stubbed toes and mud pies

[flowerbug]

welcome to December! the days are short, cool and cold, sometimes snow, sometimes rain. it's not really gardening weather and there has been ice on the puddles enough that i'm not sure if there's a frozen layer on top of the ground or not out there. today is also raining and snowing mix so i am not going out there to do any thing but i would like to make something happen.

right now i'm just hoping for one more warm and dry spell of a long enough duration that the ground is not frozen or too wet. i'm not sure i will get that, but it has happened before.

 

[flowerbug]

it looks like the Thursday, Friday and perhaps Saturday morning forecasts will be ok for finishing up gardens for winter along with getting some ashes scattered and turned in. we've had so many rains that it will take that long to dry out enough but i'm going to be optimistic and hope the forecast doesn't change.

today is a day of rest with perhaps a bout of cleaning of a desk and window sill that is showing way more spider webs than it should (it tires me out just thinking about it )... if i don't get to it today then there is always tomorrow...

 

[Phaedra]

right now i'm just hoping for one more warm and dry spell of a long enough duration that the ground is not frozen or too wet. i'm not sure i will get that, but it has happened before.

I wish for a dry spell badly, no matter snow or rain, it's way too wet for a long while.
I do look for a completely dry week and don't need to worry about some muddy and slippery areas even wearing good boots.

 

[flowerbug]

some time ago i went and tracked down some spiders and removed them. some more recent time ago i checked up on how things were doing and saw more webs and spiders so i did the same thing again. and then even more recently i went through it all again and looked further around and found six small spiders so i'm glad i did it because it means i've kept after them and made progress on knocking down the population. of the six spiders only one of them had an egg sac.

that was in the living room, in my own room i've always had a few around and last week looking at the desk i saw a lot more spider webs in the window than i really wanted to see and i also needed to clean my desk off and get it dusted a little. it wasn't too bad but just getting rid of some of the clutter and putting some things in recycle and cleaning up a few things i'd set aside until i could get back to them for a more thorough cleaning or get them also into the recycle bin.

i only found one spider. one! in all those webs i expected a bit more action. it is good because it means there really wasn't enough food to support a population i that area... i'll keep an eye on things there too now that it is more indoor time and i can do smaller cleaning tasks like this as the weather closes in. it's also a good time to do it when the flying insect populations are low.

Mom said she has some webs in her room she wants me to check and i will but not tonight...

this is all interesting to me because i'm also using this as a way to learn more about spider habits, reproduction and how they manage to survive in a house (i'm pretty sure that they do eat each other). population dynamics, nerd stuff, nature stuff, always interesting to me. in the meantime i'm also pretty sure the crawlspace has plenty more in there... no, i'm not going to look...

 

[flowerbug]

it was fun to find out my nephew's bowling team recently beat the previous 5th all-time-record in the country for a recorded league game (it is the record for the state). he's still fairly young and hasn't bowled that much but he's already had a 300 game (but not in this tourney).

 

[Branching Out]

it was fun to find out my nephew's bowling team recently beat the previous 5th all-time-record in the country for a recorded league game (it is the record for the state). he's still fairly young and hasn't bowled that much but he's already had a 300 game (but not in this tourney).

Impressive result!

 

[flowerbug]

i've been doing some more spider hunting. it is interesting the places you can find them. one was up in a closet which isn't opened very often and there's not many bugs that get in there but it must have been enough. luckily it was right out where you could see it easily and it had an egg sac with it. one yesterday was hiding in the upper right corner of a patio door. i saw it the other day when i started doing my next level inspection (the first level was to get all along the bottom of the wall cleared out) and noted it as having several egg sacs so i sure wasn't going to let that one alone for too long. Saturday i got the web, spider and egg sacs (three of them) removed and then went back the next day to see if i'd missed anything. already there was a new smaller spider who'd taken up residence in that same corner so i removed that one too. it may have been a young one of the previous spider as it was the same species.

i also went around and checked for other spiders in places i'd already cleared to keep them from coming back and caught four new tiny ones. several different species.

gladly none of them are dangerous or poisonous.

 

[flowerbug]

the last two bean packages are finished and ready to go out in today's mail to people who wanted them. i hope they get them in time for Christmas, but even if they don't they'll be like Christmas presents because they have a lot of different beans in them.

in one package i took samples of three different sub-collections along with including a bunch of my favorites. so that is easily over a hundred bean varieties.

the other one wasn't quite so many but perhaps over twenty different beans in that one.

it looks like a tornado went through my room though now with all the boxes scattered around and shelves cleaned off so i could get at things.

after today's garden club meeting i'll have time to go through things and start taking some more pictures and ponder what i need to weed out of the collection and what samples i can start making up for the seed swap to go along with the ones i've already got left over from last time.

 

[digitS']

scattered

Scattered Spider - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[flowerbug]

Scattered Spider - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

i have nothing to do with that sort of thing...