Thanks again everyone. If (or more likely when) I see another in my garden I will definitely post a picture. I have been dealing with these spiders for 12 years now, ever since we built our house in what was formerly farm land. We have our home and surrounding area sprayed regularly every 3 months to control for them but my garden is not in an area that is sprayed for obvious reasons. We have taken efforts to remove their habitat by getting rid of bricks, etc., that were used for landscaping and made lovely little homes for them but I don't know that we will ever be completely free of them. I don't scare easily but these things terrify me. I always wear gloves but now I am afraid to even work in there! Thank you for all of the suggestions. By the way, I called my pest control guy and asked for his opinion and he told me to spray liquid sevin dust every day until I don't see anymore. Scary much? :)

Hi there. You asked for an honest opinion, so here I go =:) If you are wanting raised vegetable beds, the easiest thing for you to do is to build them new. IMHO by the time you remove the glass from those frames, you've spent probably more time and energy than you would to build new frames. How would you dispose of the glass? Also, it seems like a waste of good windows that you could use for a cold frame. As far as the paint goes, if you use the windows for a cold frame, the paint won't come any where near your plants =:)

Thank-you Flora for that link! I like the look of that one better than the HFW recipe -- which I did indeed try to 'translate' into cups, tho' I didn't do it very well. (The original was published in the Guardian in 2007 under 'courgette glutney'). My English in-laws always chutney-ize everything from their garden and it's always delicious. I can never seem to find interesting vegetable chutney recipes published in North America. Thanks, DAve, for looking in the Ball -- yep, no zucc chutney there. And, while I have you, big thanks too for all your tomato posts -- I've harvested 70 pounds this year and have really relied on the good advice from the 'growing tomatoes' forum. Chutney search: the 'Marrow Chutney' recipe that Flora's link takes me to has approx 10-11 cups of low acid veg (zucchini and onion) and 2 cups of vinegar. Linda Lou's yummy zucchini relish recipe has 15-16 cups of low acid veg (zucc, onion, garlic, peppers) with 2.5 cups of acid. Both recipes call for salting zucchini overnight to remove water. This sounds like the two recipes are comparable, no, in terms of acidity? Thanks again -- Amy

Lukeifell, I didn't know zone 4 was a desert before the appearance of European settlers! In fact, using your argument...wouldn't the whole northern tier of North America have been a plant-less, tree-less, lifeless desert? What about that pesky fossil record showing ferns and trees and grasses? And those darn mastodons......What about the core samples of the earth that scientists take in prairie remnants...core samples go back many, many hundreds of years, and show what was growing here, say, in the 1200's or so. According to all definitions I have read in the books I have read on the subject.. Native means plants that were here, in North America, pre-dating settlement by Europeans. And it's very easy to tell which plants those are. Siberian Elm isn't one of them. Black Hawk didn't get the Thompson & Morgan's catalogue. Native peoples who were migratory often brought seed from plants around them from one place to another, and planted it, yes. ..but they're still native to this continent. They weren't planting marigolds and cannas. Not that there is ANYTHING wrong with planting them. "Is there an exact number of years that must pass before Black Locust is considered " Native " to a particular State ?" No. If black locust is not native to a state, it's not native to that state. It may be naturalised, but it's not the same as native. If it isn't native, it isn't native, no matter how many centuries pass. If I am wrong, someone please correct me! April