DIY Stock Tank Gardens Part 1
If you haven’t checked out my IG feed, I posted some pictures of my stock tank garden beds.
These took a couple weeks to build and assemble. I purchased the stock tanks on sale at Tractor Supply Company. I originally wanted to go with the 2×4 tanks, but the size and sale price of 2×6 tanks made them too attractive to pass up. Of course, their size meant we had to rent a truck to haul them home. Luckily, we still had other yard projects that required the rent-a-truck to transport supplies.
Due to their size, I knew these tanks had to be mobile. Especially when filled with soil and water, they’d be a challenge to move around on my patio. I purchased 3/8 carriage bolts, heavy duty casters off Amazon and some waterproof stain. The stain was to seal the lumber on which the casters would be mounted. Finally I had to wait a week to get in an order of 5/16 galvanized threaded bolts, washers and hex nuts…because none of the local home improvement shops had sufficient quantities in stock to buy.
While I waited for the hardware to arrive, I drilled drainage holes in the bottom of the tanks. This required some titanium bits and some wrist strength, as drilling into steel can cause the drill to torque. I then marked out the area where the casters would be mounted. I was banking that 2 pieces of lumber would be enough to support these tanks upright.
I then secured the lumber to stock tanks using 3/8 carriage bolts, washers and hex nuts. Once the 5/16 hardware arrived, I was then able to drill and secure the casters to the lumber.
I then sealed the lumber and the inside of the stock tanks with silicone to prevent water seeping into or leaking into wood. It’s important to have the lumber last as long as possible since I depend on these supports to move these tanks around the yard and patio.
Once everything was drilled and sealed into place, it was time to get the tanks onto the casters and filled.
I lined the bottom with leftover landscape fabric then threw in 2 bags of lawn trimmings and cuttings. Afterwards, I layered in organic raised bed soil, compost, vermiculite, peat moss and perlite, adjusting as needed to get proper drainage. It’s quite an upper body workout to till and turn the soil media,
Fabric liner 
Lawn trimmings and organic raised bed soil for layering on top 
Drainage test revealed a need for more perlite 
Vermiculite and peat moss 
Tilled and ready to plant
Sprinkled in some Espoma Organic Garden-Tone fertilizer then it’s off to planting veggies! By the way, this seeding square is awesome for spacing out new plants!
I had quite a number of dill, kale, lettuce, broccoli, brussel sprouts and cauliflower starts, along with some lettuce seedlings I began indoors. In between the rows, I also stuck some garlic cloves, which took no time to sprout. Unfortunately I have way too many plants to fit in one of these tanks, if I stuck to the square-foot gardening method.
Plant purchases 
Brussel sprouts and Broccoli starts from Burpee 
More crops to plant 
Seeding square to space plants out 
Plant Layout 
Planted!
With one bed planted, I realized my new starts needed a little more sun. So I moved them to the east side of the pergola. Even with casters, the tank was almost too heavy to move on my own! I’d like to get more of these stock tanks, but size and mobility are definitely going to be deciding factors…likely I’d go with the smaller tanks next time.
Stay tuned for stock tank #2 details!
Nasturtiums! November Seed starting adventures
I’m bound and determined to grow nasturtiums this year. I had some old packets of Alaska Variegated, but turns out they were too old to germinate. So I picked up several packets at Calloway’s and online from Amazon. While seed shopping I also picked up Spinach and Lettuce seeds, along with bunching onions, chives, marigolds and coneflower seeds. I’m also looking forward to my order from Baker Creek Heirloom seeds, consisting of baby bok and Chinese broccoli, coming soon!
As it turns out, my last seed starting venture left me with a lot of unsprouted soil blocks: arugula, spinach, bok choy, and various types of basil. Cleaning out the old seeds from my collection turned out to be a simple matter of dumping packets into wet paper towels and storing them in plastic zip lock bags.
Seeds in baggies 
Paper towel germination
No surprise here…well except for a single spinach seed that germinated. It just wasn’t worth the effort to keep it.
I also started another flat of soil blocks. The Parris Cos lettuce germinated within a few days. I’m hoping that the basils germinate. I also broke out the fenugreek seeds and sowed them in a pot. I purchased these seeds from Amazon pantry a few years ago, which sold them as spices. But whole fenugreek can also grown from these spice seeds. Even as sprouts, they are very fragrant.
New flat of soil blocks 
Sprouted Fenugreek and Prunella vulgaris variegata
If this batch of soil blocks fails to produce any basil, I may have to run them all through the paper towel method. I’m still hopeful I’ll get some to germinate. Stay tuned.
Furkids @IG
WordPress File Permissions: Always Check and Reset
You’d think after over a decade of troubleshooting WordPress permission issues that I’d have learned my lesson by now.
I’ve been diagnosing site performance issues with my garden blog (the Site Health tool was complaining). One of the issues that constantly kept coming up was a REST API error that reported cURL timeout issues. This usually manifested itself in agonizingly slow page load times. I went through the plugin/theme deactivation dance to hone in on the culprit: Fast Secure plugins that had been defunct for several years but still useful for buffering brute force attempts. I finally decided to move on to a different ReCaptcha solution and retire Fast Secure. Oddly enough, my primary site had the identical plugins installed but never encountered the same issues.
Moving on, I noticed that the Media Library thumbnails never displayed and that I had issues uploading/adding new media (cannot create directory). Now ordinarily my main media storage is in an S3 bucket, but I sometimes might need to make local posts unique to the garden theme of the site.
I spent hours and days researching this issue, thinking it had to be some kind of ownership issue. I kept flipping user and group ownership on files and directories, only to break ownership of other WordPress files and directories. I poured over logs looking for some indication of access errors.
Ultimately, I just had to reset all the file and directory permissions in my WordPress wp-content folder to get things working again:
$sudo find /path/to/website/wp-content -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
$sudo find /path/to/website/wp-content -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
Then I reset ownership of wp-content to my wp-user:
$sudo chown wp-user:wp-user -R wp-content/
Then finally, to make sure media uploads and thumbnails worked again:
$sudo chown www-data:www-data -R wp-content/uploads/
Of course while I was resetting file/directory permissions, it was worth reading the updated Permissions topic over at WordPress codex. Turns out I could have a functional site even with wp-config.php set to 440/400.
Last issue that drove me a little crazy. View Details on the Plugin page always resulted in an error: refused to connect. I was so sure that my restrictive firewall settings needed to open an IP block to the WordPress plugin repository. But it turned out to be an SSL issue. Because the details page was in an iFrame, an SSL setting needed to be set to permit this. In my case, I change this setting in the appropriate ssl parameter .conf file:
Header always set X-Frame-Options sameorigin
Then restarted Apache for settings to take effect. Now…does this toggling the option make my site less secure? I’m assuming that if the request came directly from localhost that the traffic should be permitted. I just have to ensure my servers are sufficiently secure against being hacked, a lesson I learned earlier this year, and a story for another day.