Author: Eugene

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June garden update

The leaves on the butternut squashes have been thinning out and aren’t nearly as dense as they were a few weeks ago. It looks like a few of the butternut squashes will be ready to harvest soon too.

The jalapeno plants (pretty sure that’s what they are anyway) have sprouted a few flowers. Maybe I’ll be seeing some peppers growing in a month or two.

The rest of the garden seems to be doing fairly well. The raspberry plants are getting eaten up pretty badly by the Japanese beetles. The blueberries have stopped blueberrying, but the blackberry plants still have a bunch of clusters in various stages of ripening. The two fig plants put on a pretty big growth spurt over the past few weeks, but no signs of any fruiting. They seem green and happy though.

Looking forward to seeing how the butternut squashes turn out. I think the first ones should be ready to pick in a few more weeks.

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Southeast Linuxfest 2024

Another Southeast Linuxfest is wrapped up and I had a great time again. Saw a bunch of new faces at SELF this year, which was nice. Attendance seemed about the same as last year. As usual, the hallway track was pretty active.

New sponsors this year were AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux. I’ll have to try them out on some of the older hardware I’ve got that Fedora doesn’t like to install on now.

Back this year was System76, showing off some of their hardware and one of their Launch keyboards, which looked really nice. Might have to get myself one. I’d love to get one of the Thelio systems.

In addition to the great talks this year, the grand opening of the new Charlotte Microcenter happened to coincide with SELF and there was much buzz. The new Microcenter isn’t very far away away and fairly easy to get to. Very nice store, very big. I somehow managed to get out of the store having only purchased a 5 port ethernet switch and an Arduino Mega clone board.

As usual, we had the W4L special event station running at SELF making FT8 contacts throughout the weekend. The amateur radio test session went pretty well too despite the room being a little on the frigid side, with 12 out of 16 people getting upgrades or new licenses.

And of course, it wouldn’t be SELF without Fred. Joining him this year was Larry the Cat.

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May garden progress

In the past month, the butternut squash plants have grown and are practically taking over the bed. I’ve actually had to trim them back a bit because it was starting to send stems out of the bed and into the lawn.

Butternut squash vines growing in a raised bed
Butternut squash vines growing in a raised bed
A butternut squash blossom

There are also a number of butternut squashes growing now!

A butternut squash resting on the ground
A butternut squash resting on the ground

Some latecomers to the bed are these plants, which I think are the jalapenos I planted. They’re in about the same area I threw some jalapeno seeds into the ground at any rate. I had given up on them every sprouting until I saw these sprout up a couple weeks ago. I’ll see in a while what they turn out to be.

Possibly some jalapenos growing in the raised bed
Possibly some jalapenos growing in the raised bed

The potato plants got off to a good start, but they’re looking pretty sad these days. One of the things I learned is that potatoes like acidic soil, so I think that could be part of the problem. I might pull the plug on the potato experiment and let the butternut squash take over the bed.

Sad looking potato plants

One of the blueberry bushes had a bunch of these small aphid-like bugs and egg sacs on one of the branches. I don’t know what they are, but they were interesting to watch. I ended up cutting the branch off and tossing it out.

Small red and black aphid-like bugs and egg sacs on a bush

Lots of blackberry clusters on the blackberry bush. I think it’ll be another week or two before they’re ready for harvesting. The one early bird blackberry I harvested was pretty tasty.

A few clusters of developing blackberries
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Hurricane season 2024

Fresh off the presses is the National Hurricane Center‘s forecast for the 2024 hurricane seasion.

NOAA National Weather Service forecasters at the Climate Prediction Center predict above-normal hurricane activity in the Atlantic basin this year. NOAA’s outlook for the 2024 Atlantic hurricane season, which spans from June 1 to November 30, predicts an 85% chance of an above-normal season, a 10% chance of a near-normal season and a 5% chance of a below-normal season.

NOAA is forecasting a range of 17 to 25 total named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher). Of those, 8 to 13 are forecast to become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 4 to 7 major hurricanes (category 3, 4 or 5; with winds of 111 mph or higher). Forecasters have a 70% confidence in these ranges.

Interestingly enough, there haven’t been any early pre-season storms this year like there have been the last few years. Coincidentally enough though, there is an area to watch in the middle of the Caribbean from early this morning, between Cuba and Haiti. Doesn’t look like it will amount to anything though.

1. Southwestern Atlantic:
A large area of cloudiness and showers over the southwestern 
Atlantic is associated with a surface trough.  An area of low 
pressure is expected to form within this system a few hundred miles 
north of Hispaniola in the next day or so.  Environmental conditions 
are not expected to be conducive, however, some slight tropical or 
subtropical development is possible while the low moves 
northeastward through the weekend. 
* Formation chance through 48 hours...low...10 percent.
* Formation chance through 7 days...low...10 percent.
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Email subscribers

The small handful of email subscribers to this blog might have noticed the lack of email notifications of new posts for the last little while.

I had been running into some weird blog posting issues that I thought might have been due to the Jetpack plugin, so I removed it a while back. The blog posting issues seemed to go away, so I went along on my merry way.

I’d forgotten that email subscriptions were handled by Jetpack until someone asked recently. I’ve reinstalled the Jetpack plugin, and hopefully won’t run into those weird problems I had with it before.