Notes From Zone 4

My sweet peas were getting so tall that I decided they just had to go outside already, because there’s no way to keep a vining plant under lights, I think. Why did I start these so early? I’ve never grown them before, and the package said they like cool weather, so cool weather they are

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I’m deciding that keeping bees is part of gardening, so I’m going to track them here in this journal, rather than trying to figure out some place else to do it. We are taking a beekeeping class this spring offered by a local co-op farm, and we each ordered a hive kit as part

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Lisa spent the week in LA and took the red-eye home last night. While I was waiting for her, I scooped as much crud as I could out of the pond, and turned the pump back on. We lost all our fish for the second year in a row. We told the landscaper we wanted

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I just spent a couple hours demonstrating that there is a maximum product image size that can be be uploaded to ZenCart. I’m posting this here so the next person that hits the limit can save some torn hair. Anyway, when creating or editing a product the expected situation is that you have a product

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We got close to a foot of snow today, I think. I shoveled most of it myself, but ended up doing it in shifts, luckily. We were about bare before this storm, and I wasn’t sure there was going to be more snow, but I guess I should have known better.

Frank went out today to see if he could see any fish, and unfortunately found them all dead. Damn it. This is two years in a row that they haven’t made it through the winter, and this year we tried a pond heater. I don’t know how it’s going to fit into what is going to be a busy year this year, but we need to re-do the pond, because it clearly needs to be at least a foot deeper to be able to winter over fish. We aren’t willing to bring them in, so I guess there will be no fish this year until we get this figured out.

We finally have Google Adwords running over on Zinmasters.com. For sure it’s a low traffic site, but google and awstats are sure not seeing eye to eye on the issue. It’s only been three days, but here’s the situation: Day awstats pages Google Impressions Friday 62 56 Saturday 31 7 Sunday 9 2 Since I didn’t get adwords running until midday on Friday, that[s a pretty solid agreement for that day. So what happened Saturday and Sunday. Well, there are certainly some hits to awstats that Google wouldn’t see. But the number is much more like 4 than 24. I’ve checked that all pages show the adwords, and I haven’t seen any public service come through in my checking, so I’m really wondering what’ going on here. Today will actually be a test. I _know_ there were at least 6 impressions, because I saw them.

I’ve been planting yet more seeds — I started some marigolds for my window boxes, some cilantro for my kitchen, and I’m trying my hand at melampodium, notoriously hard to grow from seeds, but I can never find it in the nurseries around here and I love it. I also transplanted out my pansies, moving

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Zen-Cart is the Open Source shopping cart we’re using in the vast Richards web-empire. It’s a fork of OsCommerce. They seem to be doing the same kind of cleanup that the OsCommerce team is doing, but actually delivering code. Version 1.1 seems much cleaner than the current OsCommerce build. However, calling the documentation sketchy is

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I’m not sure what I was thinking, but I had ordered a bunch of heirloom tomato seeds from Tomato Fest last month. I bought their short season collection, hoping for an earlier harvest that I got last year. But anyway, in his book, he talks about planting his seed in the first of April, and he’s in California, yet I started mine the first of March? I did, though. I think I’m going to try those water surround things from Gardener’s Supply, too, to see if I can get them outside mid-April. So the seedlings are already pushing up the tops on the clear covers, growing madly. I used some old plastic silverware for markers, because I really want to keep track of the varieties of these guys. I planted four each of six varieties, and it looks like all but two germinated. Here we go!