random updates

San Miguel Island buck­wheat, Eri­o­gonum grande var. rubescens, pos­si­bly pro­tected by a cloak of extra-hot chili powder

Update #1: The gopher chron­i­cles (Orig­i­nal post: Cook­ing for Ver­min)

It’s been three weeks since I tried to ward off gophers by using extra-hot chili pow­der. Peo­ple want to know if it works.

The con­clu­sion: There’s no sign of obvi­ous dam­age from pocket gophers in the treated area. The plants are grow­ing and bloom­ing nor­mally. That might sound like suc­cess, but there hasn’t been any gopher dam­age any­where else in the gar­den, either. So it’s incon­clu­sive at this point. But I’ll post as the sea­son goes on. I really really want this to work.

Update #2: Life post-hacking (Orig­i­nal post: I was hacked)

After I real­ized that my blog was hacked I cleaned out what looked like the prob­lem code. But two days later the Word­Press Pharma Hack was back. I did more dras­tic cleanup after that, and it looks like that took care of the problem.

The tide turns…

Even after cleanup, because it takes days to weeks for Google to catch up and rein­dex every­thing on a site, searches for my blog showed many titles for my posts as promis­ing ways to buy var­i­ous drugs with­out pre­scrip­tion. Even as recently as Wednes­day, last week, the num­ber one blog key­word was “Pre­scrip­tion.” For a gar­den blog it’s pathetic to have that word ahead of the next four on the list: “gar­den,” “plants,” “blog” or “land­scape.” But the tide turned on Thurs­day, and the good words con­tinue to rise as the hacker words sink.

Update #3: Aloe, good-bye (Orig­i­nal post: Exotic plant, exotic pest)

It’s been almost a year since I men­tioned that my spec­i­men Aloe bar­berae (aka A. baine­sii) was in seri­ous decline. Aloe mites had attacked the plant and I was blam­ing its fate on them. The plant con­tin­ued to decline to the point that it had just a few grow­ing tips that kept get­ting smaller and smaller. Some­thing was very wrong and we cut the plant back to a stump one to two months later, leav­ing three small pups that were spring­ing from the low­est two feet of the plant.

The dying trunk of the dying aloe, with the three pups look­ing increas­ingly worse. Time to pull the pups off to root them, it looks like…

Since then even those lit­tle pups have failed to thrive. Signs of mites have been few, so I’m begin­ning to think that some other cause is respon­si­ble for the prob­lems. Hypoth­e­sis #1 at the moment: pocket gophers eat­ing the roots. My main rea­son for think­ing this is that there’s another A. bar­berae just a few feet away that looks robust, with none of the signs of ill­ness the big plant was show­ing. I’ll keep my hope up for that plant.

A rooted cut­ting of the orig­i­nal big aloe

In the mean­time, aloes being aloes, I fig­ured that all the lit­tle branch tips I cut off might root eas­ily. I treated all the chunks with miti­cide, stuck them in pot­ting mix and kept them just-moist. All three took.

Quite frankly I’m not sure there’s room in the front for two giant aloes I had there in the first place–placing the two orig­i­nal plants so close was a mis­take. So I gave two of the rooted plants to peo­ple in my office who were eager to grow this ter­rific plant. I still have one rooted plant, along with a half dozen more unrooted branch tips sit­ting on my green­house floor that are still green, almost a year later. I might end up with an impres­sive aloe in a pot if I can’t find a place for it. And if I root the remain­ing branch tips I could have a half-dozen more giveaways.

The orig­i­nal plant looks doomed, but pieces of the orig­i­nal clone live on. In the life and death world of gar­dens that’s almost a happy ending.

Update #4: Crest-fallen (Orig­i­nal post: Mutant Prim­rose)

In case you’re won­derng what hap­pened to the mutant Hooker’s evening prim­rose from a May 12 post­ing, it looks like the weight of the extra tis­sue on the crested grow­ing tip was more than the stem could keep aloft. Within a week of the orig­i­nal photo, the stem flopped to the ground, where it has stayed, still alive, but not thriving…

Now (early July)…

How the plant looked in early May…


Update #5: A dif­fer­ent out­come for a crested growth (Orig­i­nal post: Defor­mity or Bio­log­i­cal Won­der?)

My last progress report is on this mutant crested growth of a Euphor­bia lam­bii. Since I posted on it in June of 2009, the plant seems to have incor­po­rated the crest into its con­tin­ued growth pat­terns, unlike on what was going on with the prim­rose above. Still, you can tell that the growth pat­tern isn’t quite what nor­mal plants go through. Still inter­est­ing, two years later…

The crest as of July of this year…

The crest in June, 2009

A dif­fer­ent view of the plant as it looks today. The spindly-looking-ness of the plant is my fault (for­get­ting to water it enough) and not some­thing the crested growth is respon­si­ble for.


July 15 2011 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • • • • • • • | 8 Comments »

blog typography

In response to my post on the inter­est­ing typog­ra­phy of the J.L. Hud­son seed cat­a­log, Philip won­dered whether it would be pos­si­ble to design a blog so that it would look like an older pub­li­ca­tion that was type­set with­out the aid of computers.

There are lots of blog design ele­ments, but one of the most impor­tant is the main text that peo­ple read. Here are a cou­ple attempts at com­ing up with an online typo­graphic style that looks a lit­tle more old­school, more pre-computer.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isic­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nos­trud exerci­ta­tion ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea com­modo con­se­quat. Duis aute irure dolor in rep­re­hen­derit in volup­tate velit esse cil­lum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excep­teur sint occae­cat cup­i­datat non proident, sunt in culpa qui offi­cia deserunt mol­lit anim id est laborum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isic­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nos­trud exerci­ta­tion ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea com­modo con­se­quat. Duis aute irure dolor in rep­re­hen­derit in volup­tate velit esse cil­lum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excep­teur sint occae­cat cup­i­datat non proident, sunt in culpa qui offi­cia deserunt mol­lit anim id est laborum.

So do they look on the right track?

This is a greatly con­densed ver­sion of a much more tech­ni­cal post. Click “con­tinue read­ing” below to see the full ver­sion.
con­tinue reading »

January 26 2009 | Categories: art • rambles | Tags: • • • | 6 Comments »

visualize your blog content

A lot of blogs these days–including this one–have tag clouds in their side­bars. These highly visual dis­plays of tags the blog­ger has sup­plied give you a good sense of the kinds of top­ics the blog cov­ers. And they give you a sense of how often the top­ics get discussed.

These do a nice job of dis­play­ing the words the blog­ger thought would be impor­tant, but they some­times miss the big pic­ture that you could get by turn­ing an entire post into a cloud, some­thing using all the words in the post, not just the ones sup­plied by the blogger.

One of the inter­est­ing things I saw in the cov­er­age of Barack Obama’s inau­gu­ra­tion was an Asso­ci­ated Press visu­al­iza­tion of his inau­gural address using an online tool to ana­lyze the fre­quency of the words he used. (Per­haps the AP’s analy­sis was based on one at Free Gov­ern­ment Infor­ma­tion.) Then the story went on to com­pare it with a visu­al­ized ver­sion of George Bush’s 2005 inau­gural address.

I used the same tool, TagCrowd, to re-visualize the same Obama speech. TagCrowd picks the most fre­quently used words and assigns dif­fer­ent sizes to them. As in a reg­u­lar tag cloud, the big­ger the visu­al­ized word, the more times it was used.

obamaspeech

But instead of com­par­ing it to Bush’s address, I visu­al­ized Lincoln’s Get­tys­burg address, since peo­ple seem to com­pare Obama and Lin­coln. You can see how lan­guage has shifted over one and a half cen­turies, as well as how dif­fer­ently the men use words.

lincolnspeech

Inter­est­ing, huh?

Then I thought, why not try visu­al­iz­ing some blog posts by turn­ing all the words in blog posts into clouds? Would the results between posts be that dif­fer­ent? And would they dif­fer much from the tag cloud in my left sidebar?

The first post­ing I ana­lyzed is a recent one, “greener gar­den­ing prac­tices,” from Jan­u­ary 7:

blogpostinggreener

How would that gar­den­ing post com­pare with one of my older hoity-toity art posts? This is the cloud derived from “gar­dens, phone­booths, poet­ics and old maids,” a post from Jan­u­ary 21, 2008:

blogpostchiricahua

Pretty dif­fer­ent clouds, I thought. (And sorry for the typos on “Cochise!”) The dif­fer­ent sub­jects resulted in dra­mat­i­cally dif­fer­ent vocab­u­lar­ies and dif­fer­ent word emphases. Also, over the last year, I’ve been try­ing to sim­plify my writ­ing for the web–not at all dumb­ing it down, but adapt­ing to how peo­ple read text on a screen ver­sus text in a book. That prob­a­bly con­tributed to a dif­fer­ence between the two posts.

Try TagCrowd. Com­pare old posts with new posts, or posts about your gar­den with those about your friends or trav­els. Or pick just one text you like to see what the repeated words tell you.

I think you’ll dis­cover some inter­est­ing things!

January 23 2009 | Categories: art • gardening • quotes • rambles | Tags: • • • • • • • • | 6 Comments »

chicago in may–garden bloggers unite!

In case any of you missed the post­ing back in Sep­tem­ber, over at Mr McGregor’s Daugh­ter, be sure to mark your cal­en­dars for the 2009 Spring Fling of gar­den blog­gers in Chicago. The dates are set for May 29–31, a per­fect time to visit the Lurie Gar­den (after hang­ing with the other blog­gers, of course).

Unfor­tu­nately, my only 2009 Chicago trip will be in Feb­ru­ary. But for those of you who can make it this should be a great way to finally meet some of your fel­low gar­den blog­gers. From all the reports the 2008 Spring Fling in Austin was amaz­ing, and this should be at least as great. Be sure to blog about it big time (and I know all of you will)–Make those of us who can’t be there leaf-green with envy!

December 12 2008 | Categories: rambles | Tags: • • | 1 Comment »

i’ve been tagged!

Thanks to Mary Ann at Urban Gar­den Jour­nal, this blog has been tagged. Actu­ally, it’s the sec­ond time I’ve been tagged. (Thanks, In the Gar­den!) But I was swamped at the time and didn’t get a chance to respond. Also, I was even newer to blog­ging than I am now, and wasn’t famil­iar with the game of blog tag. In my occa­sion­ally over-cynical mind I mis­took it to be some sort of sus­pect blogger’s pyra­mid scheme. But in the mean­time I’ve real­ized it’s actu­ally a fun game and a ter­rific way to get to know more about your fel­low bloggers.

The rules as passed down to me from the two tag­gers are sim­ple, though the two sets of rules vary a bit. If I’ve tagged you, you can pick whichever ver­sion you like, or make up some­thing along these lines:

  1. Once you have been tagged, in your blog you must list six (or ten) weird things, ran­dom facts, or habits about yourself.
  2. In that same post, tag five (or six) other blog­gers, by link­ing to their blogs and writ­ing a lit­tle about why you’re tag­ging that blog.
  3. Once you’ve done the above, you should leave a note on the blog of the per­son who tagged you. (That would be me.)
  4. The per­son that is tagged can’t tag back the per­son who just tagged them.

So…some ran­dom­ness about me:

  1. “Mulch” is one of my favorite words–not to gar­den with it, nec­es­sar­ily, just the sound of of the word.
  2. My shoe size is 11.
  3. When other chil­dren were want­ing to be fire­men or police offi­cers I was think­ing that I wanted to be a col­lege pro­fes­sor. I didn’t grow out of it until I was three years into a grad­u­ate pro­gram in music.
  4. Though I enjoy nov­els, I read mostly non-fiction books.
  5. The Four Cor­ners region of Ari­zona, New Mex­ico, Col­orado and Utah is prob­a­bly my favorite place on earth.
  6. I love good chocolate.
  7. In my teen years I appeared as an extra in Paul Bartel’s film, Death Race 2000.
  8. I appre­ci­ate order, but I seem to attract chaos at least as much.
  9. I have a big yel­low ocean kayak in the side yard that I haven’t taken out on the water in at least four years.
  10. I don’t con­sider myself par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in pop­u­lar culture–I wouldn’t know a Brit­ney Spears if one jumped up from the side­walk and bit me on the butt–but I do enjoy Bravo TV’s Project Run­way and Top Chef real­ity shows, as well as the Daily Show.

And now for the blog­gers I’m tagging:

Gar­den His­tory Girl: Excel­lent insights into gar­dens today, informed by gar­dens past, as well as notes on cul­tural influ­ences that can influ­ence garden-making.

The Mid­night Gar­den: A blog­ger on Cape Cod enjoy­ing his gar­den and its seasons–as well as his morn­ing cups of coffee.

Gar­den Wise Guy: Always infor­ma­tive, usu­ally funny, some­times even a lit­tle snide–and com­ing from me that’s a com­pli­ment! You might not want your gar­den to appear on his blog…sometimes like a 10 worst-dressed list…

Land­scape + Urban­ism: A great roundup of things in the out­door urban­ism realm. Lots of fun ideas to steal and down-size for your own garden.

Pacha Mona: What’s it like to live and gar­den and cook with inter­est­ing ingre­di­ents in Costa Rica? This blog cap­tures the tex­tures and fla­vors of a place that’s on my “visit some­day” list.

Gar­den Porn: With a name like that what’s not to like? A fun read and some great spaces to boot.

There are more–lots more–that I enjoy and would have loved to have tagged. But I need to keep some in store for the next time I’m tagged. And if I haven’t tagged you but you’d like to play, please do! I’ll add you to my list here.

July 15 2008 | Categories: gardening • landscape design • rambles | Tags: • | 4 Comments »