Accessible Gardening: #21 Practical Matters for Phsically Challenged Gardeners, 1 by Agavegirl1

Agavegirl1 wrote:
Ewwww! I hate ants. They\'re such a pain in the butt and so hard to get rid of even after you spray. Time for the exterminator. Sigh. What a flaming mess. I\'m hoping they don\'t get into your food/kitchen or bedrooms. I\'m sorry you\'re having such an issue with them. :[ GRRRRR!

Summer here is Black Widow season. YIKES!!!
Bad enough I hate spiders in any way, shape and form and they make my skin crawl but those things give me a massive coronary and I start screeching literally in terror and panic.
Summer time they are active because they\'re looking for cool, dark, and damp-ish spots for obvious reasons and that is also the time they lay eggs. Usually garage corners, in boxes, pots and stuff you have in the garage stored, by faucets and taps and sprinklers outside. (Aside from lowering the water bill it is another reason we shut off our automatic sprinkler system). They liked to hide in corners of the patio or under the crevices of the house and under the plants and rocks. EWWWW!!

We have to do regular \'spider patrol\' around this time. They are more active at night and more visible. The two triangles on their back show up kind of \'whitish-yellow\' even though they don\'t change color. They\'re red/orange all the time but for some reason when you hit them with a flash light they show up \'whitish-yellow\'.

I can not tell you, especially in our last place that was more rural, how many in 7 years total my husband has killed. As for me when I\'ve seen them, I\'ve emptied copious amounts of any chemical that says \'kills spiders\' and if that wasn\'t handy many a Black Widow has met a painful death with a trowel, shovel, rock or shoe. They are subsequently stomped and ground into a pile of mush.

Also have to watch the dog. Greyhounds aren\'t the stupidest breed but they\'re not the smartest either. Zoe is overly curious and likes to \'look\' and sniff at my plants a lot and sometimes paws at the ground around them. I usually think it is for the tiny little lizards she\'s so fond of eating but it wouldn\'t surprise me if she had tried to eat some spider or the spider decided to \'eat\' her back.

The one year we have no clue what she got into in our yard but she wound up very, very, sick and started to go into renal failure. We almost lost her. Since then she is not allowed out to potty in the Summer unless she is supervised and being watched! Hey, $1,400.00 vet bills are a luxury we can\'t afford! We also can\'t afford to be bit ourselves! Ewwwwwwww. I hate spiders.

We\'ve never had a real problem with them per se aside from having to kill the random few every now and then so it never warranted getting an exterminator but I know people who have had real infestation problems. What a nightmare that would be.

As for plants remember I told you about that \'freak\' plant I had, even by my standards. Well this is what happened in a span of less than 12 days. Watch the \'black\' fuzzy bumps. Weeeird.