Spiders and comfrey
As I sink my hands into mass after mass of
fallen leaves, I am always happy to see creepy crawlies. Tuesday
was no exception. The leaves I raked out of the woods came with
mushrooms, daddy-long-legs, one salamander (who I returned to the
woods), and several spiders.
Despite many folks' odd antipathy to spiders, the arachnids are in fact
a very helpful generalist predator in the garden. Spiders will
eat just about anything that moves, so they keep insect population
explosions from getting out of hand. But spiders hate bare soil,
so they are often absent from conventional agricultural situations.
Mulching is the best way to attract spiders to your garden, but having
perennial plants around is also a good bet. Comfrey seems to be
especially attractive, even more so if you let the winter-killed leaves
lie on the ground rather than "cleaning" them up. One study in
Switzerland found 240 spiders for every square meter of soil beneath
comfrey leaves. Wow!
From: Burki, H.M., and A.
Hausammann. 1992. Uberwinterung von Arthropoden im Boden
und an Ackerunkrautern kunstlich angelegter Achkerkrautstreifen. Agrarokologie.
7:1-158. (I can't actually read this, but the study is cited all
over the organic gardening world, so I assume someone can read
German. I got it most recently out of Edible
Forest Gardens.)
Or explore more posts by date or by subject.
About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
Want to be notified when new comments are posted on this page? Click on the RSS button after you add a comment to subscribe to the comment feed, or simply check the box beside "email replies to me" while writing your comment.