling mosquitoes. They can grow to great heights with proper gardening, so try planting them outside windows or near doorways to repel mosquitoes at key entry points. You can also plant them around the areas where you sit down for garden parties or BBQs to help protect yourself and your guests.
Catnip is another plant that repels mosquitoes but it might attract local cats. Depending on your view of cats, having catnip might be a nuisance to you or a helpful way to keep away rodents.
Prevent Eggs
A great way to nip your mosquito problem in the bud is by limiting the places where mosquitoes can shelter or lay eggs. mosquitoes tend to hide in tall grass, so trimming your lawn and removing weeds leads to fewer mosquitoes around you. Clean up standing pools of water like puddles and old tires that offer mosquitoes places to lay eggs. Add mosquito fish or any fish that feasts on mosquito larvae to your ponds.
Call the Professionals
The best way to keep mosquitoes away is to hire professionals who have all the right equipment to get rid of mosquitoes and keep them gone. Mosquitoes can ruin summer nights, but they are a very manageable problem with the right tools. Contact us at Abarb Pest Services, and let us help you take back the night!
