Posts tagged ‘spiders’
Spotlight: Natural Pest Control
Bugs are good. Really, they are. In compost, in nature, everywhere. It’s all cyclical, folks. Food web, circle of life – you know what I mean. However, they can be annoying, spread disease (think mosquitoes), painful, poisonous (think spiders), messy and generally a pain in the butt. I don’t think it’s an abnormal thing to not be particularly fond of them. However, I do think it’s not ideal to blitz them into oblivion with intensive pest control. It’s good to keep a balance. We spend so much time trying to avoid bugs in so many ways – how about some of the natural ways?
In the Elven household, we live in harmony with bugs by:
- Sharing our house with geckos (they eat lots of bugs, but sadly our most common geckos are non-natives – even so, Yankee Elv loves them)
- Letting lots of spiders live in our yard – mostly golden orb weavers (but not in the house, not in the house!)
A female golden orb weaver spider living outside our kitchen window. She moved along herself before we had to move her - she was preventing us from opening the window - but now she's back with her cronies over the front flower bed.
- Stopping the cats from terrorising the local lizards, including blue-tongue lizards (they also eat lots of bugs)
A very pissy adolescent blue-tongue lizard bravely showing us his big, scary tongue. Pou had been trying to toy with him, but he was having none of it! We rehomed him under a bush.
- Keeping all the windows open without screens during the day (only some of our windows are screened, so if we screen those that are and still keep the screenless windows open, bugs come in but can’t get out again – if you keep them all unscreened, they fly in one window and out the other)
- Shutting all screenless windows and closing the screens on all screened windows at dusk (keeps out the mozzies, moths and Christmas beetles)
- Keeping the interior lights off unless you’re using them (bugs are attracted to light)
- Wiping kitchen benches meticulously after food preparation and rinsing all dishes after eating to keep off the ants (I’m still working on this one with Mr Teeny-bop)
- Keeping all food in sealed containers or jars to remove temptation for the ants
- Avoiding leaving still water lying around (mosquito breeding ground)
- Keeping the lid on the garbage bin and kitchen compost containers to discourage flies
- Using a cat food bowl with a moat to prevent ant swarms
- Keeping pet food in sealed containers in the cupboard to prevent ants from gorging.
Our one concession to ‘unnatural’ pest control is flea treatment for the dog and cats – they are miserable without it.
This seems to mostly do the trick (although these darned red ants keep coming and trying to live in my bamboo plant). We really don’t have a bug problem – if you don’t count the critters in the compost, and the cicadas that are loud enough for even Yankee Elv to hear!
Do you have any other natural pest control tips?
Blue-tongue lizards are quite cute when they stop hissing and poking out their tongues. This guy is still pretty mad though - he is all puffed up and flattened out.
[As an interesting aside, golden orb weaver webs are currently being studied in the hopes that something similar can be used in medicine to make things like sutures. The golden webs are so strong and flexible they are able to entangle small birds, although the spiders are not bird-eaters. At the moment, we have a golden orb weaver's web holding up a tendril of the passionfruit vine.]
A passionfruit vine tendril held up by the web of a golden orb weaver spider.
Look closely and you can see the golden web!
Composting Revisited
Well, I haven’t done anything with the compost yet, but I am planning on investigating it tomorrow. I asked around on one of the Livejournal communities I lurk on and found out:
- The grubs are black soldier fly larvae, which apparently are very good for compost (some people use them purposefully for composting)
- The spiders look like brown house spiders/cupboard spiders – related to redbacks but non-poisonous (except this site says they can be venomous!)
- My compost may be too dry, too wet, not hot enough or not including enough brown matter, which would have created prime conditions for the larvae
- The spiders are likely there to eat the larvae (which I’m not convinced of – those grubs are bigger than the spiders, quite a lot bigger).
I have options as to what I can do:
- Turn out the compost onto the ground somewhere and let the birds make short work of the grubs and spiders
- Leave the lid on and start a new compost pile outside – in about a year the compost in the bin should be fantastic and the bugs will be gone
- Pour boiling water in the bin and kill all the critters, then continue with the composting
- Leave the critters in there cos they’re super awesome for composting
- Turn the compost thoroughly and try to get the balance better for composting without so many grubs (potentially burying food scraps in the middle of the bin to increase the heat as they decompose, which will keep the bug population in balance better)
- Cover the compost in 2 to 4 inches of brown matter to discourage the bugs, which will, hopefully, discourage the spiders in turn.
I’m not sure which one I’m going to do yet. Suggestions? I like the idea of the birds going to town, but I am not keen to scoop everything out of there and spread it around on my lawn. The bin is under the house, so I can’t just leave the lid off and let the birds come to it – they can’t get to the bin. My gut is boiling water cos those grubs and spiders really kinda creep me out, but if they’re actually good for the compost, then maybe that’s not a good idea either! Maybe trying to work with the balance of the compost to at least keep the population down is the best idea…
I’m also a little scared of opening the bin and having a swarm of black soldier flies come out, even if they don’t bite or anything. I still don’t want them all in my face.
I’ve got to decide something soon; I have food scraps piling up…
P.S. Thanks to everyone who helped me over on Livejournal!
Compost Alert!
This morning I went down to empty the weekly compost (from the ice-cream containers that sit in our kitchen) into the compost bin (which you can see here). The compost has been going for a few months now, no troubles, and I was thinking it might be nearly time to turn it.
However…
After I finished clearing away the spider webs around the general under-the-house walls/ceiling area with the end of the rake, I lifted the lid of the compost to find a bunch of these gross little grub things. They were all through the compost, like everywhere. They were not there last week. Sure, there were a few grubby looking things, but they were black or brown and they were not in these prolific numbers – I thought they looked like they were being helpful, so I left them. These new grub things kind of reminded me of a big pile of maggots, except they’re bigger, not quite so white and if you look really closely, they had something that was like little hairs on them.
Pile of wiggly grubs in my compost - are these supposed to be there?
Then I stopped looking too closely, because I realised there were a bunch of spiders all around the rim of the compost bin… spiders that looked a lot like redbacks. Now, my great-great-grandmother died from a redback spider bite, and I’d like to not add to the family history in that way. Not to mention, I’m a bit arachnophobic. Nothing severe, but I am the squealy, shrieky, stand-on-top-of-the-toilet-while-someone-chases-the-spider-outside kind of person. It doesn’t really go with my pseudo-tough genderqueer image, but there you have it. Spiders make me shudder.
Spiders around the rim of my compost bin. Little males and big mama! These kind of look like redbacks.
I felt very brave in going to get a camera to document the grubs and spiders, so someone can help me identify them and decide whether the compost is salvageable and if not, whether I can get rid of it myself or whether I need pest control. I ain’t messing with redbacks (or red house spiders or common house spiders or whatever they are… my google -fu is failing me in identification of the spiders, even though I forced myself to look at all these pictures of hairy, gross spiders).
A close-up image of the big mama and some little guys. The black thing at the bottom is a dead bug in their web, so don't worry about that. You can see the mama at the top has a huge abdomen, nearly the size of a pea. The males are considerably smaller. I think there might have been some smaller females too - they were kind of in-between sized. I looked at the mama to check the colour - she had a red-brown thorax and legs, but her abdomen was almost black. Where I would expect the red stripe to be though, there were white spots. I didn't look underneath her to see if she had the characteristic hourglass shape on her belly! My gut says atypically-coloured redbacks.
Here’s a video of the grubs and spiders. The video really helps you get an idea of the wiggly feralness of the grubs, but the spiders aren’t brilliantly in focus (I just used my still camera and it doesn’t allow me to re-focus in the middle of a recording). I have included some pictures (above, with descriptions), which also aren’t great, because the compost bin isn’t in the most well-lit position. My first instinct when I saw them was ‘redback!’, so I try to trust my gut.
So what should I do??
[EDIT next day: Jump to this post if you want to read what I have since learned about my creepy, crawly compost.]
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