polkadots and moonbeams

Here he is. The Mighty , The Incomparable , Jeronimo - defending the patch where he faithfully weaves his web every day. As I've said here before, I am rather scared of spiders and certainly can't tolerate them in the house but out in the garden they have their uses and this guy (at least, I think it's a guy, I haven't been that close) has obeyed my orders and stayed firmly in the same space for a couple of months now. He's a big chap - that pot in the background is a 12 incher - and sometimes the mainstay of his web is up to six feet long. It's stood up to some fair winds this week and today he had a bit of a set-to with a cat but I think he will still be there tomorrow. They say it's going to be sunny tomorrow too, so Jeronimo and I will be out there trying to get that last bit of tanning in.

Another reason why I haven't blogged for a week is that this is the peak spider training season. i don't like spiders. If they are indoors they scare me and I have to leave the room (I haven't been in the back bedroom since the May Bank Holiday) until I am sure they have gone. Outside spiders have a point and that is to keep the flies down BUT they have to do so in places where they won't get in my hair. Being spiders, they don't always anticipate where my hair is going to be when they are spinning their webs in the dead of night so from late May to mid-June I have to train them. It's actually quite easy - if you walk into their web and destroy it on a daily basis they soon get the message and move to a safer place. Sometimes I train them more carefully using a pencil to break the web and attach the broken web to better placed plants. Last year I trained a rather large and hairy fellow called Henry to stay in the south-west corner of my back yard and we got on f...