Notes From Zone 4

The garden is slowly transitioning from all blues and purples to the reds and oranges that signal that summer is coming.

Most notably, my poppy bloomed, for the first time ever. In my old garden, I had an entire bed of poppies, right near the front, very full and beautiful. In particular, we’d gotten a few white poppies after a couple of years, and we really cherished them. One summer, my mother visited and tried to help with the weeding, and pulled all the poppies out into the compost. Arg! Then the landscapers we hired after the fire dug up the rest, stuck them in mulch as a holding bed, then planted them too late in November (!!) and none of them survived.

I bought some new ones in June of 2001, planted them in the bed I still call the poppy bed, even though it mostly kills the plants! The soil sucks here, it’s mostly fill, but we’ve been trying to improve it constantly with compost. Last year, I didn’t get a single bloom from the one plant that survived. Yet somehow, this year, I have two seedlings about six feet from that plant, which boggles me. How could I have seedlings when I didn’t have a bloom?

We are really babying all three plants, though, giving them a ton of compost. We’ve made ourselves not buy more plants or seeds even, until we improve the soil to the point that they will survive. That sure is a hard rule to stick to, though. I found a place that sells poppy seeds in bulk, including blue and white ones, and I so want to buy them.

Yep folks, another artifact of the upgrade from Redhat 8 to Redhat 9. Most of my domains lost incremental processing of usage statistics. Which of course I didn’t find till weeks later because it didn’t actually show up till logrotate did its thing.

I’m pretty sure they changed the default from yes to no, because most of my webalizer.conf files had incremental processing commented out, and the inactivated line set to ‘no’. The one that kept working was manually set to ‘yes’.

I just read the man page, and I should be able to continue defaulting the location of ‘webalizer.current’ but I’ve got a bad feeling about that too.