Saturday, January 26, 2008

Nasty or Nice?

In consideration of anyone who may have a certain phobia starting with "a" - please feel free to look away.

We have a lot of spiders at our place, in the garden, in the house. Thankfully I'm not afraid of spiders, although I don't like them. My fear, although I don't know the latin term, is of the smaller four legged creatures with long tails - they, they paralyse me with fear. Actually no, that's not true, they send me running for the hills. If I even saw any tiny, tiny evidence that one had been in our house, I would not return until it had left the house in a plastic bag.


Back to the sssssspiders though. We have a lot, as I've mentioned, but recently two have taken up residence in our front garden, where the girls and I spend most of our time playing. The first one spun its web between two rose bushes right next to the front tap. The second one, that I only found this afternoon, has spun its web between two of my tomato plants. I wanted Geoff to get rid of it for me. They're very striking, with an unusual web, quite active and also BIG. He assured me they're harmless - I asked him how he knew that. He said that the nasty ones aren't so colourful. Hmmm. Anyway, we decided to look it up on the internet and our spider is harmless (at most a bite will cause a weak local reaction - that's okay then) and is called a St Andrew's Cross spider.


They can stay, for now, I'll exercise less reckless abandon in picking my tomatoes and won't be diving into the zucchinis as much as I have. Ella isn't enthused though - she wants them to go - she dislikes all insects, despite buying her a bug catcher to try and help with her nervousness. She has only had sunny boys (slaters) in her bug catcher, butterflies are "too beautiful", grass hoppers "too scary", bees "too dangerous". She doesn't want to go outside until they're gone ..... oh dear, spiders days may be numbered - can we perhaps successfully relocate them via the bug catcher??

3 comments:

Lindsay said...

OOO shivers! I'm with Ella on this one, they look scary! Just showed the picture to Matt and he says he saw lots of them when he was a student picking fruit in the Riverlands and they can give you a nip! When we lived in Australia I was paranoid about all spiders and checked my shoes every day! There was a massive Huntsman that lived outside my in-laws house on their veranda yuk!

Tanya said...

Bonjour!

your PIF is ready to be mailed. Could you email me your address so I can send it!
Thanks,
Tanya

Pina said...

Nasty and nice! I am not really afraid of spiders but I am not very comfortable in their presence. I admire the webs they weave and their colors and shapes.
I have many of them in my house. I can't help it, they just come into the rooms; after all I live in a country. I remove one, there comes another. They can live happily in the fields, I suppose, but they keep coming back.
And last night I discovered two little grasshoppers feeding on my orchids!