How to Get Rid of Cicadas: Home Remedies That Work

Physical barriers, hand removal, and water are the most effective home remedies for managing cicadas around your property, but “getting rid of” them entirely is not realistic during an emergence. Periodical cicadas emerge in the billions across wide geographic areas, and no home remedy will prevent them from showing up. What you can do is protect the plants that matter most to you and reduce the number of cicadas congregating in specific spots. The good news is that the damage they cause is far less severe than most people assume, and the proven strategies are simple, cheap, and chemical-free.

Netting Is the Single Best Home Remedy

If you have young fruit trees, ornamental saplings, or garden shrubs you want to protect, covering them with fine mesh netting before the cicadas emerge is the most reliable method available. Standard garden netting with mesh openings of about a quarter inch or smaller keeps female cicadas from reaching branches to lay eggs. You drape it over the tree and secure the bottom around the trunk with twine or zip ties. It looks a bit silly, but it works consistently.

The reason netting outperforms every other approach is that female cicadas cause the most visible damage by slicing into small branches to deposit eggs. Research on periodical cicada egg-laying in Washington, D.C., found that cicadas strongly preferred certain tree types, with the most damage observed in maples and black gum trees, and that egg laying occurred most often in scaffold and lateral branches rather than the main trunk.¹ Netting those vulnerable branches directly blocks the behavior that causes branch flagging, the browning and drooping of tips you see after an emergence.

Timing matters. You want the netting in place before the cicadas start emerging in your area, which typically happens when soil temperatures hit roughly 64°F at about eight inches deep. In most of the eastern United States, that means late April through May for a periodical brood, though annual cicadas show up later in summer. Once the netting is on, leave it until the emergence winds down, usually four to six weeks later.

Water, Hand Removal, and Other Low-Tech Methods

A strong blast from a garden hose knocks cicadas off trees, porches, and siding. Cicadas are not agile fliers. They are large, clumsy, and slow to recover once dislodged. Spraying them with water in the morning, when they tend to be sluggish, is especially effective. You will not eliminate them this way, but you can keep a patio or doorway relatively clear by hosing down surfaces once or twice a day.

Hand-picking works too, especially early in the morning or late in the evening. Cicadas do not bite or sting. You can pluck them off plants and drop them into a bucket of soapy water, which drowns them within minutes. This is tedious during a major emergence, but for a small garden or a few prized rose bushes, it is straightforward. The soapy water bucket trick is the same approach used for Japanese beetles and other large, slow-moving insects.

Some people swear by DIY sprays made with dish soap diluted in water, sometimes with a splash of cooking oil. A light soapy spray can coat cicadas and suffocate them on contact, and it may make plant surfaces slightly less appealing. There is no peer-reviewed research showing this deters cicadas specifically, but the mechanism is the same one that works on soft-bodied insects: the soap breaks down their waxy coating and clogs their breathing pores. If you try this, keep the soap concentration low (a tablespoon or two per gallon) to avoid damaging plant foliage, and rinse the plants with clean water afterward.

Do Cicadas Actually Damage Your Yard?

The noise and sheer volume of a periodical cicada emergence can make it feel like your landscape is under siege, but the actual harm to established plants is modest. The same Washington, D.C., study that documented egg-laying patterns found little evidence of cicada impacts on overall tree health. Tree condition was unrelated to egg-laying intensity, and survival rates for young trees planted during the emergence year were similar to survival rates in years without a large-scale cicada emergence.¹

The damage that does occur is mostly cosmetic. When a female cicada slits a branch to lay eggs, that branch tip often dies back, a phenomenon called flagging. On a mature tree, flagging looks alarming for a few weeks but amounts to a natural pruning. The tree loses a small percentage of its canopy and recovers fully. The real risk is to very young or newly transplanted trees with trunk diameters under about two inches, because they have fewer branches and less energy in reserve. Those are the trees worth netting.

Adult cicadas also feed, contrary to a popular myth that they do not eat at all during their brief above-ground lives. Molecular analysis of periodical cicadas from the 2021 Brood X emergence found that fully mature adults had ingested plant material from a range of woody and herbaceous plants spanning 17 genera and 14 families.² That said, adult cicada feeding involves sipping xylem fluid, the watery sap that moves through plant vessels, not chewing leaves. The feeding pressure from individual cicadas is trivial. When millions are on one tree, cumulative fluid loss can stress a small or drought-weakened plant, but healthy, well-watered trees handle it without problems.

Why You Should Skip the Pesticides

It is tempting to reach for insecticide when your yard sounds like a jet engine and every surface is crawling with bugs, but spraying pesticides during a cicada emergence is a genuinely bad idea for several reasons. First, it does not work. Periodical cicadas emerge in such enormous numbers that chemical sprays kill only a fraction, and new individuals keep flying in from surrounding areas. You would need to reapply constantly, turning your yard into a toxic zone without meaningfully reducing the population.

Second, the collateral damage is severe. Broad-spectrum insecticides kill pollinators, beneficial predatory insects, and the natural enemies that help control actual garden pests like aphids and caterpillars. Spraying during an emergence also poisons the birds, mammals, and other wildlife that feed heavily on cicadas and provide free, effective population control. A study tracking coyote diets during a 13-year periodical cicada emergence found that cicadas appeared in nearly 86% of coyote scat samples during the four-week peak, and about half of those samples contained nothing but cicadas.³ Birds, raccoons, and even domestic pets gorge on cicadas too. Poisoning the cicadas means poisoning the animals eating them.

Third, cicadas spend the vast majority of their lives underground as nymphs, completely beyond the reach of any surface-applied chemical. The adults you see above ground are the final stage of a 13- or 17-year cycle. Killing a few thousand adults in your yard has zero effect on the next emergence, because the nymphs that will become the next brood are already underground, feeding on root fluids deep in the soil.

Dealing With the Noise

The mating calls of male cicadas can exceed 90 decibels at close range, louder than a lawnmower. For many people, the noise is the most intolerable part of an emergence, and there is no home remedy that silences them. No repellent, spray, or ultrasonic device reduces cicada calling. The males call to attract females, and they will do it from whatever perch they can find.

What you can do is manage your exposure. Closing windows and running white noise or fans indoors helps significantly. If you work outdoors or spend a lot of time in the yard, foam earplugs bring the volume down to a tolerable level. Scheduling outdoor activities for early morning or dusk, when calling activity drops, can also make a difference. The peak chorus usually hits in the late morning through mid-afternoon when temperatures are highest.

Some homeowners try to reduce the number of cicadas in their immediate vicinity by removing or pruning the trees cicadas favor. This is almost always a mistake. You lose far more in shade, property value, and ecological function than you gain in noise reduction, and the cicadas will call from neighboring trees anyway. The noise lasts four to six weeks, then it is over for another generation.

Vinegar, Essential Oils, and Other Claimed Repellents

Online advice columns frequently recommend spraying vinegar, peppermint oil, lavender oil, or garlic solutions on plants and around doorways to repel cicadas. There is no controlled evidence that any of these substances deter cicadas. Essential oils can repel certain insect groups, particularly mosquitoes and some beetle species, but cicadas are not closely related to those groups and do not respond to the same chemical cues.

Vinegar sprayed directly on a cicada may kill it through acidic contact, similar to the soapy water method, but as a repellent applied to surfaces it does not create a barrier cicadas avoid. The same goes for garlic sprays and hot pepper solutions. These may discourage soft-bodied insects that rely heavily on scent cues, but cicadas navigate primarily by sound and light. A male cicada looking for a calling site is not going to be deterred by the smell of peppermint on your porch railing.

If you want to try these anyway, they are unlikely to harm your plants at dilute concentrations, so the worst outcome is wasted effort. Just do not rely on them as your primary defense for young trees or valuable plants. Netting and water remain the only approaches with a solid practical track record.

What Happens to Dead Cicadas

After the emergence winds down, your yard may be carpeted with cicada carcasses. The smell can be unpleasant as they decompose, but the bodies are a massive nutrient pulse for your soil. Cicada carcasses are rich in nitrogen and other nutrients that break down quickly. Rather than bagging them up, many experienced gardeners rake them into mulch beds or compost piles. If the smell near your door or patio is too much, a leaf blower or broom moves them into garden beds where they decompose out of the way.

On hard surfaces like driveways and sidewalks, decomposing cicadas can become slippery and attract flies. Hosing them off or sweeping them into the lawn every few days keeps things manageable. The cleanup period lasts a week or two after the last adults die off.

Natural Enemies and Biological Control Research

Cicadas have a wide range of natural predators. During a periodical emergence, birds, small mammals, reptiles, and even fish gorge on the abundant, slow-moving insects. The coyote study mentioned earlier found that cicadas dominated the diet of a top predator during the emergence peak, with nearly half of all scat samples containing cicadas exclusively.³ This predation pressure is one reason cicadas evolved their mass-emergence strategy in the first place: they overwhelm predators with sheer numbers, ensuring that enough individuals survive to reproduce.

On the pathogen side, cicadas face a remarkable fungal enemy. Massospora cicadina is a specialized fungal pathogen of 13- and 17-year periodical cicadas that infects adults and replaces their abdominal tissues with fungal spores.⁴ What makes this fungus unusual is that infected males behave as if they are females, performing wing-flick signals that attract other males and spread the infection through attempted mating. Researchers have described this as a form of behavioral manipulation by the fungus for its own transmission benefit.⁵

Researchers have also explored using entomopathogenic nematodes, microscopic worm-like organisms that parasitize insects, against cicada nymphs. Laboratory trials on coffee cicada nymphs found that two nematode species achieved mortality rates of 93.5% and 100% at higher doses.⁶ These results are promising for agricultural settings where a specific cicada species is an ongoing crop pest, but they have not been tested or developed for periodical cicadas in North American yards. The nymphs of periodical cicadas live deep underground for over a decade, making them impractical targets for any biological agent applied from the surface.

Annual Cicadas Versus Periodical Cicadas

Most of the dramatic coverage focuses on periodical cicadas, the 13- and 17-year species that emerge in synchronized broods numbering in the billions. But the cicadas you hear every summer in most parts of North America are annual cicadas, sometimes called dog-day cicadas, which appear in smaller numbers every year from July through September. The home remedies discussed above apply to both types, but the context is different.

Annual cicadas rarely show up in numbers large enough to cause meaningful plant damage. You might have a dozen or a few hundred in your yard rather than tens of thousands. Netting is overkill for annual species in most cases. Hand removal and the garden hose are usually sufficient if they are bothering you. The noise from annual cicadas is also less overwhelming, typically produced by scattered individuals rather than a continuous wall of sound.

Periodical cicada emergences, by contrast, create conditions where remedies struggle to keep pace with the sheer volume. During a major brood emergence, a single acre of forest can produce over a million cicadas. At that scale, your goal shifts from elimination to targeted protection: net the young trees, hose off the patio, and wait it out. The adults live four to six weeks above ground, and the emergence is self-limiting. Once it ends, you will not see that brood again for over a decade.

Protecting Specific Plants and Garden Beds

If you are planning new landscaping in a year when a periodical brood is expected, the simplest remedy is timing. Delay planting new trees until late summer or fall, after the emergence has ended and the adults have died off. Nurseries in affected regions often advise this, and some adjust their planting schedules accordingly. A sapling planted in September will have its first full growing season the following spring, well past any cicada risk.

For vegetable gardens and flower beds, cicadas are mostly a nuisance rather than a threat. They are not interested in tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, or most annual flowers. Their egg-laying targets are woody branches, not herbaceous stems. You may find cicadas resting on garden plants or crawling across them, but they are not feeding on your vegetables in any meaningful way. If their presence bothers you, a lightweight row cover draped over garden beds keeps them off without blocking light or rain.

Fruit trees deserve the most attention. Apple, cherry, peach, and pear trees with branches in the size range cicadas prefer for egg-laying are vulnerable to flagging. Mature fruit trees handle the damage through normal regrowth, but young orchard trees can lose a significant fraction of their branch structure. Netting is the standard recommendation from university extension services across the eastern United States. Wrapping individual branches with cheesecloth or fine mesh is a more targeted option if full-tree netting is impractical. The key is covering the branch tips where new growth is still pencil-thin, since those are the diameters female cicadas prefer for egg slits.