Homeowners are often asking us at our visits what they can do to help prevent pests. Sometimes, this starts by just making sure that you’re taking care of your lawn and landscape. The simple act of mowing your lawn more often can have a pretty substantial effect on insect populations.

What Does Lawn Mowing Do to Pests?

Insects are everywhere. There is no way to stop all pests outside of your property. Nor would you want to, as many of them are beneficial to the environment and harmless to you and your home.

But you can naturally reduce pest populations, and one way to do this is simply by mowing you lawn. Mowing your lawn offers several benefits that include, but are not limited to:

• Reducing Hiding Spots – Large and unruly lawns offer a considerable amount of safety and security to pests that are looking for a place to stay safe from predators, feed, and breed. If you cut your grass, you reduce the number of possible pest habitats, forcing them to move elsewhere. The fewer pests that can hide on your lawn, the less likely they’ll find their way indoors.
• Removal of Food Sources – In addition to hiding spots, pests quite literally feed on the overgrowth of weeds and plants that grow in lawns that haven’t property been cared for. Reducing food sources helps to decreases pest populations.
• Sunlight – Overgrown lawns creates an excess of shade, which makes living on your property safer for pests. But if you mow your lawn, pests are exposed to sunlight, which dries them out and provides a natural form of pest control.
• Early Detection – Cockroaches, ants, and other pests can live and breed for months or years without detection. That is especially true if you provide them covering, such as with an unmanicured landscape. Eliminating excess grass may not eliminate the infestation, but it will help you notice it faster, which in turn helps treat it quicker.

In addition, tall grass can be a home for some specific pests, like ticks, that only move into areas with tall grass. Ticks can be surprisingly dangerous pests, and so eliminating tall grass to prevent ticks from coming to your property is very important.

Lawn Care and Pests

Lawn mowing is not going to reduce your entire risk of pests. But it can help. Pest control is never 100% effective because pests can enter from open windows, hanging onto animals, and more, none of which pest control can prevent. But the more you can reduce pests outside your property, the less pests there are to enter. Lawn mowing is one way to do this – an easy activity to reduce your risk of pests.