you can do what you state, but still you are fighting a war with one hand tied behind your back.
And it appears that ticks all over are getting worse. All the “precautions” are to a degree helpful but you still can get sick the more I have read on the subject. Unless of course one decides to be a shut in or live in the concrete jungle.
Even the “tick has to be attached for up to 24 hours” may be wrong”.
I have free range guineas and chickens. All it takes is one tick to hop onto anything and travel to your yard and you happen to cross its path. Heck even DEET doesn’t always work.
Permitheren (sp?) is great on your jeans and boots. Last week I saw a tick walk up my treated jeans and he got real slow and stopped. A few minutes later I put him on a rock and was it motionless, then died.
But you still need luck. And early this summer luck was what I did not have.
The stuff IS great for bugs, but be careful. Permethrin is highly toxic to cats.
Here in the northeast much of the tick problem stems from an unwillingness to deal with the deer problem. In my town we don’t have deer ticks, yet if I drive 1/2 hour west they do. The difference? I’m in a semi-urban area without deer.
Being on the edge of the Meadowlands, we do have ticks; they are bigger, and carry fewer, different diseases.