Midsummer Garden Realities

It’s a dark, wet day.  The Chicago area has had more than an inch of rain since midnight.  It’s not yet noon and there is more to come.

Rain, of course, is good for plants.  The grass will grow and require mowing.  Weeds will grow and require pulling.  But my flowers and vegetables will also grow and give me pleasure in many ways: color, delicious food, pride in how the yard looks.

Lots has happened since I reported my new spring bulb blooms.   My best friends housewarming gift of her prettiest iris gave me gorgeous color as soon as the dutch bulb stuff started to fade.  Look how beautiful!

That new back-of-the-house bed I dug is full.  The south third of it holds herbs, and the rest is flowers – some of them herbal (lavender) or edible (nasturtiums).  Zinnias and Cosmos promise lots of bloom starting soon, and the hollyhocks are growing, though of course I won’t see bloom from those until next year.  The annual herbs have gone bananas.  I’ve already harvested quite a bit of basil; I have regular and lemon.  Parsley is also available for salads and stir-fries.  And there’s a huge supply of cilantro, because apparently some of last year’s went to seed.  Good thing I love cilantro.  The other herbs are growing more normally but all are doing well.

This photo is a couple weeks old.  There's more stuff and more color now!

The new, enlarged vegetable bed is also doing well.  I still don’t think it gets enough sun.  I have an idea on what to do about that, involving removal of the south end of the garage’s “patio overhang”.   But that will cost $$ I don’t want to spend this year.  I’ll target doing it when the roof is redone, which is probably within the next 5 years.  Anyway.   There are a few tomato fruits and quite a few flowers.  I think they’re getting pollinated, maybe even by bees.  I’ve harvested a couple of hot peppers already.  I’ve also been harvesting spinach, chard, and kale – mostly thinnings so far but that’s about to change.  The zucchini are starting to produce, and the beans have many flowers so I’ll have lovely violet haricots shortly.    

The lilies have bloomed, and now it’s time for daylilies and pink coneflowers.   I also have lots of annuals in bloom, both in pots on the patio and in the various gardens.  There are portulaca in the front of the new flower bed, dahlias in the north fence bed in front of the coneflowers, and begonias in front(rex) and in the north patio bed (tuberous). 

This photo is a week old.  As soon as it stops raining I'll take another picture!

For such a tiny yard, I have a lot going on.  It’s delightful.  I go out there most mornings, while Coco does her thing, and look at what has changed since yesterday.  A few weeds get pulled, and spent blooms removed.  Pots get watered.  Colors are enjoyed.  And now, vegetables will be harvested.  So much pleasure. 

Cloud Tools

People worry about this new “cloud” thing, but like so many other terms in technology, it’s just a fancy name for things you already know how to do.  The difference is that some of the work is done on a computer you access via the internet instead of your own computer.  You'll do that either through your browser or through an app you download to use the service. 

If you have a free online email account (gmail, yahoo mail, etc.), you already use a cloud service.  Your provider handles sending, delivery, spam filtering, and other things at the mail server instead of your having to set up all those things on your own computer.  You can choose whether to download your mail or keep it all on the service.  For example, I use Gmail.  My account is at mail.google.com, and I let google store it all for me.  Every google account has 15Gb (that’s 15 GIGAbytes, or 15,000 Megabytes even if you don’t bother with the base-2 arithmetic.  It’s an unbelievable, immense amount of storage.  If you’re curious, take a look at http://www.whatsabyte.com/)  for mail and files.  If you do a minimal amount of cleanup and remember to delete your trash, you should not fill up this much space.  

If you like using a mail client on your computer, such as Outlook or Thunderbird, you can configure your mail to automatically download.  That’s helpful if you have to work with your mail offline a lot.  But these days few people spend very much time offline.  Even folks who don’t have a constant wifi connection can peek at mail on their phones using their mobile data plan.  I gave up downloaded mail several years ago and have not missed it.  When your mail is in the cloud, you can reach it with any device on which you happen to be working, including a public PC or other device in a library or Internet Café.  Just be sure you don’t let that public device save your password.

What other cloud tools are common for individuals?  There are several, but I'm only going to address the one additional obvious choice in this post:  File storage.  Most people have heard of Dropbox, which is a pretty handy way to sync needed files across devices and share/collaborate with others.  Dropbox has cousins:, Google Drive, MS OneDrive, SpiderOak, Box.com, and others.  There are pros and cons to each.  I use both Dropbox and Google Drive, depending on the need.  Google Drive comes with office-like tools and the ability for people to collaborate on the same document in real time.  Dropbox, on the other hand, synchronizes with all my devices but updates and edits to files take place on the device.  Every time I save a file that has changed, the little icon “whirls” until the updated file has replaced the old one on my Dropbox account in the Cloud.  And every time I fire up my computer or tablet, Dropbox updates anything (well, only the starred things on the tablet) that changed since the last time I was on there.  

What about security?  Any time you put a file on someone else’s computer you are taking a risk.  But then, any time you put a file on any computer connected to the internet, including your own, you are taking a risk.  Are the cloud providers better at security than you are?   Very probably.  But here are a few things you can do to minimize your risks.

1. Encrypt files you don’t want anyone else to see, no matter where you keep them.  That means spreadsheets with personal financial information, your personal journal, legal documents.  All office packages let you put a password on a file.  Do it.  Make it a good password (see this post for how to do that).
2. Share files only with people you trust, and/or files you don’t care that the public sees. 
3. Assume that if you attach a file to an email, it could be intercepted.  It’s true.  NEVER send confidential or financial information in an open email.
4. If you do send an encrypted file with private information in an email, DO NOT send the password to the file in that same email.  Send it – preferably in a text, but at least in a separate email at least 30 minutes later, with “follow up” or something equally nondescript in the subject -- with only “for that file I sent you….[insert password here]” in the body.
5. Assume that if you share a file you’ve lost control of it.  Even if you’re encrypted it, if you share it with someone, s/he could share the password with someone else, or make a non-encrypted copy that could be hacked. 
6. Keep your Dropbox/Google Drive/whatever clean.  Don’t keep stuff on there that isn’t in use.  Lots of people use Dropbox for photo/video backup storage, and that’s fine if you want to.  I don’t.  I don’t want to pay monthly for something I don’t actively use.  I bought a 1Terrabyte USB drive for about the cost of a year’s worth of 1T Cloud storage, where I keep archives.   That drive will take me a LONG time to fill up, but your results may be different depending on how many photos and videos you have. 
7. Remove sensitive files that aren’t in use, even off your own PC.  When your taxes are done, archive off the financial records.  I use that same 1T drive.  I also make a CD of that year’s files, which I keep with my tax returns.  However, I don’t know how long the CD will be readable – they do degrade, you know! – so I also archive off to my external drive. 

If you do these things, you can use Cloud Storage and Cloud Services with confidence.  They are useful.  Just apply some common sense with just a hint of paranoia.  Take a look at comparisons of services to see which might be best for what you need.  The ones I use may not be best for you.  

More on this topic soon.  

“Please to call it… research”

Man, I love Google.  It’s fabulous to live in an era where just about any silly question I want to ask can be answered in moments.

• Who was that amazing, skinny-waisted, tap-dancing sister who played opposite Rosemary Clooney in White Christmas?
  
• How do HTML table styles work, again?
  
• What could I make for lunch with kale and tahini?
  
• Are there any new virus removal programs?
  
• Who wrote Le Grande Maunes?
  
• What good shielded outdoor lights are available?

Of course, there’s a downside.  If you’ve got the discipline to find your answer and then get off the web and move on, you’re good.   I don’t seem to have it.  So many of my Google searches turn up all sorts of interesting things that I want to explore.  Often they spawn more Google searches (I’d love to blame this all on a nefarious plot by Google).  Articles have links to other articles.  

I mostly ignore videos on the grounds that they take too long (unless I’m trying to learn something and so far the written answers aren’t helping). But that's probably a false economy.  I can get lost for big chunks of time reading stuff that, eventually, is not even related to my original question.  Is it fun? Sure.  Does it help me get my work done?  Well…

In this age of infinite information, it’s very easy to get lost in it, especially if you enjoy reading and the process of learning like I do.  How do you decide when you’ve had enough?  For me, it depends – on how black-and-white the question is, how comfortable I am that I know what I’m doing right now and don’t need much input from an expert.  And how much I’m enjoying the task at hand.  If I’d really rather not be doing what I’m doing, it’s easy to rationalize that a differently-worded search might come up with better info, or that these 4 related articles might be useful before I get back to work.  All in the name of …research, of course.  

I already set a timer for Facebook because aside from keeping in touch with friends, the thing’s a time sink.  Maybe I should do that before I type something into that search box, too.  

What do you do to keep from endlessly wandering around in all that delicious information out there?

Garden dreams in progress

Finally, finally, FINALLY there are signs of spring in ChicagoLand.  It’s been a long, tough winter.  This post is primarily to share the eye candy coming up in my yard; it's been a delight this month to watch it begin to happen.

My potted plants have managed to survive on the back porch (which long ago was turned into an extra little room off the kitchen).  It was sometimes chilly but nobody died.  I’ve also tried to keep some sort of bloom going.  I plant a few paperwhite bulbs at a time.  And I’ve bought hyacinths from Trader Joe's.  The fragrance is so intoxicating.  There’s nothing I like better in my office to lighten the gloom of winter.  

And now, finally, my yard is beginning to wake up.  First there were the crocus: 

 Then, the delicious little blue Scilla (siberica) in the back:

And then my newly planted Fritillaria (michailovskyi).  

And then, surprisingly, the tulips.  I expect daffodils first, but not this year.  At this point the daffodils are up too, but the tulips are still ahead and will probably bloom first.  Neither is quite there yet, though:

This morning my rhododendron popped into bloom.  Last year, the tulips and daffodils were blooming first.  This year, it’s the other way around.  

Coco and I watch for flowers in other yards as we walk, and there are now spring bulbs up everywhere.  My next door neighbor’s front is gorgeous, so I can enjoy that until my own blooms appear.

Half of the hyacinths, the ones I planted by the back steps, are coming up (they were a mixture; they’re not all supposed to be pink!  But I guess I don’t really care as long as they smell good).  The ones planted close to the patio have not appeared.  It’s probably colder over there.  I shall sit on the bottom step, though, and drink in that fragrance.  

It’s time – past time – to get going on the spring work of the garden.  The soil is warming up very slowly, but it might be OK to plant snow peas, spinach, lettuce, and other early vegetables.  I did not start tomatoes or peppers from seed this year, so will need to buy plants from my CSA farmer or a farmer’s market.  But at the rate we’re going, it won’t be time to put those plants outside until June.  

That’s OK.  Every day in the garden is a good one.  I will enjoy both the work and the results in my yard.  I spent 16 years in Maryland turning my lot into something beautiful.  Now I’m starting over with a new project.  It’s exciting.