Summer Garden Idyll© now with Poisonous Spiders®!

The ones I found didn't have any change.

Yesterday was insanely lovely: a cool, dry 90 degrees, puffy white clouds, steady breeze. Both boys were in the grip of some bizarre angelic possession. They comported themselves beautifully on our errand-and-lunch run. At home, Rocketboy eagerly helped with our garden project, hauling big cinder blocks to the end of the yard to make quick-and-dirty raised planting beds for each child. When Hurricanehead awoke from his nap, he joined us outside in the sunshine and birdsong as we filled the first bed with organic garden soil, bagged compost, and sphagnum moss. They were happily mixing this stuff together when I added the crowning touch, a little bit of homemade compost that had been sitting finished in an old rabbit cage for a few weeks.

"Get back, guys," I told my barefoot assistants. "There could be some critters in here." Sure enough, a few random earwigs and pillbugs showed themselves as the compost slid into the bed. I'm generally wary about dumping compost as I've found the odd snake and brown recluse in it before.

In fact, there was one now.

I scooped the spider into a tupperware bowl and held it up (gloves on!) for the boys to see. "Look, this is a brown recluse. Even though they're common around here, people don't see them very often."

Hurricanehead just looked at the spider, but Rocketboy demanded action.

"Kill it!" he bellowed. "It's poisonous!"

I dumped the spider into the creekbed behind our fence. "They're not aggressive," I assured him. "They only bite if they get stepped on or bumped into."

Shovel back in hand, I pitched in turning the compost into the soil. And that's when I uncovered about twenty or so brown recluses, a few of the brown females with the violin-shaped mark on the back and many darker spiders of the same size and shape but without markings. I'm assuming they were male. As soon as the light hit them, they scattered. I'd never seen so many spiders of any species in one place.

Here was the vegetable plot we'd made just for Rocketboy, and I had unwittingly filled it with toxic spiders. Here were my shoeless kids, watching the spiders run for the proverbial tall grass. I knew if I started yelling for them to run or if I started smashing spiders with a trowel, the kids would be afraid to ever come back out here.

"Break time," I announced. "We'll just give these spiders a chance to find somewhere else to live and come back later." I wasn't worried about the spiders making it to the house but I was very worried about the boys stepping on one on the way in.

I know there's a certain amount of hysteria pertaining to the brown recluse, and like Neddie I don't want to add to that. Apparently 90% of the time, brown recluse bites don't produce any major symptoms. But any time you see near your kids twenty or so of anything that can, albeit in rare cases, cause fatal systemic reactions or necrotic wounds, you take action. After Hombre got home I armed myself with a couple of shovels and got out there. The good news is that the soil in that bed is exquisitely well turned now, and most of the spiders had either left for danker quarters or had the good sense to hide from me. But I did kill four, which is four more than I'd like to see in an area set up for kids.

The boys know the garden rules -- wear gloves, wear shoes, never stick your hand or foot where you can't see. And I learned that just because compost is "finished" doesn't mean I should stop turning it every couple of days. Recluses like to be in dark, funky, undisturbed areas. Turning should clear them out. I think I can remember that now.