shellsharks

Three months ago I shared my gardening plan for this year, and I’m here now to give updates on how it’s all been shaking out. Things got… a bit out of hand… But at least I’m finally getting my hands dirty! 🍓 🪱 🌱 🌼 🫛 🐜 🌷 ☘️ 🌱 🫐 💚 🐢 🌸 🐝 # Planting Sites There’s a few distinct zones where I have been planting things. Let me talk about each individually… - The main “Garden” 🌼 🍓 🍅 - The “Blueberry Patch” 🫐 🌿 🫐 - The “Orchard” 🍐 🌳 🍑 - The “Herb Garden 🪴 ## The “Garden” Let’s start with the main planting site / “garden” spot… In a previous log, I shared a picture of the rather barren and sandy (but sun-filled and hopeful) spot that I wanted to turn into a future garden bed. Well, now it looks like this! At first, my plan was to dig into the ground a bit so that any raised beds I put in would be slightly sunken into the ground. I thought this was a good idea at first mostly because I wanted to keep any plants/support structures a bit lower overall so they wouldn’t obscure sight lines from the screened porch. Ultimately though, digging into this area proved extremely challenging. This area was previously a patio and so was mostly fill dirt and matting underneath. Digging through it all was not easy. So after digging out some of the area I decided to fill it mostly back in and drop the raised beds on the top. At first, my plan was to have two 6x6 beds. I had a ~14’x6’-ish area to work with so that would give me two beds and some space in between. I got some feedback that this was a bad idea, and that it would be too annoying to reach all the way into a 6’-across bed. Of course I got this advice after I had purchased and cut the wood for two 6x6 beds. After doing some thinking and measuring, I determined that with the wood I had, I’d be able to pivot from two 6’x6’ beds, to two 3’x6’ beds and one 4’x6’ bed. All I needed was a circular saw to do some extra cuts. I borrowed one from the neighbor, and after a few quick cuts, was ready to assemble! After the beds were built, it was time to load ‘em up with soil. Look, I don’t know much about dirt if I’m being honest. Without thinking too much about it, my plan originally was to just load these three raised beds with your standard Miracle Gro garden soil and call it a day. But as it turns out, that’s maybe not what you’re supposed to do? From what I’ve read, Miracle Gro is more of a soil amendment and not really exclusively what you’re supposed to fill up a bed with and plant into. So I had to do some research. Let me tell you, there’s A LOT to learn and know about soil — soil composition, amending soil, raised beds vs. in-ground gardens, etc… After a bunch of internet searching, and calling local nurseries about dirt, I ultimately settled on this product that was available at Walmart. It’s not the cheapest thing, dirt… but I was able to purchase enough bags of this, plus source some local soil (from digging out holes for trees and such), and add in a few huge bagfulls of dead leaves from last fall to finally fill up the three beds. Yay! Let me stop here and say, the Gorilla Cart I purchased last year has been extrememly helpful for hauling all this soil, gear and plants around. The final product, and the site itself is great! It gets sun pretty much all day, which is a real stroke of luck because a lot of my yard is pretty shady thanks to the big trees and tall houses in my neighborhood. ☀️ In this photo: The nearest bed has an assortment of tomatoes and a single pepper plant. They are supported using a three-staked florida weave method. The next bed is seeded with cucumbers and cow peas. I used an A-frame trellis to support these. The farthest bed is the strawberry patch, which has now been covered with protective netting to keep those pesky squirrels out. ## The “Blueberry Patch” When I moved into this house, there were two blueberry plants already planted in a side garden (how lucky!). Since those have seemingly done well enough there over the years, and I have room to spare, I figured why not add more? So I’ve added three new plants (so far). From left to right, there’s a “Peach Sorbet”, “Jellybean” and “Sunshine Blue” varieties. I don’t know what the two larger original plant varieties are. There’s also a rather large blackberry plant hiding in the back. ## The “Orchard” There’s an area further back behind my house that is a bit more untamed, but quite sunny through the morning and into the afternoon (with shade in the later afternoon). Since it’s relatively spacious, I decided it could be a nice place for some fruit trees (if I’m lucky enough for them to grow here). So I picked up a couple peach, pear and plum trees and threw them in the ground! One of may li’l peaches that are already forming on this new tree. ## The “Herb Garden” On a whim I decieded to pick up a little raised planter and plop an assortment of herbs in there. Just for fun. Here’s what it looks like now… Shoutout to my wife for making all the fun little signs! As you can see I’ve got cilantro, mint, sage, thyme, rosemary and chives planted here. # Plant Shopping! So yeah, you can read about what I had planned to get… But you know, as one does, you get to the store with your li’l list in-hand but you walk out with a bunch of stuff that isn’t on said list. It happens! (Honestly I think I may have blacked out a few times. I just kept coming home with new trees and shrubs in the car… 😁) - 🍓 On my first shopping trip, I took my son. He’s not a big vegetable fan to say the least, and he’s even a bit picky about fruit sometimes. What he does love is strawberries. So, as I was trying to figure out how to arrange the three raised beds, I decided “why not”, I can turn one of them into a li’l strawberry patch. So I bought a strawberry plant. Later I realized that I can fit a lot of strawberry plants in a 6’x3’ space, so I went back to the store and bought 9 more. 🤗 I then finished up that bed with some chive seedlings and marigolds. - 🍅 There’s a lot to discuss on the tomato front. I grew cherokee purple heirloom tomatoes last year and they were bangers. So I got some more this year. But I also picked up a “golden jubilee” heirloom tomato because my son saw it at the store and “loves yellow”. This year I planned on doing some cherry tomatoes but hadn’t done much research into what variety specifically. So at the store I got a bunch of varieties. I’ve got “super sweet 100’s”, “husky cherry reds” and “sun sugar yellows” (again with the yellow…) - 🫑 My plan was to grow some kinda pepper. I got a “sweet bell yellow sweet pepper”. MORE YELLOW! 💛 - 🥒 🫛 : As planned, I got some cucumbers and cowpeas. Nothing new to report there. - 🍑 🍐 🌳 OK, let’s get into trees. Again, there’s a lot to discuss. Yes it’s true that I planned on getting a pear and a peach tree, but as things often turn out, it’s a bit more complex than just that. For starters, I grabbed an “elberta peach” and a “bartlett pear”. Cool! But y’know I’m at the store and I love plums. There happens to be plum trees for sale. What’s one more tree!? So I came home with a “ruby sweet” plum tree. Now… I’m at home on a video chat with my mom, walking her through my garden stuff and I explain to her the trees I got. She brings up that I need more than one of each tree for cross-pollination. Doh! I totally whiffed on this. The good news is, I get to go buy more trees. After some searching, I settle on a “santa rosa” plum, “anjou” pear and “red haven” peach to pair with my other three trees. Let me tell you, it’s fun jamming 8-9ft tree-lings up into a sedan 😅 - 🫐 My plan was to buy one more blueberry plant to pair with the two I already have. (Can you see a pattern emerging yet?). I am now the proud owner of three new blueberry bushes! The new varieties include “peach sorbet”, “sunshine blue” and “jellybean”. How delightful! - 🍋 🌿 One thing I really want to make this summer is a “garden salad”, consisting of only things I’ve pulled out of the yard. Courtesy of Peppa Pig (that my kids love to listen to), I had the idea to make a cucumber and tomato salad that also requires basil and lemon juice. So I got a lemon tree and some basil plants. Yum! - 🌸 🌻 🌺 For added whimsical spice, I wanted to grow some wildflowers in and around the property, so I picked up this mix. - 🍋‍🟩 At some point in all this craziness I went and got myself a key lime tree too 😁 - 🪴 To top it all off I set up the herb garden with an assortment of herbs too. # Planting Buying things is fun, and all too easy. Planting is a little harder. But keeping things alive is the real sport. Let me walk you through some of my (mis)adventures with getting things in-the-ground. I’m new to this whole gardening thing. I grew some tomatoes last year, but that’s about it as far as gardening/plant-growing experience goes. For each thing I’ve bought and then sought to put in the ground, I’ve been learning new things to consider… - Does it do well in my particular zone? - Will it get enough sunshine in the spot I want to plant it? - Does it do well in proximity to other specific plants? - How do I support the plant (i.e. think vined varieties)? - How will I protect the plants from diseases and critters? - Are there cross-pollination requirements? - Does the plant have special soil needs? - How should the plants be pruned to maximize growth vs. production, increase airflow, minimize diseases, etc… So yeah, there’s all this and I’m sure more to be discovered for me. Let’s talk about what I’ve done so far… - I got 10 strawberry plants put in a raised bed, with some chives dotting the perimeter and a few marigolds in the corners of the box. Nice! After a bit of research it seems like the spacing I went with should support that many plants in that size box. But we’ll see! The Marigolds are meant to help with luring pollinators and the chives help make good use of extra space. What I didn’t realize was that since these are fairly low-growing shrubs, the fruit will rest low and touch the soil. Well the soil is compost and dirt and such, so its recommended to lay something down on top of the dirt so that the fruit doesn’t get filthy. So I got some straw much to lay down. - I’m doing the cucumbers and beans from seeds. They’re supported by an A-Frame trellis. - To help bring in other pollinators, I got some borage and nasturtium seeds. I also have the wildflower medley. Pictured below is one of the wildflower sprouts! - I have limited options for protecting the trees out in “the orchard”. It’ll be years before they (hopefully) produce fruit anyways so I’ll cross that bridge when I get there. If the deer try to eat the small trees or their leaves I may have to figure something out though… # Adding to the Kit It wasn’t just plants I’ve been buying either. Here’s some new things I’ve added to the toolshed… - Pick Axe: Because digging in my area means a lot of big rocks and clay - Soil Knife: For all the versatility a tool like this brings - Rake: For spreading mulch and soil and such - Garden Gnome: He’s a good li’l buddy and a watchful eye at night 😁 # LOOKING FORWARD I’ve got my hands full with what I’ve gotten myself into this year. But that hasn’t stopped me from thinking about what’s next! - There’s an area in the back between the “orchard” and my schip laurels that I could plant a few things in. Not sure I’ll get to it this year though. - I’d like to get (buy or maybe build?) a plant bench that I can put on the side of my porch. I could put my lemon tree and any other future potted plants in there as it’s a pretty nice sunny spot. - I have plans to build my own potting bench! Soon. - I might just keep adding more and more blueberry plants to the blueberry patch. It’s quite sunny, spacious and I suuure do love blueberries 🤔 - My wife has been interested in composting for a while—that would work great with what I’m doin’ garden-wise. - We’ll see how the wild blackberries do this year. I’ve seen a bunch growing in the wooded area behind my house. I’ve been thinking about what I can do to help propagate them so I have more of a thicket of berries to munch on in the late summer. - I’ve got some watermelon and pumpkin seeds now. Ya never know what I might do with those… Thanks for reading and wish me luck!

This month’s IndieWeb Carnival is hosted by Juha-Matti Santala—the theme is love letter. I’m going to write about the one and only, “Outside”. “Outside what?” You may think. Well really anywhere outside, anywhere but in(side). It’s warming up here in the ol’ northern hemisphere where I live and I like to spend as much of it as I can not indoors. You see professionally I poke at computers, which means I sit quite a bit, and a lot of that sitting tends to be inside (especially in colder months). But with the portability of a laptop, I can do some of said work outside too. Specifically, on my screened-in porch which affords me a lot of the benefits of being outside, without some of the pesky downsides (direct sunlight, annoying bugs, rain, etc…). When it’s time to take a break, or after-work, or on weekends, I enjoy tending to my garden, mucking about in the yard, going for walks, really anything just to be outside. Growing up in the 90’s, I didn’t have a smart phone or particularly interesting personal computers, so I spent just about all day after school and on the weekends outside. Don’t get me wrong, I had and loved playing videogames (inside), but I was most definitely an outside kid—and still am to this day. I love camping, hiking, boating, outdoor sports, campfires, whatever. Name an outside activity and I’m probably into it. Here’s what outside is to me, expressed through abstract feelings and fragments of thought: > A brisk morning, a sun low in the sky sends streaks across a meadowed yard… > > Spring blooms unfurl, stretching in the warmth of the new day’s rise… > > Birds chirp, squirrels scamper. Bees flit to and fro… > > Sipping a brew, I try to identify what flies, what frolics, what flowers… > > The forecast calls for storms. A cautious breeze heralds the sombering sky… > > Canopies dance as the rain begins… > > The beat grows louder on the roof, there’s a rumble in the distance… > > Skies part, the birds sing once more, night falls… > > Fireflies dance, I strike the match… > > God, I love a good campfire. If nothing more than to stare into incandescent depths… > > A smoldering fire gives way to the chorus nocturnum—a nightly lullaby for me on summer nights. I wrote this post inside. I think it’s time for me to go.

This note contains lists of plants and animals that I’ve seen in my yard. It’s a reference for myself, but maybe others will find it interesting! # FLORA 🌸 A variety of lists for the plants I see in my yard. Anything with a (👨‍🌾) next to it is something that I planted (not natively growing)… - 🌳 Trees: Black Cherry, Cherry, Dogwood, Holly, Maple, Oak, Redbud, River Birch - 🌼 Flowers: Azalea, Candytuft, Peony, Periwinkle, Rhododendron, Rose - 🌿 Bushes & Shrubs: Buttonbush, Liriope, Schip Laurel 👨‍🌾 - 🍐 Fruit: Red Haven Peach 👨‍🌾, Bartlett Pear 👨‍🌾, Ruby Sweet Plum 👨‍🌾, Elberta Peach 👨‍🌾, Anjou Pear 👨‍🌾, Santa Rosa Plum 👨‍🌾, Peach Sorbet Blueberry 👨‍🌾, Sunshine Blue Blueberry 👨‍🌾, Jellybean Blueberry 👨‍🌾, Thornless Blackberry, Wild Wllegheny Blackberry, There’s also some other kind of nothern highbush blueberry that I don’t know the variety of - Other: Mock strawberry, Wildflowers (Dandelion) - Weeds: Chickweed, Garlic Mustard, Poison ivy, Virginia creeper # FAUNA 🦊 The animals of my yard… - 🦇 Bats - Blue jays - 🪲 Bugs: Ants, Bees, Beetles, Butterflies, Earth Worms, Fireflies, Gnats, Grasshoppers, Ladybugs, Mosquitos, Moths, Spiders, Spotted Lantern Flies, Wasps - Cardinals - 🐦 Catbirds (I think these li’l buggers are what eat my blueberries the most) - Chipmunks - 🦌 Deer - 🦊 Fox - Hawks - 🐁 Mice - Opossum (that one time) - 🦉 Owl (though I haven’t heard him in a while) - 🐇 Rabbits - Robins - 🦎 Salamanders - 🦎 Skinks - 🐍 Snake (I sprayed him with the hose and haven’t seen ‘em since) - Sparrows - 🐿️ Squirrels (so many squirrels!) - 🐢 (Box) Turtles I’ll update this list as I see more things and identify other plants.

I recently intoduced my newest project, the Vulnerability Garden 🪴. Unlike this site (shellsharks.com), which has always been hosted on GitHub Pages, Vulnerability.Garden is brought to you by Codeberg pages! This post will walk through how (and a bit of why) I got this new static site goin’ with Codeberg. I’ve been thinking of migrating my main site off of GitHub for a while. For all the reasons you probably already know of—but let’s just say that Microsoftslop has given me a lot of reasons to want to move away. It’s a big undertaking, and for many-a-reason, I just haven’t done it yet. But, I had a new project in mind, and decided to start fresh. So I am trying out Codeberg’s “pages” offering. # Setting up the static site on Codeberg To get started, sign up for an account at Codeberg.org. Easy! Then, spin up a new project for your static site—I personally am familiar with Jekyll, having used it for this site for years, so decided to go with that for this new project as well. Create a Codeberg repository, either on the remote side or locally and clone-down or commit that repo to get it synced up with Codeberg. Next, you’ll want to make sure you’ve added an ssh key to your account. For setting up the static page on Codeberg, I’ve opted for the “legacy method”, which is currently the only option that supports custom domains on Codeberg. To get the site up, you need to set up the repo with a separate pages branch, push the generated static content (i.e. HTML, style sheets, images, etc…), configure DNS, and create a .domains file in the project repo. Let me walk through these steps below as I found this the most confusing part of the whole thing, despite Codeberg’s claim that “it’s quick and easy”. 🙄 SPECIAL THANKS: I want to pause here and give all the credit for the rest of this setting-up-a-static-site-on-Codeberg walkthrough to @mttaggart@infosec.exchange. He was kind enough to hold my hand through this process and even taught me a cool thing or two about git in the process. Thank you, thank you! 🙏 So, at a high level, we’re going to create the new pages branch (the branch has to be named ‘pages’ according to the Codeberg instructions), which will at first have everything that the main branch has. We’re going to switch to, and then delete everything from it (SCARY!). Then we switch back to the main repo and add that new branch as a submodule. From there we can build the site, copy the files from that build folder (this would be _site in Jekyll terms) into the new pages folder (which remember is where the submodule/branch will be), move into the pages branch (by simply cd-ing into the folder), commit+push the updated files there, and then finally move back to the project root directory and commit+push any files there. Phew! Let’s walk through those steps again at a more granular level below… 1. Starting in your main branch and in your project root on the command line, run git switch -c pages to create and switch to the new pages branch. 2. Run git -rm -r ./* to delete everything from the pages branch. It will look scary at first, but when you switch back to your main branch, everything will still be there I promise! 3. Then push everything up to the remote repo to lock in that new clean branch. So while in the pages branch run git add -A, then git commit -m "WHATEVER COMMIT MESSAGE", git push -u origin pages, and then git switch - to go back to your main branch. 4. Next, you add the submodule and associate it with the pages branch by running git submodule add -b pages git@codeberg.org:USERNAME/SITE-REPO.git pages. REMEMBER! Use YOUR username and the name of your Codeberg repository here. You’ll also need to be sure you’ve set up your SSH keys at this point. 5. Next, move your built site static content to the newly created pages directory, cp -R YOUBUILDFOLDER/* pages/ — be sure to include the /* after your build folder directory to ensure only the files in your build directory are moved over and not the build directory folder itself. 6. Create a .domains file and move it into the pages directory. The .domains file will simply list, line-by-line, the custom domains you want your site to be reachable on. So for example, my .domains file for Vulnerability.Garden simply has one line: vulnerability.garden. 7. Move into the pages directory cd pages and add git add -A, commit git commit -m "COMMIT MESSAGE" and push git push the static files up to the remote repo. One beauty of submodules here is that by simply navigating into this directory on the command line and committing+pushing your files, it also pushes these files into the pages branch of the project. So you don’t have to do any branch switching here. Neat! 8. Finally, move back to the project root directory cd .., commit changes at that level git commit -am "COMMIT MESSAGE" and push those changes up as well git push. To recap, here’s all those instructions in one go… git switch -c pages git rm -r ./* git add -A git commit -m "Remove everything for new branch" git push -u origin pages git switch - git submodule add -b pages git@codeberg.org:username/site-repo.git pages cp -R build_folder/* pages/ cp .domains pages/ cd pages git add -A git commit -m "Rebuild: $(date -Iseconds)" git push cd .. git commit -am "Update build" git push Hopefully everything worked for you! Now the last step is to get DNS all set up through your DNS provider. I use GoDaddy, but the instructions should be pretty straight-forward for other providers as well. Codeberg’s instructions I feel are pretty straight forward… - Add a DNS record for that domain: CNAME [[branch.]repo.]user.codeberg.page. — which I didn't do as my provider wouldn’t let me. - So alternatively you can, for an apex domain where CNAME doesn’t work, add the ALIAS record ALIAS codeberg.page. (which I also didn’t do because it also wasn’t supported), and TXT [[branch.]repo.]user.codeberg.page TXT record, which I did do. - So in the end, I only added the TXT record. Mine looked like: pages.vulnerability-garden.shellsharks.codeberg.page. - Finally, set up the A and AAAA records using A 217.197.84.141 and AAAA 2a0a:4580:103f:c0de::2 respectively. Give DNS time to propagate, and Codeberg time to do their magic on the back end, and before long you should be able to see your site at your custom domain. Hurray! 🎉 ## Updating content on your static site Now that your site is all set up, you’ll want to know how to update said site right? Well the good news here is that you’ve already done the steps at least once. The bad news is it’s a little clunky, but there are ways to streamline it. Basically, you just need to redo steps 5-8 from the previous section. But before you do, make sure you delete any existing build folder (i.e. _site in the Jekyll world), and I also like to delete everything out of the pages directory (except the .domains file). I do this because I was seeing some issues recursively adding ‘pages’ folder content into my _site and pages directories. From there, it’s the same steps as before. To recap again, here’s what I do… # DELETE BUILDFOLDER # DELETE EVERYTHING IN PAGES FOLDER *EXCEPT* .domains FILE # cd TO MAIN REPO DIR cp -R _site/* ./pages # SUB '_site' with the path to your build directory cd pages git add -A git commit -m “COMMIT MSG” git push cd .. rm -rf _site/ # SUB '_site' with the path to your build directory git add -A git commit -am “COMMIT MSG” git push Give Codeberg another minute or two and huzzah! The days is yours. 🥳 ### just file Updating your static site on Codeberg pages can be a bit clunky if done manually via the approach described here. But you can use a just file to streamline the process. I haven’t set this up quite yet, but Taggart was kind enough to share his (thanks again!) — to give you an idea of what one might look like. With a bit of tweaking, this can be used for your site to do all the moving about, deleting things, committing+pushing, etc… --- # Jekyll on Codeberg I want to highlight a few li’l oddities and differences I encountered while setting up a Jekyll site this way on Codeberg, versus GitHub Pages. - You’ll want to really make sure you’re building your site with jekyll build, and not jekyll serve when you are pushing content into production. This way you can avoid having localhost URLs in your site’s production code. This one got me a few times. - On GitHub, you commit your un-built files and their backend does the build for you and then publishes your static content. Here, you’re running the build locally and moving files into the pages branch. This should be evident at this point in the post, but I felt it worth mentioning again. # Interesting things I’ve done with Vulnerability.Garden In this final section, I want to cover a few noteworthy things that I’ve done with Vulnerability.Garden. - The base theme is Beautiful Jekyll, which I heavily modified. - The main vulnerability table is powered by DataTables. It’s a tool I hadn’t used before, but it is awesome! Below you can see some of the DataTables-specific configuration I did to get it to work the way I wanted… $(document).ready( function () { $('#myTable').DataTable( { paging: false, order: [[3, '']], layout: {topStart: 'search', topEnd: null} } ); } ); - One issue I encountered with DataTables was the way it was trying to sort my date fields. It was doing so alphabetically instead of, well… date-wise. This li’l stackoverflow thread helped me sort this issue out (get it!?) rather quickly. To be clear, I used the “HTML Solution” by adding <td data-sort='YYYYMMDD'> parameters to my <td> tags. Elegant. - For vulnerability logos, I used this site to help remove background and improve transparency for the images.

Inspired by this post on Threads, I thought about which Pokémon would be the most useful to me in real life. Here’s what I came up with (in index order)… - Jigglypuff is a fluffy li’l guy who can help put my kids to sleep when it’s time. 😆 - Diglett would be a great helper for my gardening tasks—tilling soil, digging, etc… - Meowth can literally produce coins/money, can talk, is playful, and hunts around at night finding treasures to bring back to me. All wins there. - Poliwrath seems like a good bro to have around. Strong swimmer and can be a useful, amphibious body guard. - Machoke’s are chill and can help with stuff around the house. - Chansey’s got eggs that are nutritious and delicious. - Lapras is a gentle chap that can ferry me around. - Meganium can legit bring dead plants back to life—need that given my not-so-green thumb. - Miltank can produce tasty, nutritious and healing milk. I’m sure it’s protein packed too. - Blissey brings good luck and healing powers. Gotta have one in your corner. - Gardevoir is a zealous protector and could also lift stuff with its mind which could be useful around the house. - Latias seems like a good option for flying and is gentle and can understand humans. - Rayquaza could be useful from time to time on bad weather days—though it seems a bit intense to have around… NOTE: I’m only really familiar with Pokémon up through Gen III so this list doesn’t consider anything beyond that.