Garden blogging on a rainy day

Maybe this rain signals the end of the heat of the last few days.

A couple of pictures from the garden, one from a few days ago during the heat of the day, the second from around sunset last night.

The Black-Eyed Susans are flourishing, thought not exactly where intended. A few are sturdily filling up the Dead Zone, along with Verbena and an African Daisy.

A lot of people think Lantanas are a nuisance. Maybe they are, but they’re growing where even weeds hesitate to settle in, they attract butterflies like this one, and they root easily. Yes, they stink, but still.

I got an email the other day…

…that said bandwidth on this site was about to be exceeded. I have no illusions about this blog — it’s not designed to draw in masses of readers, just those who already know me. I’ll occasionally send out a notice that some new pictures are up, and maybe a few other people will stumble on the site looking for information on diskectomies. But it’s pretty much a project that helps me experiment with web stuff.

So this email was a surprise. A few months ago I’d gotten hit with comment spam, but was able to knock that out with WordPress Hashcash, an elegant script that eliminated comment spam immediately. I’d experimented with authentication images, but the spammers were somehow able to work around it. Hascash, though, took care of it invisibly and effectively, and I’ll get an email every month saying how many spam posts were made. Kind of like the bills a hospital sends, even though insurance already picked them up. Makes me say a big Thank You out loud.

But then the bandwidth messages started coming, and after looking at the logs, I learned a new phrase: “referer spam.” Online poker and prescription meds were hitting me every couple of minutes. Their goal is to get a link embedded in as many databases as they can, increasing their rankings in search engines. Because of Hashcash, they weren’t making it into the database (CJD Spam Nuke keeps track of that), but were still showing up in the logs, meaning they were eating up my bandwidth.

I locked out block.alestra.mx — they’ve done nothing to secure their servers for a very long time, and were far and away the largest single source of referrer spam.

But IP Deny wasn’t quite enough. These guys were sending from IPs all over the world, sometimes only one or two hits before they went to the next one. Working with .htaccess was the next step, but I’m not confident ( or knowledgeable) enough to tinker at that level.

This took care of it. Installation is easy (though I had a little trouble with permissions), and the list of banned referrers easy to edit. Best of all: The messages bounce back to the referring URL. Heh. (I don’t have any way to prove it’s happening, but the images in my head are enough.)

Hashcash. Referer bouncer.

Problem solved.

Fishing. Gardening.

Back from the annual two-week fishing trip last week. If we didn’t catch-and-release, we’d have eaten very well every day.

This week I’ve been catching up with the garden. The rudbeckia in the Death Zone didn’t do well. Only a few remnants left. However, seeds from last year keep popping up throughout the front flowerbed.

Planted this week:

Lantana: I’ve been told they’ll grow in concrete, which isn’t much different from the soil in one of the backyard beds. When we first moved here, I thought it really was poorly troweled cement. But after a couple of years of turning it over and adding soil conditioner, gutter gunk, and garden cuttings, it’s beginning to look like something resembling dirt.

Verbena: For the Death Zone. Often used in xeriscaping. So far, little has survived the DZ except Cosmos, and even they struggled.

Weigela Alexandra: In the space previously occupied by Euonymus Manhattan. They had been there before we moved in, and by late summer each year were consumed by scale. I spent a couple of days hacking them down and pulling out the stumps, but for a year the area’s been vacant. Weigela may be the answer. Low maintenance, resistant to disease, and with foliage that will look good against the brick of the house.

Every gardener has a philosophy, whether it’s stated or not. Mine is simple: Plants should be placed so they need as little care as possible. I like pulling weeds and doing minor maintenance like deadheading and pruning out dead branches, but I prefer plants to be in their natural shapes and in environments that I don’t have to interfere with. That’s why it’s taken a while to make decisions and get things in the ground. So far I’m happy with the decisions that have been made, and there haven’t been any dramatic disasters. The Death Zone continues to mock all efforts, but if weeds can grow there, something will defeat it.

Pictures coming soon . . .