The Ground Wasp Saga

 

Back in July I was stung by a wasp while I was watering the garden. At first I thought wasps had made a nest in the sugar maple tree next door but I was VERY WRONG. They were ground wasps and they had made a nest in my raised bed.

Last year when I was putting together the beds I used the hugelkulture method of layering materials. I used leftover tree logs from the neighbor's tree - a HUGE branch had fallen and so I grabbed the branches that didn't get taken by our neighbor for their fireplace. One log was hollow (which is why the branch had fallen, it was extremely unstable). I thought I had truly filled it all the way with compost and leaves but I guess I made a lovely hibernation chamber for a wasp Queen instead. 

I learned an unfortunate lesson. Do not use hollow logs.

I used so many cans of wasp spray but there was just no way that I was able to get the whole nest. I used traps and trapped an unbelievable amount of wasps. But finally, the weather changed.

Wasps are temperature dependent upon flying and once it hits temps 50 degrees or lower, they get really sluggish and are unable to fly or move quickly, which means after their extremely aggressive months of August and September - you can finally relax and kill the shit out of them. The night temps were dipping into the 30s and I finally observed only 1-2 wasps flying out of the nest at a time. 

Yesterday it was 44 degrees. I decided to go for it. 

One thing to note: when wasps make nests, they actually create their own heat so stay warm to protect their babies. I knew that if I didn't expose the nest to the cold air I would probably have another nest next year.

I poked the nest and dislodged the log out of place - only 1 wasp flew out so I exposed the whole nest to the cold and pulled it apart to see what I was working with. There were maybe 25 wasps left that crawled out into the cold. They couldn't fly and could barely move.

This week was going to be warmer - but this upcoming weekend with temps in the low 40s would have been another good time to pull apart the nest. If I had wanted to do this in any warmer temperatures, I would have called in exterminator professionals because earlier this summer when I was stung, I also discovered that I'm allergic to wasps. My hand swelled up larger than a baseball and I was so itchy. A full 7 days of prednisone was most helpful but man, I never want to be stung again!

So this year, to remedy and refill my raised bed, I got a free bag of topsoil from a neighbor, I have compost from my compost pile and I have a full bag of straw to mix in. Because I used wasp spray, I washed off the galvanized metal bed with dish soap and I will not grow edibles in the bed next year, I am going to have to grow flowers next year and do soil testing for specific chemicals if possible to be able to plant edibles. I'll update as I go along.

SOOOOOO... get those wasp nests taken care of and make sure you kill the queen so she doesn't make a nest in your fresh garden beds next year!

What to Learn in 2026?

 As a Master Gardener Volunteer, we're required to do 5 hours of continuing education - but when I started we needed to do the 50 hour course plus another 12 hours of continuing education (which I have to say, I had re-learned HOW to learn so it wasn't that difficult!). This past year, I was able to contribute to my gardening community and be the educator at a Schoolyard Garden Conference and I truly have to say, that was an absolute blast. I had so much fun! I would love to do that again next year but switch up the topics and do a presentation on something else, maybe how to collaborate on curriculum through the different grades while keeping to the K-5 science standards. I'm not sure yet, I don't have a confirmation if there will be a conference yet (but if you're a fellow schoolyard gardener - I've got you covered for ideas for curriculum and lessons!). 

But then that means that I need to find classes and courses for MYSELF. I don't necessarily need anymore "how to grow" classes because I do know how - and I have a whole host of Master Gardeners at my fingertips to ask questions! 

I was thinking of becoming a tree care specialist because I have limited knowledge on trees and would love to know more. 

Or possibly taking classes on how to grow roses. I've never grown them before.

I don't think I can possibly sit through anymore pollinator lectures, I've done that now for 15+ hours and my brain has received all of that information. LOL. 

We shall see what pops up in the next few months from the Horticulture Society and the Arboretum. 

Planted Gladiolus for Next Year

I truly love the look of Foxglove, Gladiolus, and other tall stalks with multi-flowers. They just make me so happy when they're blooming. I've never planted Gladiolus before and I actually found these at Costco in the Spring but they're supposed to be planted in the Fall. So... here I am!

I choose these to replace the Echinacea that I had to pull out due to Asters Yellow and will see what these bulbs do. I'm too cautious that the Asters Yellow disease is hanging out in the soil, so I'm very reluctant to plant any perennials until I can do more research as to how its spread and what types of flowers and perennials it affects. We'll see how that goes.

I planted the first 30, and still have 20 bulbs left, I'm going to put those bulbs in a different spot, possibly in my front yard where I know there's full sun next to my front door (where I have a lot of milkweed!). I'm really excited for these flowers to peek out with bright blooms above a bright green elephant ear hosta. This season isn't even done yet and I'm already looking forward to next year!

 

Homemade Hot Sauce with Arriba Peppers

This is the first time I've grown peppers hotter than jalepenos for the sole purpose of making hot sauce. I've tried habaneros but they've truly never done well at my house and I needed to try a new variety. I thought these might do well - they're the Arriba variety and I purchased these from Johnny's Seeds. The actual plants never grew taller than 18 inches and I was ultra worried that they might not produce anything but in total, from 6 plants, I was able to make 2 pints of hot sauce so I'm pleasantly surprised!

Also, I know that I've said I don't like preserving large quantities and truly - this is enough for us for one season for hot sauce and it's really all we need because we like a variety of hot sauces so I don't want too much anyway!

I don't pay for a recipe organizer so you get what you get: not a life story but an explanation of what variety to grow + a recipe. LOL.

Hot Sauce with Arriba Peppers

About 18-22 peppers

1/2 yellow onion, roughly chopped, can be large pieces

3-4 tbsp olive oil

Salt & pepper to taste

1 tsp dried oregano (can use fresh, just a small handful)

2 tsp cumin

Garlic - optional, I add 4-5 cloves or leave it out

1/2 cup vinegar

1/4 cup water

a good handful of fresh cilantro, you can use dried but doesn't taste the same

Preheat oven to 425 degrees. I do not de-seed the peppers. I just chop off the stem to make it as easy as possible. If you don't want it eye-watering spicy, then cut the peppers in half and de-seed. Wear gloves. Put onto a very large sheet pan along with olive oil, onion, salt, pepper, oregano, cumin, garlic. Put try in the oven. 

Roast for 15 minutes. Pull out of the oven, stir around and see if parts have a brown, roasted side. If so, continue on with recipe. If not, put back in the oven for 5 minutes. It usually is about 20 minutes total for me. 

Let cool for 5ish minutes while you pull together your blender or food processor. Add everything from the sheet pan into your food processor or blender. Add in vinegar, water, and cilantro. Puree the shit out of it until its super smooth and not chunky. Add in water or vinegar if necessary to make it smooth. Put it in a jar and keep it in the fridge. 

 

Asters Yellow on my Echinacea

 I am so annoyed. Last year I spotted Asters Yellow on Echinacea on my walk and I was like... oh, shit. That's what it looks like in person. I had one weird flower head on my Echinacea every year since I planted it and I'm one hundred percent positive that the plugs I bought were infested from the start three years ago. In the pictures I'm sharing below, you can see the odd green growth coming out of the seed head. That's not normal.

So on my list of things to do this week is dig out every single echinacea from my yard and get those out so the Asters Yellow doesn't infect anything else. Even Master Gardeners can have pest problems and disease infestation! 

Asters Yellow can be devastating - this isn't something were you just pull off the seedheads or cut to the ground or use chemicals. The whole entire plant needs to be removed to remediate the situation. So for me, I have 4 echinacea plants that will need to come out. It can be extremely frustrating. For me though, as much as I've always wanted to grow echinacea, the rabbits have always chewed every single one of my plants to ground. Every year I have had to battle rabbits to keep this and quite honestly, I'm ok giving up this battle. It's frustrating every year to lose plants to the bunnies and so this will take a garden chore off my list in the spring. 

Fun August Harvests

Potato harvest - these are Yukon Golds, my favorite potato ever. They're so soft and the mashed potatoes that come from these are amazing (especially with roasted garlic!). I only did one potato bag so I harvested enough for about 3 meals total. Last year I had 5 bags and it was too many potatoes all at once, I made a note that I think 3 potato bags will be enough for us to eat fresh and I won't have to worry about saving potatoes or eating too many and getting tired of them. I'll stick with Yukon Golds and possibly add in a baking potato or a red potato for some variety.

I have decided that I'm actually really terrible at preserving or saving fresh food - I just really like eating produce freshly harvested from the garden. I truly have zero interest in canning and freezing anymore besides the occasional tomato sauce or tomato basil soup. 

Tomatoes this year were a little weird. I had a ground wasp queen decide she wanted to make a nest in my brand new raised bed that I did JUST FOR TOMATOES. So I need to pull out the soil because I did use a ground wasp spray several times to keep the numbers of wasps down until it freezes overnight, the hollow log I used to fill in the bed hugelkulture-style. It's going to be a really cold chore the day I do that and I can't wait until all the stupid wasps are dead.

But I digress. My tomatoes this year were just kinda ok. The sungolds were delicious as usual but everything else just seemed to wait too long to get ripe. I ended up with maybe 12 large tomatoes for BLTs or salads, half as many small snacking tomatoes as I wanted, and only enough for 2 medium size leftover containers for tomato sauce. I didn't even get to make homemade tomato basil soup.

I think maybe because my mom died my head isn't exactly in the right place for gardening this year. I really just didn't feel like doing what I love - and to make up for that I just planted the bare basics to get through the year. That's fine because both of my kids had sports that took over the whole summer and I didn't have time to cook anyway. My husband seems to love not being home whereas I would like to enjoy our mortgage a little bit more. LOL. Next year I don't want to be so busy, I am fully exhausted from summer and sports. It's really a lot and too much - if we can't eat at home for the majority of the week, then I'm at the point where I don't want to do activities. It's too much work and we all need to rest. I think by the end of the summer both of my kids truly question whether or not they want to continue anyway.

Green beans were absolutely prolific and I will be doing green beans again next year. I don't think I want to do multiple varieties though - we can only eat so many fresh beans! I'll stick with bush beans so I don't need to build or find any trellising. My family prefers them roasted with garlic!

Because I knew in May after my mom died I probably wouldn't be too interested in gardening this year, I replaced a lot of my veggie areas with annual flowers. Zinnias are the easiest to grow so that's what's sprinkled around my yard in very colorful bursts of fucshia, orange, pinks, and reds.

This was an ok garden year for me. I have more hopes and dreams for next year and I'm hoping I have more time to do what I want and to grow more. Pumpkins are on the list as well as loofa, and tomatoes. My Arriba peppers grew so well that they're on my list for next year along with sweet peppers. And the perfect amount of zucchini is one plant so that's what I'll be growing next year too!

 

Let's Talk Lilies

 

Daylilies can be fun pops of color in my yard and they're in their long blooming season now. I am able to get them to bloom fairly easily, and I consider myself lucky because daylilies are not on the salad buffets of the rabbits this year. I've been able to buy a variety of colors and get them all happy in various parts of my yard. Stella d'Oro is the most popular variety that you see landscaping - both commercial and residential and this yellowy -orange variety is easy to start with if you're just getting into gardening. In my yard, the other color varieties seem to take longer to grow (and I mean they are taking 3-4 years to really take off and fill in well, whereas the Stella d'Oro seems to grow HUGE in the same season). Just an observation from my gardening notebooks for your home expectations.

In the past few years I have seen more and more people planting Stella d'Oro variety and saying that they are native to Minnesota and have seen this variety put into "native" categories in a couple of garden centers. Technically, they're not native to Minnesota - daylilies are native to Asia and central Europe. But there's also different types of lilies - Tiger lilies are true lilies and belong to the genus Lilium with a single stem with leaves coming off the stem with the flowers on top that bloom for several days in a row whereas daylilies belong to the genus Hemerocallis with grass-like foliage at the bottom and individual flowers that typically bloom for one day. 

I know people LOVE native flowers and sometimes only plant native varieties (everyone's gardening goals are different and each person's garden is a "you do you boo" situation, you gotta make yourself happy) but I'm not one to shy away from different hybrid varieties that are interesting or a different color. Non-native varieties do not have as much pollen or nectar for pollinators so non-native varieties are not the best food sources but I plant enough natives in my yard for a variety of pollinators so I'm not really worried about it.

But back to talking about native and non-native varieties of lilies - the only lilies that are native to Minnesota are spring ephemerals and they are trout lilies - Dwarf trout lily (erythronium propullans), white trout lily (erythronium albidum), and the yellow trout lily (erythronium americanum). I was lucky enough to see a couple of these at the Eloise Butler Wildflowers Gardens located in Theodore Wirth Park earlier this spring if you would like to see them in person. 

The varieties that I'm showing in pictures today are non-native daylilies that I've found at random garden centers over the years. I'm usually always attracted to the peach colored varieties and the deep maroon (because go Gophers!). I think maybe I only have two of the yellow-orange varieties left in my yard and I'll happily keep them because they grow so well. I find the ruffled petals so cute!

 

They like full sun and a good watering 2x per week so I would definitely consider them drought-tolerant (a good dousing with dishwater works well or the water from rinsing greens one or twice per week if it hasn't rained). I have varieties in different areas of my yard - they also thrive in my boulevard and haven't yet died from the salt and brine solutions that the City puts down in the winter for snow removal. Lilies also grow on the 1-2-3 schedule - 1st year they sleep, 2nd year they creep, 3rd year they leap (this tends to be true for lots of perennials, which is why the recommendation to give space when planting holds true). I highly recommend picking up a few daylily varieties for an easy-grow bloomer for your garden. They're so pretty when in bloom.

Hydrangea Leaftier Infestation

Unfortunately earlier this year I saw that the leaves on my hydrangeas were stuck together - and inside was the larvae of a caterpillar that feeds on the leaves and the flower buds. Because I was so busy with my mom and kids at the time, I didn't take pictures, instead I just went ahead and opened the leaves that had been bound together and killed the larvae without taking any photos. These caterpillars basically destroy the flower bud and so you end up with less buds and less flowers on your hydrangeas. I ended up snipping off maybe 3 bound leaf pods per plant and carefully pulling apart another 3-5 per plant. It doesn't take very long but it is annoying when you walk away and realize you forgot to check the whole side of the plant! 

But as you can see, we're at the point where I need to deadhead the blooms so that's on my chore list for this week. Apparently in some varieties deadheading can encourage more growth and blooms. Since I received these as a gift, and not purchased, I will definitely experiment on 2 out of the 3. I'll deadhead and see what happens. 

The blooms on these are HUGE this year and last year I babied all three hydrangea plants so they would come back. I had low expectations since we had transplanted in the middle of summer and not in the cooler spring or fall temperatures where I would be able to control the elements a little bit more. BUT I'm so happy they came back, even with a little larvae - but now I know what to look for and I will be on top of the leaves that are bound together. The bound leaves are easy to spot (they literally look like bound leaves and it looks like they're making a home for a pest, which they are!). You can either snip off the leaves if you can't get it open being gentle OR you can pry apart the leaves very gently and dispose of the larvae inside the bound leaves. 

 

Rabbit Damage

 

This lily was still in the pot when the rabbits decided to decimate it. Luckily I found some fencing to put around it for the rest of the year. The flower buds are still at the top so I think we'll get some blooms out of it but I'm not sure how long I can protect it in the upcoming years.

Well, I discovered that using ground clove burns plant leaves. So don't use that to keep away bunnies. It also doesn't keep away bunnies. However, you can see in the background that I took this after installing new fencing. 

I planted a new succession of green beans about 3 days ago. I can see some of the bean seeds are sprouting so I'm hopeful we still get some green beans this year! 

These rabbits. They've actually taken down maybe 30 milkweed plants. I've truly decided to leave the milkweed until I don't see monarchs - then I'll pull the milkweed, weed out the invasives and the plants I don't want. So I have milkweed everywhere but there's also monarch eggs on the majority of it! I'm super excited about this. I thought they liked swamp milkweed more, so I didn't really give any thoughts about possibly having a bit of a milkweed and butterfly farm. Ha.

These Asiatic lilies have been eaten down a lot - but the bunnies can only reach a little bit of the group of plants because I have this area planted so close together. Also. there's Snow on the Mountain and I desperately need to weed this out. But also there's milkweed in this area and so I can't quite get in here without disturbing the eggs. It's not quite a win-win situation yet so I just need to keep an eye on all the potential butterflies. 

This lily is on my boulevard. The half of the stems that are next to the sidewalk have just been terrorized by the bunnies. 

This year I've learned that if you really want to save something and you're attached to plants - fence them. Don't risk trying a home remedy or the rain washing away a store-bought bunny mix. Sometimes with the rain in the middle of the night, you can't get out there fast enough and those bunnies will absolutely eat everything. 

This year I've seen at least 3 new bunnies that have survived the neighborhood cats, the hawks, the owls, the fox, and the coyote that live around us. I wish animals could read so I could put a sign up saying "PLEASE EAT FROM MY YARD." 

Next year my plan is to fully fence in a large portion of the backyard so I don't have to keep reaching over bunny fencing in my raised beds. I bought the raised beds thinking that it would deter bunnies and I was wrong. Instead I'm going to be researching the best way to fence in a small area, find an archway for a door, and figure out how high of a fence I'll need to keep the critters out. I will also start moving favorite flowers like my delphiniums, lilies, coneflowers, and hostas into the fenced area too. As a gardener we understand that we will have a certain amount of pest damage but I'm at the point where I'm no longer interested in being continuously disappointed every year and spending time and money on indoor grown plants (and veggies!) to then give them to the rabbits as food each spring. No, thank you. As long as I have the time, I'll share what I find here and I will update with pictures and plans too.

Early July Blooms

I don't actually remember planting this coneflower. It's tucked into a patch of Bee Balm (or Monarda if you're looking to google it!) and the milkweed has surrounded it. This is also next to a sedum - which I need to move to a better, more sunny spot where I don't have to pull out Bee Balm for the sedum to bloom.

But this coneflower is really pretty and had I remembered that it was there, I would have pulled out the encroaching other flowers around it. 

The Bee Balm has just started blooming and is in various states of growth, some of it is small still, other plants are just starting to bloom. I really enjoy this in my yard because I feel that it's long lasting - especially if you have it in various areas of sun & shade. It also doesn't have a ton of pest pressure which means that it's been incredibly reliable for me over the years and bunnies, squirrels, and Phil have left it alone. 

Self-seeded Snapdragon from last year. Light purple or lavender blooms with the dark leaves are really pretty and a great addition to my planters. I wish I could remember where it came from - I'm thinking I got a mix pack from Burpee and this was part of the pack. Now that I know that Snapdragons can self-seed, I'm going to toss out a few seed packets next year at the school garden and see what happens.

Purple is my favorite color. And magenta! But these striped ones are so cute.

Milkweed is blooming and even though it doesn't seem to look all that impressive from afar - when you look closely there's so many blooms and the little flowers are pretty detailed. My backyard doesn't have as much milkweed but what it does have, has been creeping into the grass and I've had to mow it down. I need the backyard to have some grass for Phil and Q to play soccer and the milkweed, if it's knocked into by a soccer ball will get everything sticky. I hate dealing with the sticky milkweed on soccer balls and other sports equipment.

Butterfly Weed is one of my favorites. It doesn't spread too crazy in my yard - this is easy to pull if you don't like where it landed. The seed pods are ginormous and so if you pull those in the fall, it will contain the spread if you find that it's spreading too much for your likin. I highly recommend this native for the pollinators. Butterfly Weed is the larval food source for Monarch butterflies. In my yard, I will see bumble bees, sweat bees - the ones with the bright green coloration, and occasionally other butterflies hanging around it.