At home in the garden

It was Earth Day. And I spent most of it up to my elbows in the stuff. Earth.

First, I re-potted and trimmed all but one of my houseplants. Then I moved outside, and repotted most of the outside container plants, divided the hostas, transplanted some of the London Pride*, trimmed the evergreens, ripped out a mountain of moss, top-dressed the second half of the garden with manure, and repositioned a wire fence.

A pleasant, contemplative day; I love digging in the dirt!

For the smaller hostas, I decided to use a planter box that had spent the winter upside-down in a dry spot. When I flipped it over, I found it full of spider webs. I brushed some away, and a big Tegenaria rushed out.

Tegenaria domestica, probably.


Good view of the row of eyes.

Several clumps of frass hung in the box; I fished this one out to examine it.

Frass

I thought I could identify what she's been eating, but other than that ridged thing, which I think is the remains of a woodbug, nothing there is identifiable. Yet it all came from her food, since nothing could fall into her cozy upside-down house; it all walked or slithered or crawled in through the cracks between the boards. She's quite a tidy housekeeper, and ties up her garbage and hangs it out to dry well away from her nest area.

There's always the worry, with these; is she a hobo spider, T. agrestis? Does she bite, is she aggressive, is she venomous? I went back to check my list of identifying marks from last year.

Let's see: I didn't get a look at the underside, nor the top of the cephalothorax. But she has dark rings around her legs, and pointy pedipalps. She's not a hobo; no need to evict her.

I put the box back where I found it, and found another planter for my hostas.

*This (the London Pride link) was from my previous blog. Reading it over, I found a few posts that I think are worth reposting on this blog, starting with my "Shade garden" series, since we're in planting season again.

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