various Southern critters

[rainbowgardener]

Remind me next year, applestar! The season for them is past now and I didn't save any. I only see a few of them each year, anyway.

[Gary350]

When I lived in town everyone in the neighborhood had wood roaches by the 1000s. About an hour after dark turn on an outside light the driveway is covered with so many wood roaches it looks like probably 10,000. roaches. People that mulch their trees and bushes attract those roaches because they eat wood. Wood roaches do not come inside the house. I never mulched, bushes, trees, garden, so I did not have as many roaches in the yard as the neighbors.

Funnel spiders are wolf spiders. I don't like spiders very much but I like, wolf, zipper and jumping spiders. If I catch a spider I turn it loose in the garden. Jumping spiders are cute little multi color hairy things, don't get too close up looking at them they will jump in your face. LOL.

We had a very bad ant problem when I lived in town. Ants were coming in through a crack behind the refrigerator, they came in the bathroom through the water pipe hole, and came in the back door. I bought several bags of white sugar at the grocery store and put the sugar bags under the house in several places. Ants in search of food stopped at the sugar bags and never came inside the house ever again the 20 years we lived there.

TN is well known for having millions of brown recluse spiders. They love to hide inside or behind cardboard boxes. Every time I move a box in the garage a brown recluse spider come running up my arm. I jerk my arm really fast and they fall off. You can make brown recluse spider traps with empty toilet paper tubes. Glue small pieces of cereal box cardboard on 1 end of paper tubes then put a piece is sticky tape in the bottom of the tube. Duct tape works good. Place the toilet paper tubes every place you see brown recluse spiders they like to hide in dark places they get stuck to the tape in the bottom of the dark tubes.

[rainbowgardener]

I have never seen either a wood roach or a brown recluse spider in my life -- and we always have cardboard waiting to be recycled in our garage.

[ElizabethB]

RBG this is a long thread and I only skimmed through it. Your Palmetto Bugs really are not a huge problem. Disgusting - yes. Give them a smack and toss the carcass. When I lived in apartments the small German Roaches were a serious problem. Really difficult to get rid of. We seldom have roaches. Over the last 3 weeks of stupid crazy cold I have seen 2 large Palmetto Bugs in the house. I sicked my cat Daisy Faye on them. She had a ball, got her exercise for the day and did away with the creatures. I do not like creatures of any kind in the house. Roaches really are disgusting. Flies are worse - a summer torment.

Welcome to the south!!

[rainbowgardener]

Yeah, the palmetto bugs are creepy, but they are loners and don't get in the house all that often.

I can't say we have any more flies than I am used to in Ohio, and that is even though we have a horse ranch in our backyard.

There are a ton of mosquitoes though -- Chattanooga is a pretty wet place with lots of creeks, roadside ditches, etc, that provide great homes for them. But even so, it's not necessarily worse. In Cincinnati we had a big natural pond at the bottom of our hill, with very little outlet, that was also a breeding ground.

[ElizabethB]

RBG - If you have enough "fly space" you may want to consider Purple Martin Houses. They eat their weight in mosquitoes. We never had the room for them when we had our live oak. Now that it is gone Purple Martin Houses are on G's "to do" list.

[rainbowgardener]

The ranch behind us has a whole bunch of them. They are essentially about a block from our house. With a colony of purple martin houses that close, do you think it would make any difference to add more in our yard?