Like a cleaning lady for the garden.

It's definitely getting to be that time of year when walking out to the test garden after dark becomes an iffy endeavor.

Mostly because the last thing I want is a big spider web wrapped around my face.

Not a nourishing facial.

BLECH. 

Sorry if I just freaked you out.

In an effort to keep this BLECH EEK EW ACK experience from happening, I keep a close eye on where my resident garden spiders set up shop every fall. They have some favorite haunts, you might say, and I commit these to memory once they've staked their claim around the property.

This guy is conveniently out of the way attached to the cherry tree.

This guy is precariously hovering over the lime tree, so, less convenient for the cocktail makers around here.

Even if I were to take down their webs (which NO WAY - I'll tell you why in just a sec), they'd just put them right back in the same spot in no time at all, so it's better for everyone if they're just left alone to do what they do best.

Unfortunately, sometimes I get so involved in what I'm doing that I forget to work around their webs, thus ending up with one, say, wrapped around the end of the shovel handle I'm wielding, but they do rebuild them pretty fast, so I just try to be careful not to bust up the spider along with his/her web.

Must I rebuild this thing every five minutes? Really, woman.

And that best is eating all the pests that fly into their big face-wrapping webs.

I just prefer that they wrap their webs around pests' faces rather than mine, is all.

Assume the face wrapping position.

See, our friendly neighborhood garden spiders are experts at organic pest management.  They eat flies, aphids, mosquitoes, wasps, cabbage moths and anything else that goes near their webs. They aren't picky, just hungry, and they do a really good job of keeping nasties out of the garden.

I'M BUSY.

Sure, sometimes they'll pick up one of our honeybees, but it's a small price to pay for all the cabbage moths that they put down.

OK, I'll let this one go as long as the next thing I see in there is a cabbage moth.

No promises.

And, hey, sometimes they get theirs since we also get a lot of spider-hungry birds out there, so we just let the whole circle of life thing play out and try not to get in the way.

We don't spray, smush or otherwise harm these big beauties and instead just let them clean up the garden for us while we move about carefully and with our arms outstretched in front of our faces, remembering to pick limes from the BACK of the plant rather than the front because HELLO that's a web around your face.