Termites are a common household pest that can cause a great deal of damage to the wooden structures within your home, which can require extensive and expensive repairs, if allowed to progress far enough. Once termites manage to gain a foothold within your house, it can be quite hard to remove them without professional help. Therefore, the best thing that you can do to ensure your home doesn't suffer from termite damage is to make sure that they don't have the opportunity to make it inside in the first place, which can be done through a handful of preventative maintenance tasks and proper pest control.

Trim Nearby Plants

The first thing that you should do to reduce the likelihood of termites finding their way into your house is to reduce the amount of plant growth around the edges of your home. Flowers, bushes, and other plant growth can provide food and shelter for termite populations to take refuge in, and the beginning of a termite mound near the side of your home may be obscured by heavy plant growth. Trimming back, transplanting, or entirely removing bushes and other plant life can make it harder for termites to enter your home and also make it easier for you to identify termite populations in your garden early. If you are able to spot a termite problem early, then you can eliminate them before they have the chance to spread, either into your home or elsewhere in your yard.

Reduce Moisture and Standing Water

Beyond trimming back potential sources for termites to take refuge in near the sides of your home, you should also make an effort to reduce any standing water that sits around the edges of your home. Humid environments are necessary for termite colonies to take root, so reducing the overall amount of moisture that sits around the edges of your house makes the formation of a colony, or even the attraction of single termites, much less likely.

Eliminate Food Sources

Another relatively simple thing that you can do to prevent termites from entering your home is to remove any potential food sources within your home and around the sides of your home's exterior. This means removing any exposed wood, like dead stumps, firewood, or anything similar, or at the very least, storing it off of the ground and covered, to prevent it from becoming soaked with moisture. Proper yard maintenance is a large part of this preventative measure. Organic debris like twigs and fallen branches can pose a threat as well.

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