Halloween Preparations

Many of my neighbors have already decorated their gardens and porches for Halloween by adding pumpkins, spiders, ghosts and scarecrows. My only nod to the season so far is a sweet ivy a friend gave me that I surrounded with gourds and baby pumpkins for my table...

I have noticed the local nurseries are getting in the All Hallows Eve Spirit, though. I love the pumpkin patch at Red Barn Nursery.

I plan to take my son there this week to pick out his favorite pumpkin. I liked these wrinkly pumpkins the best.

Not far away, this black & white Jumping spider, (Phidippus audax) almost seemed in costume as s/he waited for lunch on the sedum.

Jumping spiders are some of my favorites because they are small (and so not scary to me) and they seem curious and brave without being aggressive. They will often check out a person by turning towards them instead of running away. I've never been bitten by a jumping spider in all my years of examining them. The little guy I watched above had beautiful, neon-green mandibles that unfortunately did not show up in my photographs.

I walked outside this morning to see what other visitors were in my garden. I found the bees busy as usual on the passionflowers.

The butterflies are showing their appreciation as well.

Two new mystery mushrooms (or are the toad-stools?) have appeared and beneath the short wrought-iron fence.

And I have the best kind of rose: a visitor from my neighbor's garden that has leaned over and through the fence to say "Hello".

"Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers." ~ from The Naval Treaty by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle