Tick Talk

I need to start this off by saying once again that I loathe the words blog, blogger and blogging. Another word I'm not fond of despite my love for Google Chrome & Gmail and any products the Google company puts out there, is the word google when it's used as a verb meaning to look something up on the internet. Why I don't like these words isn't really important, but just so you know I don't blog... I write journal entries and I never google, though I have yahooed quite a bit over the last 15 years.

Okay the real topic today is ticks, specifically as it relates to our garden. I spent some time in the garden yesterday and on two separate occasions, once before 11:00am and once after 4:00 pm I noticed several ticks hanging out on the water spigot and the pole its attached to. With-in an hour of the afternoon visit while I was enjoying an ice cream cone at the local ice cream shop with Meg & Annie, a tick was discovered crawling up my shirt. This doesn't come as that much of a surprise but confirms that in fact this is a particularly ticky (is that a word) season.

Also... while digging at the fence line of our garden I came across a cat's "flea & tick" collar buried about 4" below the ground. My first thought was that I was about to find someone's buried cat or the bones of said cat. There were none, but I began to wonder... have people ever buried "flea & tick" collars near their gardens as a preventative measure against ticks? It's always possible that this cat collar is nothing more than a coincidental fallen off collar that somehow got buried 4" in the earth, but it was a curious discovery.

This morning at home while doing my typical Sunday morning thing of drinking a cup of coffee and hanging out on my computer. I decided to look up organic preventative measures for reducing the likely hood of finding a tick on myself, Annie, Meg or in our garden at all. It turns out that there are a few things you can do. I found a particularly useful article on eHow.com.

To learn more about ticks you can simply yahoo it like I did and discover about the myriad types as well as the life cycle and various stages of engorgement.