How to Get Rid of Fleas with Cedarcide: 3 Steps

While a flea or two isn’t usually a cause for panic, if left untreated they can quickly become the worst bug problem you’ve ever faced. Given that a single female flea can produce a population of over 20,000 in just 60 days, it’s not hard to see how fast things can get out of hand. All of which is to say, if you think you might have fleas, you need to act immediately.

Whether you’re facing a stubborn flea issue or just in search of flea prevention tips, we got you covered. And don’t worry—you don’t have to resort to poisonous, old school pesticides and dangerous flea collars to get the job done. Protecting your pets, lawn, home, and family from fleas only takes 3 steps. Here’s how to do it.

 

Did you know fleas are the #1 cause of skin disease in our pets!? Sadly, they help spread tapeworms and other gross, harmful illnesses, too. 

A dog or cat covered in hidden fleas and eggs is the quickest way to get a home and lawn full of these little bloodsuckers, making your pet our first stop in tackling your flea problem. Here’s how to protect your pets and prevent bites starting today. 

Before going outside, lightly mist your dog’s coat with Cedarcide Original and then massage the spray into their fur. Don’t forget their toes, ears, and tail, too. For your pup’s face, avoid spraying and simply use your hands to apply instead. Repeat every 2-3 days for prevention, and daily for ongoing flea problems until the issue noticeably improves. 

For cats, apply Cedarcide Original using your hands or with the Cedarcide Flea & Tick Brush. Reapply every 3-4 days or more as needed for ongoing flea issues. 

To protect against irritating bites and to prevent you from accidentally spreading more fleas, apply Cedarcide Original to you and your family before outdoor activities. If you’re currently facing down a flea problem, apply every other day or more as needed. 

 

If you noticed a few fleas on your dog or cat, we’ve got some bad news: fleas are living and breeding in your lawn, too. For this reason, it’s absolutely essential to treat your yard when solving a flea problem. Here’s how to do it:

Start by thoroughly spraying your entire front, back, and side yards with PCO Choice, including shrubbery, bases of trees, and anywhere else you suspect fleas might be hiding. Make sure to spray all outdoor areas in one session to prevent fleas from simply moving to another section of your lawn. For best results, repeat this process in 5-7 days and then move on to monthly applications afterward.

If you’re not currently struggling with fleas and you’re just looking for prevention, you can start with monthly applications from the get-go. If you live in a warmer region such as the South, applications should be done every month unless the temperature drops below freezing for more than a few weeks. If you live in a state prone to cold spells, start spraying monthly in late February and then taper off in November as winter really starts to set in.

Because PCO Choice is plant-based and family-safe, no downtime is necessary. You, your family, and pets can enjoy your lawn right after application!

For additional protection, we strongly advise spreading Cedar Granules throughout your outdoor space, especially in and around the areas when you and your pets spend the most time. 

 

While minor flea issues can often be solved by consistently treating your lawn, pet, and indoor pet spaces, for developed flea problems you’ll probably need to treat your entire home. If you’ve been dealing with fleas for several weeks or months, chances are fleas and flea eggs are now hidden all throughout your house, including your furniture, carpeting, bedding, curtains, rugs, and more. 

If your flea problem is new and small, we suggest starting by spot treating indoor pet spaces and any bedding, flooring, and furniture that your pets frequently use. This is where the majority of the fleas are breeding and hiding. Simply spray these spaces with Cedarcide Original every 5-7 days or more often as needed until your issue improves. A quick spray of Cedarcide Original is also great for killing any fleas you see inside. 

PRO TIP: Daily vacuuming can be a big help when it comes to solving a flea problem. Just make sure to clean and thoroughly empty the vacuum outside after each use, otherwise you risk the fleas breeding inside your vacuum and finding a way back into your home. 

If your flea problem is more serious, we strongly suggest treating your entire indoor space, with fogging being the quickest and most cost effective option. Using the easy-to-use Cedarcide Fogging Kit, fog your entire home, starting with the rooms farthest from your planned exit. After fogging each space, including bathrooms, pantries, and cabinets, close them up and move onto the next area. Be sure to aim the fogger directly at furniture, rugs, carpeting, and bedding you suspect of flea activity. 

After fogging your home, close the front door and return in 3 hours. We suggest repeating this process—fogging your entire home, again—after 5-7 days. This will give any remaining fleas and flea eggs the opportunity to re-emerge before your next fogging treatment. 

 

The difference between preventing a flea problem and solving one is usually a significant amount of money, time, and a few dozen gray hairs. In other words, it’s much easier to prevent fleas than it is to tackle a large, ongoing issue. Here are some simple precautions you can take to help prevent future flea problems. 

• Before venturing outdoors, especially in tall grass, wooded areas, and unfamiliar pet spaces like dog parks, spray your pets and yourself with our family and pet-safe repellent, Cedarcide Original. 
• Check your pets for signs of fleas every few days, especially after returning from walks, playdates with other animals, and outdoor exploring. Apply Cedarcide Original to kill any fleas you find and re-apply to prevent bites as needed.
• Treat your yard, including shrubbery and bases of trees, monthly with the family-safe Lawn & Garden kit. 
• Treat your home, especially pet spaces, monthly. Spray doorways, windowsills, dog beds, furniture, baseboards, and carpeting your pets frequent with Cedarcide Original to prevent fleas from living and breeding in your home. 
• Wildlife like deer, raccoons, and coyotes commonly bring fleas into our yards. Help deter these carriers by installing fencing, keeping outdoor trash cans and recycling bins firmly sealed, and removing plants that attract wild animals, such as beans, roses, corn, apples, peas, tulips, etc.
• The better maintained and organized your lawn, the fewer flea problems you’ll experience. Mow, weed eat, and trim shrubbery regularly and remove unnecessary clutter like woodpiles, brush, leaves, and unused gear and equipment.

 

The post How to Get Rid of Fleas with Cedarcide: 3 Steps appeared first on Cedarcide.

How to Get Rid of Earwigs Naturally

While their large pinchers might seem threatening, earwigs are actually quite harmless, and in many cases can be a welcome addition to your yard’s natural ecosystem. And no, the old wives’ tales are not true—earwigs never burrow into human ears or present any other threat to people or pets. In fact, in small numbers, these nocturnal, reddish-brown insects are actually beneficial, helping rid our lawns of decaying organic matter and undesirable or damaging bugs like aphids, slugs, snails, and mites. 

However, when conditions are just right, earwig populations can explode. In these instances, earwigs can cause significant damage to your lawn and garden, as they begin feeding on living plants, like vegetables, fruits, and ornamental flowers. In these cases, you’ll need to act fast to prevent costly damage. The following tips will help you keep earwig populations to a healthy, manageable level, all without resorting to poisonous, old-school pesticides.

 

• Jagged leaves with holes throughout your lawn and garden, similar to slug and snail damage but without the tell-tale slime trails. 
• Check on or around damaged plants for small black spots, this is what earwig poop looks like. 
• Lawn & garden damage that seems to occur mostly after rainy or particularly humid weather. 
• If you have planters, furniture, or any other equipment or tools in your yard, lift them up and check for earwigs. The babies look just like adult earwigs only smaller. They are likely to be found near mulch and other moist organic debris, too.

 

Preventing earwigs is much easier than getting rid of a thriving population. Thankfully, prevention is quite easy and essentially all comes down to basic home and lawn maintenance. Here’s how to do it:

• Earwigs usually enter our homes through small cracks or holes in windows, screens, doorways, baseboards, and countertops. Check these areas for possible earwig entry points and re-seal or repair items as needed. This will help with other common household bugs like ants, too. 
• Leaky faucets, drains, and other plumping either inside or outside your home can attract earwigs. Clogged gutters are also a common source of earwig problems. Check these items periodically and repair, replace, or clean as needed. 
• Earwigs tend to live in and feed on moist organic matter, like mulch, stacks of wood, leaves, and unkempt vegetation. Removing these attractants and other unnecessary clutter from your lawn can make a big difference when it comes to earwigs. 
• Large overhanging branches and dense shrubbery can help create moist, shady areas in your lawn, which is exactly the environment earwigs need to survive. Trim trees and bushes as needed to limit possible earwig hideouts. 

 

A DIY earwig trap is an effective way to reduce the number of earwigs in your lawn and garden. Just roll up a few sheets of damp newspaper and bind them together with a couple rubber bands. Place these rolls both inside and outside wherever earwigs tend to congregate, or near where you suspect they may be damaging your plants. Then simply check them the next day and dispose of any trapped earwigs. Pretty easy, right? 

 

Garden pests can create a vicious cycle that ultimately ruins your beautiful lawn and garden. It goes like this: pest damage leads to a less healthy lawn, and sicklier lawns are more attractive to damaging garden pests.

Break up this cycle by treating your lawn each month with the family-friendly Lawn & Garden Kit. Not only will this kill any unwanted bugs in your lawn—like mosquitoes, ants, fleas, ticks, and chiggers—but it will help prevent additional damaging pests like earwigs from taking hold. Repeat treatments monthly during the warm months or more as needed.

Because the Lawn & Garden Kit is non-toxic and plant-based, no downtime is required. You, your family, and pets can enjoy your lawn immediately after application.

 

While they’re mostly seen outdoors, earwigs occasionally find their way inside your home in search of food and shelter. A quick spray with family and pet-safe Cedarcide Original will kill any earwigs you see inside on contact.

To help keep future earwigs outdoors, spray known entry points and trouble areas like the baseboards and flooring in your bathrooms, laundry room, basement, and kitchen weekly with Cedarcide Original until the problem improves. 

 

Like many insects, earwigs are attracted to lights, especially any lighting positioned or pointing outdoors. Thankfully, there’s an easy way to address this common earwig attractant. A quick switch from traditional light bulbs to sodium bulbs can make a significant difference in the number of earwigs you experience near your home. Giving off a more yellow light, these bulbs lack the blue wavelengths that tend to attract unwanted bugs.

 

A thriving ecosystem with plenty of birds is often enough to keep unwanted earwig populations in check. Installing a few bird feeders or baths near earwig trouble spots in your yard can provide almost immediate results.

 

The post How to Get Rid of Earwigs Naturally appeared first on Cedarcide.

How to Get Rid of Carpenter Ants: 3 Steps

If you think you might have carpenter ants, there’s no time to spare, so let’s get right to the point. Once you locate the colony, getting rid of carpenter ants with Cedarcide is straightforward and best of all it doesn’t involve exposing your family or pets to poisonous pesticides. Here’s to get rid of prevent carpenter ants with Cedarcide in 3 simple steps:

 

Contrary to popular belief carpenter ants do not actually eat wood, but are instead attracted by the same things that draw in normal ants, such as moisture, clutter, and sugary or protein-packed food sources. The following tips will help prevent not only carpenter ants but other common household ants from returning to your lawn or home. 

• Apply PCO Choice to your lawn, foundation, and bases of wooden structures monthly to kill and help repel both indoor and outdoor ants.
• Remove possible nesting spaces from your yard, such as woodpiles, wooden yard equipment, brush, dead or dying trees & tree stumps, unused dog houses, furniture, and any other unnecessary wooden items.
• Keep tree limbs and branches away from the walls of your home. Carpenter ants can use these as bridges to enter your home.
• Do not store lumber or firewood inside or right outside your home.
• Treat all wooden items and structures before or after construction with Cedarshield, which will make the wood inhospitable to wood-boring insects. 
• Keep your home clean—particularly the kitchen, flooring, windowsills and countertops. Without a food source, ants will have no reason to enter your home.
• Seal all food in tightly closed containers. Keep all food storage areas free of crumbs and residues (Tip: periodically wipe off jam, sauce and honey containers, too).
• Never leave food remains or dirty dishes in the sink.
• Take the trash out regularly, and keep all trash cans clean and sealed. If you’re currently struggling with ants, consider taking out the trash daily. 
• Food and drink spills should be cleaned up immediately.
• Looking both outside and inside your home, check for potential ant entry points. Seal any you find with caulk or another sealant to make it harder for ants to move indoors.
• Remove or remedy all sources of unnecessary moisture both inside and outside your home, including: leaky plumbing, basements, crawl spaces, A/C units, hoses, faucets, sprinklers, clogged drainage areas, etc

 

As with most ants, carpenter ants often originate just outside your home somewhere in your yard, maybe in a wood pile, old tree, or wooden structure. In other words, If you’re seeing carpenter ants or any other ants outside, they’ll find a way inside your home before you know it. In fact, sometimes treating your lawn for bugs each month is enough to get an indoor carpenter ant issue under control. Here’s how to do it. 

Spray your entire lawn, shrubbery, wood piles, and bases of trees and wooden structures monthly with PCO Choice to both kill and repel carpenter ants in all life stages. For warmer regions, this should be done every month unless the temperature drops below freezing for more than a few weeks. If you live in an area known for cold winters, start spraying monthly in late February and then taper off in November as winter sets in.

No downtime required! PCO Choice is family and pet-safe, meaning you can safely enjoy your lawn immediately after application. 

For extra outdoor carpenter ant prevention, spread Cedar Granules throughout your yard, especially in those areas where you’re seeing the most carpenter ant and other bug traffic. Pay special attention to fence lines and the foundations of your home and wooden structures like outbuildings and sheds. Reapply every 6 weeks. 

For ongoing Carpenter ant and other pest problems, spray your yard with PCO Choice twice the first month, two weeks apart, and then move on to monthly applications after that. If you locate any ant piles or carpenter ant colonies in your lawn, perhaps on a tree or near a wooden structure, stir up the mound with a stick and saturate it directly with PCO Choice

 

The next time you reach for a can of bug spray to kill ants inside your home, including carpenter ants, take a moment to consider the possible consequences. Traditional indoor bug sprays can fill your home with toxic chemicals, resulting in serious health complications for your family and pets—but not Cedarcide.

Family-safe Cedarcide Original is a non-toxic insecticide for use indoors, as well as directly on people and pets to kill and repel bugs. Whenever you spot carpenter ants inside—like in your cabinets, on flooring, countertops, or on wooden structures—simply spray them with Cedarcide Original. 

Similarly, spray known entry points like window sills, doorways, countertops and baseboards with Cedarcide Original to prevent outdoor carpenter ants from coming inside. To get a carpenter ant problem fully under control, however, you’ll almost certainly need to locate and treat their colony directly.

FIND THE COLONY

Carpenter ants nest in moist, decaying wood. Their nests can be located either inside or outside the home, and you might need to follow the carpenter ant trails in order to find them. In general, if you find carpenter ants inside your home during late winter or early spring, the colony is usually located somewhere inside. Here are some basic tips for locating a carpenter ant colony:

• Look for frass. Frass is finely ground wood debris that resembles sawdust. It’s the result of carpenter ants boring into wood to build their nests. If you see this in your home, the carpenter ants are nearby.
• Damaged wood on or within walls, doors, cabinets, and wood beams is a good indicator of an indoor colony. Look specifically for sandpaper-smooth carpenter ant galleries and holes.
• Place attractants like dog food, jam or other sweets where you most commonly spot carpenter ants. Using the resulting ant trails, attempt to find the location of their nest.
• If you have wood piles or other wooden debris inside or just outside your home, check them thoroughly—the ant colony could be inside. If you locate the carpenter ants there, remove the affected wood and avoid storing similar items inside or outside your home moving forward. 

Once you locate the colony, saturate it with Cedarcide Original until you no longer see carpenter ant activity. Afterwards, thoroughly clean the area with natural soap and water or diluted vinegar. After cleaning, spray the entire area again with Cedarcide Original to help prevent future carpenter ant problems. 

MAKE NATURAL CARPENTER ANT BAIT

If you’re having trouble locating the carpenter ant nest, making your own carpenter ant bait at home can help limit the population size without treating the colony directly. It’s no substitute for destroying the colony, but it can help substantially.

Make a simple and natural carpenter ant bait by mixing equal parts baking soda and powdered sugar. Strategically place this mixture inside shallow dishes near the locations where you usually spot carpenter ants or carpenter ant damage. This bait can also be placed outside, particularly near doorways and windows. The sugar in the mixture will attract the ants and the baking soda will naturally kill them. 

The post How to Get Rid of Carpenter Ants: 3 Steps appeared first on Cedarcide.