What's the Benefit of Having Spiders in the Garden?

What is the benefit of having spiders in the garden? That is a rhetorical question, I am not really asking. As a gardener, I know the benefits of having a predator live in my garden. Making the garden hospitable to spiders, and allowing them to biologically control garden pests, is all part of gardening chemical free and being as natural as possible. I am not a hippy or anything like that; I wanted to have bugs in my garden to photograph so I decided I would stop using bug sprays, and just let nature take its course. For the most part, it has worked out fabulously and I have no regrets. Although, nothing challenges my commitment to natural methods of pest control more than seeing the garden covered in spider webs during the summer. Spider webs like this one I took in the garden recently. If you have a fear of spiders close your eyes for a second and think of England as you scroll down past this picture of a spider and its web.

Lace Bugs

I decided to pull out some sunflowers in my garden that were starting to look particularly bad. The leaves were turning yellow or developing yellow spots and just generally not looking very good. While I was cutting them down and bagging the plants I noticed some small bugs on the leaves that I hadn't seen before. At first I thought they were crumbs or some kind of plant debris but then I started noticed them bouncing up and down sort of like a needle on a sewing machine.

Natural Methods Of Pest Control

This morning I woke up to find that a couple of the seed heads on my poppies were covered with black aphids. My first reaction was to run inside and pick up an insecticide but I remembered that I am trying not to use chemicals in my garden like I did last year. I almost searched on-line for one of those homemade concoctions to kill them but then I remembered that I had ladybugs somewhere in the garden.