if you live in a place with a definite winter/summer cycle, then if you start with aphid & ant control early on (when it’s still cooler) you’ll have better luck keeping them away. I do realize it’s too late in the season now for that, but it’s something to think about for next year.

a spray with neem oil + castille soap works wonders repelling ants, aphids and mites. though, judging from your photos, it might be very limited in effectiveness. i bought a large spray bottle from the hardware store, mixed up the neem oil (a couple of tablespoons?) and the castille soap (about the same amount - I have a huge bottle of dr bronner’s), filled up the rest of the bottle with water, and I keep it out with my outdoor plants. I live in an apartment and the concrete steps are the only space i have to grow. every spring, most anything i grow outside will get attacked by aphids as it starts to get warm. spraying the undersides of all the leaves early in the morning kills them. do it every morning for a few days, spritzing during the day if you see them bunch up. i try not to do it longer than 5-6 days before giving a break from the neem oil. if it ever gets to that point, i take the entire pots out onto the sidewalk and using a gentle jetstream of water, I’ll shoot the aphids off.

flowering plants will generally attract hornets/wasps no matter what you do. but, if you don’t bug them, they won’t get aggressive usually. and even though they’re al the assholes of the air, they are still important pollinators.

diatomaceous earth works great against external pests like ants too. spread it around in a light dusting where you see them come in, that will work better than making something like a “circle of salt”… ants aren’t hollywood demons haha. it’ll keep out some beetles too and other critters. DE is safe around your cat too, hell, it’s used in baking too.

That is a very cute master gardener supervisor!

Look up what ladybug lava look like… Unless you are already aware that you have some photos of ladybugs in that set.

Ugh, man fuck ants and aphids, I feel your pain. Pests are well… pests, and are never fun to deal with. I got a huge infestation of aphids on most of my indoor houseplants and had to spray the heck out of them with what was unfortunately not organic Captain Jack’s Deadbug. It did take care of the problem, though, but was a whole ordeal. That said, as much of a pain as it can be it may be time to step back & evaluate starting from scratch. If there are some plants that are highly valued, keep them & spray away, but if there are some you don’t care as much about, it may be easier to dispose of them than to fight off the damn critters.

Either way, best of luck to you!!

Some notes:

• slugs and snails hate traveling on copper, if you isolate the area early (before they come), you can keep them away with a barrier of copper foil

• tobacco deters and heated + filtered tobacco water kills insects, aphids are relatively easy to kill with “green soap” spray (direct translation, I don’t know the English name of the substance)

Now as for wasps, I would consider a netting of some sort. Most likely, it would keep other kinds of insects out too, but aphids are probably too small to keep out with nets. If there’s too much, I would control their numbers with soap.

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Wasps are pollinators too

The top photo’s wasp comes off as a yellow jacket to me. They are notoriously aggressive compared to milder species like mud daubers and paper wasps. So if that’s the look of the waso that stung ya, I’m completely unsurprised.

For reference we tend to get quite a few paper wasps in our garden, and they are so mild that they will fly right by us without giving a damn.

Though, to be clear, a lot of wasp aggresssion is dependent on the temperment of their queen. You might need to remove the nest.

The space is beautiful but a quick glance doesn’t show a lot of ‘fuck you’ plants in there. Things to tell various kinds of bugs to cut themselves in half and bite their genitals until nobody can tell what they were.

Do searches per-bug. Things like onions and mint to irritate the fuckers. Spiders are friends too, and buying good-bugs to fill those ecological niches–or feed on whatever does –is always great fun.

A good rule of thumb is that you dont get to say “no” to nature-it’s not always red in tooth and claw, but it kind of never cares what you want. If something’s living somewhere, something’s probably going to live there-but it doesn’t have to be the something that moved in while you weren’t looking. Or sometimes you can put something else into a niche that makes that one invalid.

Potential good news for your sticky flowers; if you can put off harvest just a little and dip them for mites right now the stress could cause a growth-spurt with the metabolism cranked towards flowering. This might still be something you can turn into a win if you can avoid pollination.

Your cat is majestic beautiful and perfect.

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Don’t be sorry! It is perfectlyh normal to be upset when you get hurt, I personally am quite phobic re: wasps and hornets, so I absolutely understand. Few hints:

• On two pics (the last one and the one before the cute kitty) those Alien looking elongated things are in fact ladybug larvae! Which is great news, since they are way more hungry for the aphids than the adult ones are. That’s a score for you! An old technique that’s recommended by people to attract more ladybugs is to tie some yellow ribbons, as this colour is supposed to attract them. While I haven’t experimented with it myself, I have a couple of friends who swear by it.
• Easy, practical and relatively non-hostile way to deter wasps that I can personally vouch for is putting up a fake nest up there - the critters are madly territorial and will not hang around it the place seems to be claimed by another clan already.

Also, well, don’t give up, try again, rinse and repeat. And try not to be bothered by people who give you their unsolicited moral lectures instead of actually trying to help.
Cheers, good luck, and keep us updated on your adventures!