false start! 14-day penalty!

i managed to get a little gardening in over the weekend. i put down a bunch of flower seeds¹, and got the beds ready to transplant the seedlings i started indoors. i was going to plant them, but over the weekend, the weather service posted a freeze warning for monday night. (not just frost; a hard freeze. the temperatures bottomed out at 25° F/-4° C. that should slow down some of the early-rising bugs.) this morning it was still too cold to do any outdoor work except pull up perennial weeds in the lawn and flower beds. die, weeds, die!

which reminds me: anybody got any ideas for killing wild strawberries? the damn things are taking over the lawn, and they laugh off everything i've tried (2,4-d, dicamba, mecoprop)... except glyphosate (but i'm not interested in killing all the grass, altho it may come to that).

i also now have one of the blueberry bushes i'm going to plant (earliblue). hopefully, i'll be able to fiddle with the soil pH in the most sunny bed later this week, and plant them next week.

1: mostly sweet alyssum (lobularia) and toadflax (linaria maroccana; a wild snapdragon) as fillers for after the perennials peak. since my main flower bed is against a west wall, it peaks early, despite my attempts to add later-season plants.

in addition to starting some mexican hat (ratibida) indoors, i also sowed rather a lot of it in the hope that some takes. while poking around on one of my gardening shelves, i found some old, part-full seed packets, so i threw those down as well: gaillardia, chives, and a couple packets of mixed wildflowers (give-aways from somewhere). i'm curious to see what actually sprouts from those.

watching the watchman, er, brutal enforcers

dïe überblönde passed on this article analyzing the great firewall of china and what it censors. the authors tried a statistical probe to see what terms got banned. i thought the results were pretty interesting:

( but a bit long )