Ye Olde Garden

The front yard embedded in winter ice

Two serious wintry blasts defined February; uncommon in Texas and burying much of the landscape in ice and snow.

It’s good to know that the gardenia is hanging on, still in good shape despite its tender tropical nature. The azaleas look somewhat bare this time of year, though the low-growing cultivars look fuller than the taller shrubs.

The Emerald Snow loropetalums are clothed in dark, very dark leaves. What damage they may have endured remains to be seen.

The nandina cultivars seem rather unaffected by the harsh weather; though the broadleaf types tend to show a little more leaf burn with their winter color.

The Hot Lips salvia definitely took a beating; I’m unsure at this point if it will recover. Where other salvia strains are putting up a good fight, this particular hybrid is sensitive to the ice and snow and all of its top growth appears dead. I made the mistake of leaving out my cuttings during the storm; I am hoping they will bounce back after bringing them indoors.

The foxtail ferns which had remained bright green up until this point finally displayed some winter burn. The spiky spears changed to yellow and brown…I am wondering if I will need to prune them back for spring.

Buried in leaves, most of the kale and violas appear to have been unharmed. I can’t say the same for the gaura plantings in the front bed. I’m even worried about the kangaroo paw returning in the spring. As for the hakonechloa, I reckon I will be moving them soon under the direct shade of the crape myrtle bed. After struggling most of last year, t his type of grass probably looks best in the cool spring months under full shade.

[svgallery name=”20110211″]

Dining, Recipes

Spicy Thai Peanut Sauce

Being trapped indoors for nearly a week after one of Texas’ fiercest ice storms of the last decade, I had a craving for something sweet and spicy. With the larder about half empty, I was minded to whip up my own batch of spicy Thai peanut sauce–and hoped it would turn out as good as Banana Leaf’s rendition.

1 14oz can of coconut cream
1-2 tablespoons of grapeseed oil
1-2 tablespoons of curry powder
several cloves of chopped garlic
1 cup of creamy peanut butter
1-2 teaspoons of sriracha hot sauce to taste

The key to cooking this peanut sauce is low and slow. Start by frying up the garlic in oil over low-medium heat until a light golden brown. Add the curry powder and cook for 1 minute. Then add peanut butter and coconut cream, making sure to constantly stir so mixture doesn’t burn. Once the mixture reaches a creamy consistency, drizzle in hot sauce according to taste.

Serve over steamed broccoli and grilled/stir fry chicken. Makes a great dipping sauce and salad dressing too!

Technical

Killing stopped jobs

Sometimes I’ve had to CTRL-Z my way out of a Linux (Centos) command line that won’t work, accumulating a list of stopped jobs. This makes exiting impossible because the server will report that there are stopped jobs.

Use the following command line to get a list of stopped jobs:

jobs

Then by applying the following, the job can be killed and terminated right away without resorting to a process id number. Just enter the corresponding jobs number after the percent sign:

kill -9 %1

Once all the stopped jobs are killed, you can exit gracefully.

Technical

Fail2ban usage pains

What a pain it’s been trying to figure out how to get Fail2ban working again. I discovered that I no longer was receiving Fail2ban notifications some time mid January, and it’s been annoying as hell trying to get it to restart. The magic command line that got me back on track was to restart the server instance by deleting the socket file:

fail2ban-server -x

This command kick-started the service into daemon mode. So now it was a matter of reloading the configuration:

fail2ban-client reload

Thus when running fail2ban-client status, the system responded with the number of jails and a jail list.

Retrieving the status of the jail, I could already see that Fail2ban had gone straight to work:

fail2ban-client status ssh-iptables

Therefore, when I checked iptables -L, the newest banned IP showed up at the top of the list for the fail2ban-SSH chain. And, I was getting my ban notification emails again.