We goofed off all day yesterday, spending our holiday and thus day off in a canoe on the Connecticut River rather than working in the garden. We sure had fun, though, and the garden seems to have survived without us.
I noticed yesterday morning that I have the first blooms from my Galliardia. This is my third year with these two plants, which I got from Brasheers, in Alstead. They bloomed fine the first year, and then not a single bloom all year last year. The plants looked healthy enough, stubbornly refused to go to bud, even, so I’m really happy to seem them blooming this year. They look almost ready to split, but I don’t want to sacrifice another year of blooms! Maybe I’ll wait one more year. I had envisioned surrounding that tree in low-growing flowering plants, and I still like the way they look.
Many of my Crazy Daisies opened up today, and they are cute! I started 70 of these under lights two years ago, and only got a few anemic blossoms from them last year, their first, which I guess it to be expected. I think I planted them too close together, though, so I will definitely need to split them next year, and spread them out more. As it is, I have these intense areas of very white blooms, which really stand out in the garden.
One of the very strange things that seems to have happened is that I got a weird hybridization — it looks like a yellow flower mixed with the Crazy Daisies, and I have this very wild looking yellow crazy daisy, I guess. It’s only one plant, I definitely did not see it last year, so I want to be sure to grab some of the seeds from it this fall. It’s cute.
We puttered around in the garden quite a bit for how hot it was outside. After a while, though, we retreated to the new garden where there is still a lot of shade and cut down a few more trees and chipped them, weirdly reducing the shade that we were enjoying, but oh well. We are conflicted about cutting down trees, obviously. We need the sun for the vegetable garden we want to create, but we’ve lived so long with so many trees that it feels very exposing to cut them down. I keep reminding us both that we have 300 plus acres of trees, so clearing one is really okay.
The sendmail/linuxconf thing is getting scarier. I had SMTP Auth and virtual hosting working. They broke. I dorked around, they worked, they broke, and now looking deeper into sendmail.cf, I don’t think they ever should have been working together. However they definitely were.
Unfortunately, now that I know that what I did shouldn’t work, it never will again. Which means I really have to learn sendmail. Not on my list of cool things to do.