Spiders in our midst

On Saturday, I spent about an hour sitting on the deck, reading and napping. When I finally shuffled to my feet, I felt numerous sticky invisible threads on my head, arms and legs. It felt like the scene in Gulliver’s Travels when Gulliver is tied down by the tiny Lilliputians and taken prisoner.

Spiders have taken over my corner of the world. They started out this spring as tiny spiderlings huddling together for protection. A breath of air would cause them to scatter, then come together again. But they have had all summer to grow, and now they are huge and lurking everywhere.

Today I couldn't even sit down in my chair. Spiders have taken up residence, and I'm outnumbered.



This lady is a yellow argiope or writing spider, and she made herself at home in my garden last summer. Thank goodness there was only one, because I really am faint of heart and cowardly about getting too close.

My assailants are gray-brown garden spiders, not very beautiful, but very busy making webs on anything they can find, including plants, deck chairs, and me. After laying their eggs, they die. I remember reading Charlotte’s Web to my kids, and when Charlotte’s life was over, I sobbed like a baby. My kids, unaffected by the tragedy, kept wondering what was the matter with me.

Reaching my garden's potential

Well, contrary to what Betty says, the garden doesn't always reach its full potential.
Take my carrots, for instance. For the past few years, I've been having fabulous luck with Rainbow carrots, whose colours range from dark orange, through yellow, to white. They are sweet, delicious, and usually so plentiful it takes a day to harvest, wash, and store them. Not this year. When only a very few plants emerged long after planting two packages of seed, I went back and planted two more packages in July. No better luck the second time. I spent about $15 for seeds, and I have seven carrots.
When I planted sunflowers, the same story. I painstakingly planted a row of 10 seeds at the correct depth and the correct spacing at the correct time - nothing happened. I replanted new seeds and three lonely specimens appeared.

But the sunflower shown above sprang forth without any effort on my part. I didn't plant that seed. It's a volunteer, and where the seed came from is a mystery.

The garden's potential lies not in anything I do, but what happens naturally. In spite of my best efforts, things I plant thrive or die, and the power I have to control my garden is an illusion.

A first look

I have decided to start a blog to bring together my thoughts about gardening - the plants and the creatures that live among them. My garden is just outside Charottetown, Prince Edward Island, on the east coast of Canada.

This little fellow is a potato bug. He and his brothers and sisters devastated the one volunteer potato plant in my garden, and have now invaded the sunberry patch.

Sunberry (Solanum burbankii) is part of the nightshade family, which also includes potato, tomato, pepper, and eggplant. There is very little information about it on the Internet, and so when I bought the seeds at Vesey's Seeds and started them on a window sill in March, I didn't know what I was in for. But they grew like mad. I planted them outside in June. The leaves immediately got scorched and sunburned, but soon recovered, and now the plants are 3 feet high. As new green leaves appeared, they were quickly turned to swiss cheese by the dreaded flea beetle, a tiny black jumping insect that puts hundreds of small holes through the leaves.



As delicious as sunberry seems to be to the insect world, I was really disappointed by the flavour of the huge crop of pea-sized berries it produces. And something about knowing it's from the nightshade family makes me wary. I picked about four cups of berries, and they are still in the fridge - should I try cooking them into jam to see what they will taste like, or just give up and toss the berries and the plants into the compost? I'll leave that decision for another day.