Pests

A couple of weeks ago I discovered a wasps nest in the hoop house. Actually, I really didn't discover them until after I had disturbed their nest or the thing that the nest was attached to. I immediately was stung by one of them. Tom got the hose and sprayed the nest like crazy and the wasps were gone, for the moment.

Since then we have been trying to rid the hoop house of them. I had no idea that they would come back to the same place and look for the nest. Now that I think of it, why wouldn't they? A few days after the first nest was destroyed they had already started to build a new one - sorry wasps, you gotta go! More hose action please.

THEN last weekend I was tending to some of my seedlings for my Fall/Winter garden and I noticed a wasp flying in and then flying into the tube of row cover cloth on the shelf right in front of me. Yup, right in front of me. When Tom came back outside I told him what I had seen and then he went and got a couple of towels to plug the ends of the tube and then was able to spray the heck out of the tube. Turns out there were a couple of nests in the tube. Swell.

Not too long later the wasps that survived the blast of water returned to the hoop house. Here we go again. 

They're baaaack!

This time Tom remembered that we had some sort of Raid spray. It was for ants and roaches, but it worked on the wasps pretty good.

After a couple of squirt of the chemical spray

After a while I decided to start looking around for more nests in the hoop house and I found another small nest in a stack of the plastic pots that I use for transplanting older seedlings. That nest also got the water treatment. Once those wasps/nest were destroyed I started thinking about how much I didn't want to use the spray around my tomato plants so I had to come up with a new solution. A quick search on Google and I found a safe way to deal with the wasps in a more plant friendly manner.

You gotta love Googlepedia

So the recipe that I decided to go with is:

•  16 oz of white vinegar
•  16 oz of water
•  several drops of dish soap 
•  A LOT of peppermint essential oil. 

I had a spare spray bottle sitting around which is kinda weird because in the spring I couldn't find ONE.

Anyway, I poured everything into the bottle, gave it a shake or two and off I went looking for the straggler wasps that still insisted on returning to the Hoop House.

It amazes me how these little creatures will go back to their last known address and try to set up shop again. In the short couple of weeks since we started to battle the wasps they have returned to all of the spots that they built nests before and even tried to start a new nest above the door.

Once I came across a few wasps all congregated on one of the shelves that I stored some of my plastic pots on and gave them a few squirts of my new wasp spray. Surprise, surprise...they didn't like it. They started to writhe on the ground in a manner that suggested that they were not comfortable. After a couple of minutes they finally stopped moving....for good.

This was very exciting for me as I am able to use this spray around my plants and not worry about what sort of chemicals are going into the air or potentially harming my veggie plants.

Wasps have not returned to the hoop house in the past week. I'm not sure if I'm happy or not - mostly because I rather enjoyed spraying them and watching them drop to the ground or the potting bench and try to cling to life only to eventually die.

I love me a new pest remedy.