Coats Sez

I forgot to chill the columbine seeds

Terry — Sun, 20 May 2012 19:04:27 +0000

I never did get any columbine plants from 2 packets of seeds. Now I know why. On the back of the seed packets is a note which says “Prechilling improves germination.” Apparently NONE of the seeds germinate without chilling them first as I never saw a single columbine seedling. Lots of henbit seedlings, though. I still haven’t figured out where all the henbit weeds came from. I suspect from one of my seed packets but I can’t prove it.

The National Gardening Association says “You can put your seeds in a plastic bag and store them in the refrigerator for 2-3 weeks to give them the required cold-treatment. Columbine (Aquilegia) seeds will take 30-90 days to germinate at 65F -75F degrees.” I didn’t do this and apparently have lost all my seeds. They haven’t gone 90 days in the ground yet though so I’ll keep an eye out for sprouting seedlings. The better hurry up if they’re coming though as I have lots of other plants growing where I sowed the columbine. Here’s the website where I got the chilling info:http://www.garden.org

Here’s a pic of where I sowed the columbine seeds. As you can see, not a columbine in sight:

Terry

Columbine or henbit?

Terry — Sat, 12 May 2012 22:45:35 +0000

I sowed two packets of seeds. One was supposed to be mixed colors of columbine and the other packet was all blue columbine. I just sowed them and then kinda raked them slightly into the soil. What’s come up looks more to me like henbit instead of columbine. I don’t understand how two random packets of columbine seeds can make henbit. Looks like Google Image pictures of henbit, that is. I was suspicious because the growing plants just don’t look right. They also have very tiny flowers toward the top of the plant, tiny enough that I’d need a magnifying glass to get a good look at them. Anyway, I’ll post a pick. By the time someone reads this I will probably have figured it out.

Terry

Game trail cam sees skunk

Terry — Sat, 12 May 2012 19:01:55 +0000

My game trail cam from night before last showed a skunk in a picture. I didn’t know skunks were coming around along with the raccoons and gray foxes. I don’t live in the woods. I live in a 55+ manufactured housing community. There IS a creek which runs by the property though and they’re probably walking the creek and then coming in the park.

Terry

Tamron Hall strikes back

Terry — Sat, 12 May 2012 18:53:06 +0000

Tamron Hall verbally kicked Gop Jim Carney’s ass on her news show yesterday. He wasn’t talking about the questions she was asking but instead was spinning, like all Gops do constantly, and she stopped him and called him on it. Shut him up and turned his microphone off. I would like to see more of news pundits refusing to put up with lies and spin. I don’t understand how they can just sit there and take all the outrageous things Republicans can come up with.

Terry

Newt Gingrich finally going to quit

Terry — Wed, 02 May 2012 16:43:20 +0000

It appears that Newt Gingrich is going to be finally leaving the Republican race for U.S. presidential candidate. It’s about time. He never did have a chance. The idea that anyone would even consider him to be capable of being a smart U.S. president is beyond my understanding. An educated person can see he is a right-wing nut-job. We need the smartest people in the U.S. to be president, not people who don’t want to see growth and forward movement.

Terry

Rsync is backing up my $HOME directory

Terry — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 19:37:26 +0000

I’ve been having trouble getting Ubuntu/Linux backup software to work right on my system so I did some thinking and searching to try to figure it out. I have an external USB drive on which I have been backing up my home folder data but I couldn’t get the common backup software to work the way I wanted it to. I was trying to use rdiff-backup but it was having trouble with .gvfs in my home folder so I gave it up.

I decided to try rsync and just script it rather than spend any more time trying to get a gui program to do what I want.

After I figured it out I’ve got rsync working just like I want it to including emailing me the results of its run.

Here’s my amateur script I’m using. No promises it would work for you:
#!/bin/bash
cp /var/log/rsync.log /var/log/rsync.log.sav
rm -f /var/log/rsync.log
rsync -av –delete –delete-excluded –exclude-from=”/home/terry/rsync-exclude” /home/terry/ /media/4cd9100c-781e-4036-b140-6243854b451f/home/terry –log-file=”/var/log/rsync.log”
sendmail terry < /var/log/rsync.log

There’s a space between “/home/terry/” and “/media/”.

It uses a file “rsync-exclude” to get what it needs to exclude from the backup.

Here’s what it looks like:

.gvfs
.mozilla/firefox/sgjypd1c.default/Cache/*
.thunderbird/*/Trash
.thumbnails
Pictures/bushnell/*

The script writes a log file to /var/log/ and mails the log file to me on my local machine which is running sendmail.

I put this script into /etc/cron.daily/ so it’ll run every day.

So far, so good. It works. Somehow.

Terry

I’m overrun with seedlings

Terry — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 00:08:15 +0000

I’ve been planting a flower garden. I even did the work to widen my plant island to get more flower room. I must have planted 15 or more flower species. I started by carefully planting seeds but with a bunch of seeds left in each seed packet I broadcast the seeds remaining in the packet so now I have 15 species of plants coming up everywhere. Totally disorganized. Well, I may have gotten the columbines pretty much where I wanted them but I still broadcast a lot of columbine seeds. Have you ever seen columbine seeds? Very tiny black things. Not as tiny as foxglove seeds, though. Foxglove seeds are almost as tiny as dust. In fact, some was blown out of my hand while I was spreading them over the dirt. Planting the seeds in an orderly fashion was impossible as the foxglove seeds are too small almost to even handle with your fingers. I just dumped a bunch in an area. I’ll sort and thin them later.

With the seeds spread all over I really can’t identify the seedlings coming up. I don’t know what the mature plants’ seedlings look like. I guess I’ll just wait until they are all bigger and then do some thinning and maybe transplanting to fill in bare spots.

I’m planting mostly perennials. I want plants that’ll come back year after year rather than have to plant something every Spring. I’ll still plant a few annuals but I hope the perennials come out looking great. We’ll see. It’s Apr 17 2012 as I write this so it’s still early. I’ll take some pictures after they’ve all matured and post them somewhere.

Terry

I got a new game trail cam

Terry — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 22:09:17 +0000

I bought a trail cam a couple weeks ago. It is a Bushnell
model 119436 Trophy Cam. I got it to spy on what goes on
in my backyard and my neighbor’s back yard. The ladies
there say they’ve seen raccoons, possums, foxes, and some
scat that they thought was from a bear. I live in a small
town but on the edge of it and some wildlife wanders in
here.
So far I’ve captured pictures of raccoons and a fox. Or
coyote. I haven’t gotten a good closeup shot of the canine
to tell exactly what it is but my eyes have seen a small
fox at night in my backyard so I presume it is that fox.
I’ve also gotten pics of a wandering housecat. Something
I find interesting is the very small things moving around.
I can see slugs and snails moving around and keep tabs on
their numbers. I also see night-crawling worms. The worms
come out of my graveled backyard and stick their eating
end over the border of my plant island and are apparently
eating from the plant matter in there.
This is a good camera. I like it. I got it at Sportsman’s
Warehouse for 139 dollars and change. I’ve seen it elsewhere
for much more. I also bought batteries because it doesn’t
come with them and it also needs an SD memory card to store
the pictures.
I’ve always wanted a cam like this but I thought they would
be prohibitively expensive. Not so. Of course, you can spend
hunders of dollars for top-notch stuff but for backyard observing
this one works just fine and has good pictures. You download
the pictures to your computer by usb cord or you can remove the
cam’s memory card and stick it in your computer and get the
images that way.
The nighttime pics are taken with infrared flash instead of
visible light. They are black and white but fairly sharp. The
daytime pics are in color and are slightly dark but still good
pictures.
The camera takes pictures by sensing movement or you can set it
to take pics on a timed schedule starting at one minute. It’ll
also do both modes at the same time.
I’m satisfied with this camera.

Terry

Blog

Terry — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:53:34 +0000

My blog

The quail are back

Terry — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 17:16:12 +0000

I looked out my bedroom window early this morning and saw a quail
run across the yard and run into the next yard. It joined another
quail that was already over there.
A pair of quail raised a brood here last year. The yard behind mine
has bushes and trees and the two ladies who live on that lot put out
water and seed for birds and that along with a native supply of slugs
and worms seems to be enough to support a quail family. Plus other
birds and creatures.
The quail are California quail. They’re kinda cute with a decoration
sticking out of their heads.
Here’s some pictures I took of them last year:
http://terrycoats.net/mywordpress/photos-3/quail-family-and-my-cat-sky/
My cat Sky thought they were fascinating.

Terry