Is fear of spiders a world wide thing? I think so but I wonder why some people are terrified of spiders and others will pick them up and carry them outside. Which are you? 
I am of the latter variety.
This time of year the spiders are spinning their webs everywhere. Overnight they can cover a doorway in their delicate needle work.
My track to the Other Side is lined with reeds and this time of year I have to wave a stick in front of me to break the webs as I walk along. They build these strong webs from one side to the other. And I can hear the little spiders sigh as I pass through and they quickly start all over again in my wake.
I imagine their disgust when all they catch is me in their beautiful knitting. I am endlessly washing webs out of my hair. I don’t mind really but I would rather not go to the supermarket with spiders riding along on the sleeve of my jacket.
Today I am meeting with a man who grows grains of all kinds and mills them into flours. This meeting is part of my search for local pig feeds. When he switches from grinding one grain to another he has a short run of overlap where the grains get mixed. This is unsellable and is considered a byproduct. So I am doing some investigation.
One mans byproduct can become another woman’s pig food. Or at least a component on her pigfeed.
He tells me he has a small pellitiser (sp) that we can experiment with. Today will be interesting.
I hope you have a lovely day.
Love celi
I am having such trouble loading pictures from either my phone or the camera onto WordPress using my computer. I get the photos in there but they take hours to load onto the page. I cannot work out the problem. So I am writing and publishing this post from the WordPress app. It is useful but limited.
The Kitchen's Garden 
99 responses to “ARE YOU AFRAID OF SPIDERS?”
I have a love/hate thing with spiders. Outside my window with a gorgeous web all dewy and sun dappled (that I cannot possible manage to walk through) they are amazing and love prevails. Inside my house, where they may just decide to skitter across my face while I sleep they are greatly disliked. I have the biggest issue with those jumpy, fast moving ones. They mostly end up under my shoe, but the others who hang out nicely in corners get to stay if they behave.
I was extremely proud of myself the day I was visited by a black spider the size of a silver half-dollar marching across my desk as I sat at my computer. I trapped it under glass and flung it outdoors into a far bush. It was too difficult to imagine the sound and mess that one would have made had I managed to corner it with my shoe!
Eeeoooo! Yes. What a horrible thought!
In My Mother’s House by Colette, she tells about the spider who came down nightly from the upper darkness of the picture rail near the ceiling & took long sips from her mother’s cup of chocolate on her bedside table. Her mother who loved all living creatures delighted in watching the spider in the lamplight dipping into her chocolate. I too had a picture rail in my old house & had even seen a spider peeping over at me in bed. One night it was that very beast I think that came down & bit me in the eye. I came instantly wide awake thinking I must be having an brain hemorrhage. Half-blinded, I drove myself to the ER in the middle of the night to be diagnosed with spider bite to the eyelid. It was wildly painful. I remember that but I didn’t start drinking cocoa at bedtime, & I don’t remember ever getting on a ladder & cleaning the picture rail. I do take spiders out of the house if I can get them into cups or glasses so they can continue their weaving & trapping work. But I also remember Charlotte’s comment about a spider’s work this time of year. She told Wilbur the pig that she was very very weary of the catching & eating flies.
Wow! You are the only person I know who has been bitten on the eye by a spider. That must have been terrifying!
I also take my spiders outside. I live in coastal Oregon though, and there is not much to worry about, spider-wise, here. I imagine being from NZ there is a lot more risk involved with picking up and saving spiders 😛
We only have a couple of poisonous spiders. The Katipo is pretty nasty. But I never saw one of those even though they like to sit under driftwood in the dunes. Australia has more poisonous spiders.
Australia is just chockablock full of things that want to kill you. I have some friends from there who are quite jumpy, even though they live here in the states now!
Hard to let your guard down I suppose.
My husband and I like spiders. One usually stays in the ceiling corner of our bathroom but sometimes ventures forth to join me in the shower. There is a creature I can’t abide and that is the centipede that emerges from our tub drain. They show up regularly. My husband always carries it out and if I’m in a good mood I do too—but if I spot one during the night it’s a goner. Love beetles though—especially ladybugs. Stink bugs invaded us last year. Love their shape. And the green metallic ones. Like they’re wearing armor. Snakes I can’t stand. It’s how they move. I said this to a friend and she responded Well you know they can’t help it.
Your friend is funny!! Love that. How long are the centipedes . I have not seen one in years!
All sizes but two-inches probably. Some might be millipedes. (Have never actually counted their legs though. )
Spiders don’t bother me. I would never kill one.
Remember that old wives tale – if you kill a spider it will rain?
I have relocated many spiders both at home and at work to save them from panicky co-workers. If I find little spiders in my house plants I leave them alone in hopes the will eat the bad bugs.
On my local community forum on Facebook people now only post photos in the comments so the fearful can avoid seeing spiders or snakes on the original post.
I wish that people could appreciate how beneficial most spiders are.
How sweet and kind of weird not putting a picture of a spider into the public forum – hiding it in the slightly more private area of the public forum. Though I do feel bad for the people who cannot even look at a picture of one.
We have a house lizard, Lizardo by name. Keeps the house spick and span! No creepy spiders, but we do get centipedes in the shower. Lots of tarantulas and black widows. Love watching the tarantulas – impossible to describe how they walk – stumpily I guess. There’s a big festival honoring them this time of year with prizes for the biggest and best! Snakes – no way!! In fact haven’t seen any up here in the mountains except rattlers. With that happy thought, I’ll go clean the pool where the frogs and raccoons play, Have an interesting day with the pelletizer guy!
Gosh! I want a lizard too! Where abouts are you – your area sounds fascinating!
We live 10 miles south of Yosemite National Park, in the ‘civilized’ woods. Town has one main street – north to south, and one east-west that dead ends here..Used to be called Crane Flats because of all the cranes; now for many years it’s been Oakhurst. Welcome anytime!!
Do you still have cranes?
Yep, we sure do! Pure white and oh, SO graceful! They flock to the shallows of the mountain lakes and just stand in the water.
Wonderful!
I fucking HATE spiders … BUT … wait … BUT … I do leave them in the windows to catch the bugs
Perfectly reasonable I think – plus you can always get the kids to manage the spider corners for you.
They love my bath for some reason and I pick them up and put them onto the plants on my windowsill. I live on the first floor, so ejecting them out of the window seems cruel. Snakes on the other hand…well, I used to shoot them in Africa. So maybe it is one of the other!
Yes. I see a pattern forming.
I take the big ones outside and release them and the little ones can stay until I dust (once or twice a year lol). None are allowed in my shower – I tell them that too! I can handle garter snakes and that is all I want to see, though we have had rattlers reported in back yards in the police news this summer
We have bull snakes here but I seldom see one. I keep old branches etc in the gardens for them to hide under – out of my way.
I’m fine with spiders, having been taught that you are going to come into money when a spider enters your home. Love the geckos but terrified of snakes …. they are all poisonous as far as i am concerned . Laura
I should be a rich woman then!
Oh dear! I am not going to sleep tonight. I have a healthy respect for spiders. We need them and I try to let them be outside unless the are where I need to go. I’ve got some almost like the one in your header that I have left alone but watch for carefully going down my porch steps. I’ve been bitten and it hurt for months leaving a large lump. My daughter is allergic to most spider bites. I’m also quite frightened of most snakes though I learned to give the garden snakes here wide space and let them be. Living in the south, we had too many poisonous snakes so now they all give me serious pause and panic. The garden is full of spider webs so I always wear a brimmed hat and long sleeves. I hope the feed situation works out for you. Have a wonderfilled day yourself.
It sounds to me like you are handling your fear very sensibly. I do NOT want to be bitten by a spider – that sounds quite awful.
I’m not afraid of spiders but I totally hate them in my house. They’re find outside. One summer when we lived in Miami I started carefully collecting pieces of strong web. The big spiders would have a non-sticky, strong web that extended far across the yard, usually blocking my access to a clothesline, sometimes 10 feet of web. I carefully wound the length of web around a little piece of cardboard. My plan was to make a tiny weaving of spider web cloth using a needle. But then Hurricane Andrew blew through and all the spiders disappeared! They never did come back before we moved in 1996. I was so very disappointed that I never got enough web to weave.
Wow! Weaving spiders web. That is a tremendous idea. Did your spool of spiders web unravel easily. What an idea!
Yes it did unravel, and wasn’t sticky at all, perfect for weaving! Alas, I lost the card of web during a move.
I am not so much afraid of spiders, but of spider bites. I have allergic issues with insect bites….not deadly just irritating itchy spots that take
a longtime to go away. And then I shoo some out, but the other day I killed one in our garden shed as it was a Black Widow.
Hope the farmer has some good feed for your animals! Cheers!
Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
I love and fear spiders, both. I try to protect them, but I have to admit we have some extremely big black fat hairy ones in the ex-barn house we stay in in France. And I’m never quite sure what to do about them. And if I see a Brown Recluse which I have on several occasions in the south, I do take action. Guiltily.
Brown Recluse is such an interesting name.