Garden -- wasps

Been there, done that twice.

Any time you have something sit out for a long time that provides good cover, wasps will build nests there. Concrete blocks, an old drop cloth, whatever. If it will hide them and their colony, they will take it over. They will build nests in the ground, too, and they get very nasty toward the end of the summer.

Mike McGrath, my go-to guy, has ways of fixing this on his YBYG website. GO THERE AND FIND OUT.

It wouldn't have worked in my case, but what I can do is pour horticultural oil on the stuff that they nested in. Of course, it only kills the ones it touches, but enough got touched to break up the colony.

Then I had to deal with the ones floating around where the colony had been, foragers who came home and found that everything was gone. Here's a helpful site.

https://plantcaretoday.com/natural-ways-get-rid-wasps.html

I had two of the essential oils they talked about because I mix them with rubbing alcohol and witch hazel for bug repellent that I put on before doing work in my back yard.

I also had borax and a recipe for boric acid.

So I sprinkled the porch brick with essential oil to drive off the last homeless wasps, and then I loaded my water gun with boric acid and sprayed it all over the brick to poison it for new wasps -- and also ants. The homeless wasps will die in less than three weeks. No other colony will take them in and they are workers, not royalty who can start a new colony.

You do not want to spray boric acid into wasp nests in the ground. It does not wash out of the soil. Use McGrath's solution instead.

And by the way, ice poultices do a good job of stopping wasp stings from burning. Just don't get too courageous, because the effects are additive and the next sting you get could create an allergic reaction that can be deadly. It happened to a woman within 100 miles of where I live who pruned her azaleas at the wrong time of year, not knowing that she was at the tipping point.

And let this be a lesson to you to keep your property clean, to shift everything and groom around it at least once a year, to put stuff in the trash as soon as you know you're not going to need it any more, or to shut it up where wasps and other things can't get at it, and to do your landscape maintenance at the correct time for the plants instead of when it's convenient for you.