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The spider made another egg sac on Monday night and spent the rest of the week hanging out and spreading her web ever larger and more obnoxiously over all three tomato plants. Then today she was gone, and her web was all torn up.
I don't know if she was just spent or if a bird ate her or what. But we've all read Charlotte's Web; I knew something like this would happen eventually. I have to admit I'm still pretty bummed.
I took a three-day weekend. It was stupendous. I drove out to the lake, watched an electrical storm, played with my plants, went to an art opening, saw some friends, printed some shirts, ate some potato chips, hatched some schemes.
The main theme was not much internet. Some internet, mind you, just not much. I am hoping this will effortlessly become a trend. I am tired of feeling like I have to know everything all the time; it is confusing and numbing and sometimes upsetting and always unproductive. Most things will happen exactly the way they are going to happen whether I know about them or not, and if I really need to know something, well, who am I kidding, I will still be on the internet plenty. Just hopefully not as much.
All the okra advice I've read says to be so, so careful not to let it grow too long because then you will be a failure who has woody okra, and then NO OKRA AT ALL because it will stop producing because of all the energy that goes into the lengthening and woodification of the okra. So now I'm picking it at all kinds of lengths, and I'm never sure which ones are right. I think the two on each end are too long and too short, respectively, and the rest are fine, but it's hard to know. Plus I think the okra has aphids, which I will destroy this weekend. Anyway, I can't wait to have enough of the little bastards to try this cooking method from Styro and this recipe that Kristy suggested.
Okra is a very easy, pretty, and rewarding plant to grow. I wish I'd started with it a few years ago instead of bashing my head against a rock border trying to get tomatoes to grow during two consecutive drought years.
(No, I actually don't have anything else going on right now, but it's sweet of you to wonder.)
The spider spun her egg sac sometime Saturday night. Now she looks smaller and a little depleted, and she didn't bother to redo her cool web zigzag yesterday morning. I read garden spiders can pop a few rounds of eggs out before they die in the fall, so maybe she's still got some work to do.
She's lost her baby weight already--how does she do it?
I'm not sure how long these eggs will need to incubate before they hatch. If it's more than a few weeks, there may be trouble. I'm going to want to pull the tomato plants out to make room for a fall garden eventually. I wonder if the egg sac can be safely moved?
I have pretty much given up on the summer tomatoes now. I'll keep watering them and harvesting what I can, but they are getting leggy and stunted by the sun and the stinkbugs, and I can't even get to half of them because of spider lady there. Probably I should have taken down her web until she gave up on that spot and set up shop elsewhere. In hindsight, it just isn't a very good place for a giant web/nursery. Next year I will have a harder heart, I promise.
I've got it bad.
Did you know that okra is a relative of the hibiscus? There is a family resemblance for sure, especially in the cheekbones. Hard to believe that such a lovely flower yields such strange-looking vegetable, but a few hours after it looks like this, the flower folds up, falls off, and reveals a stubby little okra-ette that only needs a few days to mature. So far I have only had one okra pod get big enough to pick. I ate it raw, and it was okay. It'll be better when there are more because then it will be worth cooking or maybe even pickling.
Sorry about the near-daily spider pictures; I know some people really don't like them. But I think she and her web are beautiful, and they are both changing all the time.
Look at how much bigger she is now than just a few weeks ago. Either she is totally knocked up or is very full of delicious bugs. I'm not sure, and I'm also not sure what the indentations on her back are for. But I will find out and let you know.
I spent way too much money getting mostly crummy prints developed from the underwater camera that's been wedged in the bottom of my swim bag for the past few years. Won't you help me feel like it wasn't a total loss by clicking over to Flickr and looking at a few of my favorites? Thank you; you are nice.
You know, I really miss the in-store photo lab in Hancock Center HEB. The prices were good and the people were nice, so even if most of my pictures turned out boring or lousy, I never felt too bad about it. Of course, I helped contribute to their demise when I embraced digital about six years ago and hardly ever looked back. But jeez, can't I just have every single thing that I want, when I want, no matter how specific, useless, or obsolete it is, all of the time? I just don't think that's so much to ask.
We had the upstairs insulated, the doors sealed, the thermostat moved, and the a/c ducts replaced recently. And right now I am roasting beets in a 425-degree oven as I type this and I can't even tell, except for the occasional whiff of dirt smell. A month ago even boiling water up here would have been inadvisable as it was usually about 86-88 degrees in the kitchen every night when the sun went down, and so much as glancing at the oven would jack that up to about 92. I thought getting new ducts would be one of those shitty necessary but not-at-all-exciting expenses, but I was wrong. All of a sudden being able to inhabit half our house for half the year--and cook, really cook, year-round--is fantastic. This is easily the best money we've spent since we moved in three years (and three long, hot summers) ago, especially since city rebates paid for almost half of it.
Being able to hang out and cook upstairs also meant I got to make spring rolls yesterday afternoon, and holy cow, they are so easy and fun to make. I mean, the prep took a while, as prep tends to, especially the first time I make something, but they were really simple.
I had no idea. I was so scared. I thought it would be lots of complicated folding and nimble wrist flicking and exhibiting patience and all that stuff I'm horrible at, but the rice wrappers are easy to roll and fairly forgiving, and it's very satisfying to watch the plate fill up with damp, tidy packages of deliciousness. The recipe is here, and I can't recommend it enough. You can sub chicken, beef, tofu, carrots, cucumbers, Vienna sausages, whatever the hell you want for the shrimp. And I just used sweet chili sauce for the dipping since we had a bottle handy, but I'd like to try a peanut version next time. And now I want to make every summer recipe, ever, just because I can. Suggestions?
Here is the black and yellow argiope aka garden spider feasting on a particularly large June bug. Later today she moved on to a stinkbug, which got the same brutal treatment. Please click on the pictures for a better look because it really was cool.
I have been letting her web interfere with my tomato tending because, to be honest, I am finding this spider so much more interesting than tomatoes right now. Don't get me wrong, the tomatoes are great, but we've been enjoying them for a couple of months now, and while they are still producing okay, they don't provide the drama that a gigantic beautiful spider's web does. Does that make me a sap? Too bad; and anyway, I have peppers, mint, basil, and my very first okra ever to keep me happy while I give my Sungolds over to spiders and stinkbugs.
I have to tell y'all that this past week kind of sucked shit. After lots of sweating, swearing, and hand-wringing, it turned out that everyone and everything around here is perfectly okay, and I am so glad, but before we learned that, oh, man. We had a truckload of minor inconveniences, a few severe annoyances, and a couple of legitimate scares.
But again, it's all okay, and it was a relief this weekend to host a dear friend, swim, eat, and have the book club I'm in over for snacks and increasingly drunken semi-literary conversation. If life wants to be pretty good again all of a sudden, it can certainly do that for as long as it wants to. I for one am not going to question it.
Yeah! Jump on board my cool new steam roller! We can cruise around drinking beer and listening to Def Leppard while hunting for our enemies. Except, shit, I don't really have any enemies. But that shouldn't stop us; if you don't have any either, we can always take it out to the old airport and do really slow donuts in the mud.
Hi.
Does anyone know what kind of spider this is?
(Update, 6:34 p.m.: Clock Work Orange of flickr says it is a garden spider. For Christ's sake! I feel like I should have known that. I also feel like it should have a much cooler name than that.) (Update, 9:11 p.m.: Katherine says it's also a black and yellow argiope; see comments.)
It's totally beautiful and has a cool zigzag web, but that's all I can tell you about it. It's in an inconvenient location since I have to work around it to pick the fruit and flick the stinkbugs off the tomato plants, but I figure that's also a prime location for a bug buffet, so I have not tried to discourage it from hanging out there. Sometimes I try to toss the bugs into the web just for kicks, but so far none have stuck.
It also has a friend. I don't know what the friend is doing but I think I'd better leave him or her alone too. Those are Sungold cherry tomatoes for scale.
Here's the full garden, a little leggy but fairly happy after 2.5 inches of rain and last weekend's application of that John Dromgoole plant crack.
Okra, beans, squash, probably all planted too late and too close together. Tough shit, guys, fight it out.
Also mint, thyme, marigolds, caterpillar-raped kale, onions, and a poorly located rhubarb on the perimeter.
Hundreds of blooms on the Meyer lemon tree this spring resulted in exactly four lemons, which are taking forever to mature. I hope I get at least one lemon off the tree.
Oh, and by the way, the rat ingress point has been banished, and the car is back in the shop after a terrifying ride home yesterday. Ok, "terrifying" is a gross overstatement, but doesn't that sound so much more dramatic than "annoying and slightly worrisome"?