A seasonally appropriate question I hope. My house is beset by spiders. They relentless try to cover my decks with webs. I have a dozen potted succulents out there and I have to clear the webs off every couple of days. If I let it go a week they are festooned (festooned festooned, what a great word) with thick webs and it looks like a horror movie. Oddly I rarely see actual spiders, I think they are tiny and/or shy. Here are some photos to prove I’m not hallucinating these webs:
The first one has some gossamer stuck in it.
Any advice on what I can do to reduce the webbiness of my deck, other than screening in the whole thing?
ETA: BTW this is not a new invasion. This has been going on for years.
Years ago I saw a large spider on the kitchen floor and stomped on it. To my horror it was a wolf spider with probably 200 babies on its back or something. I had never felt such revulsion to a visual stimuli, I must have killed maybe all but two of them in my spider holocaust. I regret nothing!!!
My basement is a preferred spider habitat. I don’t know what they think they’re going to catch down there, but there are a lot of half-assed webs. To make matters worse, when I bring in house plants for the winter sometimes there are spider eggs laid in the pots and the result is a massive outbreak of mini-webs. I try to catch adults and release them outdoors in good weather, but there are limits to my generosity.
I actually know an old lady who swallowed a spider. She swallowed the spider to catch a fly she had swallowed earlier (I don’t know why she did that). She tried numerous remedies, the last of which, swallowing a horse, was her undoing.
I got nothing for the OP apart from subjecting the decks to hourly baths of flaming napalm.
We’ve reached detente with our arachnid friends. My wife went nuclear on them for many years, but has decided that as long as they remain outside, they’re safe from her wrath. The only time they get the bum’s rush is when I clean off the front deck and they get washed away, if only temporarily. Big nasty buggers are summarily executed.
Ah, you must belong to the other PETA. People Eating Tasty Animals.
It is possible (just possible) that they may be black widow webs. They are very shy and contrary to popular opinion aren’t super aggressive.
You could try placing house centipedes all around your deck. They’ll eat spiders, even if they prefer other insects. And because they compete with spiders for other insects, they’ll reduce the potential food for spiders as well.
Of course, you’ll then have a lot of house centipedes hanging around outside (and they’ll probably make their way eventually inside) your house, but you can’t have everything.
