Monsters In Georgia

I think everything in Georgia is just a little bigger or more prevalent than in Oregon or California. There is always road kill on the road. I see three or four squished animals every time I drive somewhere. Kudzu vines grow over street lamps and telephone poles, they take over hundred foot trees and make it impossible to see very far along the roads. Of course there are more bugs and they are bigger- see below, but I didn't expect the plants to be bigger too.

At the beginning of May we planted our deck garden. A mere four weeks later our tomato plants have nearly outgrown their giant pots! All three of the plants have little budding tomatoes on them but look more like and grow more like the kudzu vine monsters than cute little cherry, heirloom, and early girl tomato plants.

This is my backyard. No kudzu here, but you still can't see the neighbors.

This is the biggest spider I have ever encountered outside a cage.

He was three inches in every direction. After Brian killed it with a mallet, we looked it up on the Internet. Turns out this is a male crevice spider- not poisonous but often mistaken for the horribly poisonous brown recluse. It also turns out that the make spider wanders around looking for the female instead of setting up shop. So the question I now ask myself every time I go into the basement is, was he just passing through, or is his girl somewhere around the corner?