So much for being the “purple flower lady”, I thought to myself as I made my way around the corner of the front pond, passing the still blooming red lily on the way and carefully stepping over the surprise pile of dead and dying wasps.

The hubby found a new colony under the siding next to the garage this morning and forgot to tell me that he sprayed them on his way to work, killing most of them and leaving the rest angry and looking for revenge.

They came at me all frantic and menacing but I was able to carefully maneuver away safely, one hand in my pocket gripping my EpiPens, while trying not to emit the fear hormone. I breathed in deeply and scanned the flowerbeds to keep myself calm, mentally noting that most of the flowers aren’t purple, so I’m a long way from meeting my goal.

Reds, oranges, yellows and pinks seem to make up the bulk of them.

But there are quite a few purple ones now, like this lavender beauty.

It was probably a lofty goal to begin with since we’ve planted so many things over the years that aren’t purple so to all of a sudden decide I want to change all that is going to take some patience and a few good seasons for it to become the predominant hue in the garden.

Hopefully I’ll live long enough to find out! With the way these wasps keep returning and threatening to murder me, who knows?

At least my garden is helping the bee population, though, as they are everywhere now. The corn is absolutely buzzing with them and they really like the pumpkins and the tomatoes, too.

Who wouldn’t? I mean, if I were a bee I’d bee all over them, too!

Once I got over my fear of being stung to death and calmed my heart rate down and started watering, I noticed a couple of things that were a bit… disconcerting. Not only are the wasps back again but so is the blossom end rot on the Roma tomatoes. 🤔

Not on all of them, and not on the Early Girl plant, just the Romas. They definitely got enough water this last week with all the rain and they’ve been properly fertilized so maybe they were over watered? I still gave them a good dousing just in case since the soil was pretty dry already and decided to just wait and see.

I also noticed that one of the carrots is sticking pretty far up out of the ground and is super green, so that will be interesting to see what the rest of it looks like when it’s time to pull them.

It won’t be long before we harvest them and the first batch of potatoes (not the ones in the potato tower) as well as the rest of the onions and all the lettuce. I’ve been trimming the lettuce a bit here and there so we don’t have to use it up all at once and that helps. Any leftovers we have will go to the livestock, so either way someone will eat it.

The peas have nearly given us all they are going to and I’m still waiting on the beans to be ready. Then it will be the corn and the pumpkins and cucumbers etc. after those are ripe. Next year I plan to do things quite a bit differently in anticipation of another hot summer. We definitely weren’t prepared for it to be so bad this year, but we will be next time.

We will also hopefully get a jump on culling the wasp populations earlier next time, too!

Ah, I can hear the garden laughing as I type this…