Got Spiders?

We were sitting on the front porch the other night, when I noticed a spider web on the porch railing that looked like a swarm of gnats caught in the web.

When I looked closer, I found that it was a nest of tiny spiders that must have just hatched out of their egg case.

Just Hatched

I usually just deport spiders if I find them inside the house.  I leave most spiders alone if they are outdoors; they eat other bugs and anything that will take out Black Flies is pretty much fine with me.  Black Flies are small, biting flies that love me for some reason and I do not like the way they fly into my ears.

However, two exceptions to this Spider Tolerance Policy are Black Widow Spiders and Brown Widow Spiders.  The Brown Widows in particular seem to love our front porch, building their messy webs all over the railings around the porch and all over the porch furniture, the porch light and pretty much anything else they can use to anchor their webs.  Their egg sacs are white spheres covered with spiky protrusions; there was an empty sac and another full one just next to where these tiny spiders were, so we knew that's what they were.

We joke that we contract out our Halloween decorations to the spiders because they use locally sourced, organic webbing, but there were just too many of these Brown Widows, so that was the last of them.

We'll leave the decorating to the Orb Weavers, one of whom seems to have designs on entrapping our car.

More on local spiders:  http://waynesword.palomar.edu/redmite.htm

Wine Delivery

We were up in Temecula recently visiting wineries, and saw this scene--the sign reads "Wine Club Members Parking".

Now that's a serious wine delivery system--roll up the windows, open the sun roof and let 'er rip.

Salad Bar

Cindy had the members of her Seed-Starting Guild over a couple of weeks ago to plant some seeds for winter crops.  Their idea was to each start some of the same seeds at the same time, take them home and then compare notes about how the plants progressed.

Winter crops, such as the broccoli, Brussels sprouts, beets and cabbage she planted, prefer cool weather, so when we had a warm spell a few days later, she brought them into the house and I got to babysit them on my desk for a couple of days before she took them back outside.

Sprouts Up

They were doing very well, germinating in a few days and beginning to develop true leaves.  But then it got hot again, and Cindy took the tray out of the little green house we made out behind the garage, thinking it would be too hot in there for them.

Looking Good

She left the tray on the platform that holds our rain barrels, and when she came back a couple of hours later, she was saddened to find a scene of complete devastation.

But Not Much Left

Some varmint, probably one of the many California Ground Squirrels, had decided to treat the tray as its own private micro-green salad bar.  Almost everything had been chewed off at the roots, not yanked out as if the birds had done it, so it was most likely a veggie-loving squirrel.

The only thing the critter didn't eat was the Arugula.