After my brief rant this weekend about not buying mixed-color packets of seeds, I espied this red Easy Wave in my petunia planter bowl on my way to work this morning. I’m so very pleased to see it, but now it makes me want to grow even more petunias. It will hit 100 degrees today but these petunias seem to do quite well in the planters, as long as they get a drink every day.
I’ve had a run-in with scrapers and sploggers about a couple of years ago when my main site was exposed to the public. After locking down the info and making the domain private, I’m now thinking of more proactive ways to protect a blog site. Since the garden info is slowing being spun off to its own domain, I’ve taken action to post a Creative Commons license after each section with the help of the Open Attribute plugin. I’ve also bolstered the contact form by going with the Fast Secure Form, related to the SI Captcha anti-spam plugin. I’m wary of opening up comments, pingbacks and trackbacks at the moment until I determine if FriendConnect will allow users to register and follow my blog without a formal WP-based registration.
Meanwhile I have to be vigilant. I have Akismet, and I need to review my Analytics stats to ensure that I’m not being targetted by leeches. Of course, I also can look up who’s been duplicating my content on Copyscape.com. And I should think about watermarking my photographs…amateur as they are.
I planned on upgrading the visuals on the spinoff garden site with some fancy new graphics. But I also discovered that I could easily change the headline fonts by using Google web fonts. I also added a custom-colored dragonfly favicon to the site via an online editor.
I also integrated the Google Friend Connect system to the new site, but I’m still having a hard time comprehending all of its functions. It seems much of it is disconnected from Google itself, and I’m not sure how practical an addition it will be. The issue I’m experiencing relates to the commenting system, and so far all I’ve been getting is a message stating: “We’re sorry…We were unable to handle your request. Please try again or return a bit later.”
Last task related to the new site is opening comments/pingbacks/trackbacks. Putting the site up publicly risks spamming, but I think the experience will give me an opportunity to learn how to prevent attacks in the future.
Update: got some help from the GFC wiki installation document. Looks like the GFC comments works and has replaced the native WP commenting system.
That time of year again when all the remaining plants you had left on your to-do list finally get planted. Since the temps in North Texas warm up in the vicinity of 100, anything not in the ground tends to bake in their thin plastic pots. I got around to planting the rest of the Purple Star verbena, the majority of the ornamental pepper seedlings, felicia, tricolor sage cuttings, leftover marigold seedlings, and a few of the lemon thyme cuttings. And because I couldn’t bore a hole in my last ceramic pot (a freebie from Kathy), I had to transplant the Aztec red verbena, a dusty miller and the last red-eyed white vinca into a planter box.
I spent the day ducking in and out of the heat, clearing debris and dried out plantings (leftover violas), trimming vigorous plants (zealous Thai basil), and weeding wherever I could. In some places like the tree ring, I tamped down loose and exposed plantings and filled holes dug by industrious squirrels. Tons of the cosmos seeds are coming up now, and I am waiting eagerly to see the results of this week’s cosmos sowing.
While gardening, I made some exciting discoveries. The one remaining thai chili pepper is bearing fruit. It had been flowering for the past week, and today I found 3 fruit on it, with several more nubs showing.
A couple more of the vincas have bloomed; one from my February starts, while another from the outdoor starts. Both seemed to be in the pink color family. Several more vinca seedlings are already budding, including the two I left in my planter box. The neighboring Confetti lantanas have nearly tripled in size since planting, as well as the Purple Star verbena which get the most exposure in the front yard bed.
The daylilies are still flowering strong. An observation I made of the front bed Dallas Stars is that they are a good 1-2 feet taller than the Dallas Star in near-full shade. Still a no-show however is the Hyperion daylily, though I did notice it had a single scape on it. Whether it had already bloomed or planned to bloom is a mystery.
I’m so disappointed that none of my home-started Easy Wave petunias are red. I was hoping for a patriotic planter bowl for the Fourth of July, but currently everything in the bowl is either blue or white. I expected at least 1 out of the 10 seeds I purchased to be a red petunia (I sowed 9, and 8 are currently planted), but it seems that this wasn’t the case. Next time I plan to purchase the colors separately–and yes, I will grow them again since they were relatively easy to start and grow as it warmed up. (Just keep them covered during the first month as tiny seedlings.)
I hacked down a lot of the wildly growing pineapple mints and hot & spicy oregano. A shame I didn’t get to use most of them, but right now they are strictly ornamental. I have to wonder: if I took a purely cream-white cutting of the pineapple mint, would it continue grow white or will side shoots revert to green or variegation? I’m intrigued because despite the heat, this solid white shoot remains happy, if a little crisped on the edges.
New wishlist plant: variegated lantana camara Samantha aka Lemon Swirl, lantana camara Greg Grant, and variegated lantana montevidensis.
I’ve been experiencing a recurring problem with the Chrome browser that has other users pulling their hair out and switching back to Firefox. The issue is apparently an old one, in which the Chrome browser fails to render checkboxes correctly. Other users mention radio boxes are affected too.
In my quest to spin off my garden content into a separate blog, I’ve been dependent on a plugin to also port over the photo links. The Faster Insert plugin requires me to bulk select/deselect photos, and when the checkboxes disappear, that makes the task impossible. I hope that the Google team fixes this issue soon.