The Garden Shed - 2011-07-26

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1:37 AM

@yoda Your edit looks good. Thanks for tackling the cleanup. I'll take a look at some of the other answers and edit whatever seems fit.

@yoda - Re: gardening.stackexchange.com/questions/1461/… - I agree with your closing this one. Do you think it would be reasonable to reopen it if it were changed to read something like "What attributes should I look for when buying gardening tools if I want them to last a long time?" ? I think this would receive long-lived answers.

@winwaed :( I was at about 85 on Finance and missed it by about 3 hours...

@yoda Answer deletion is at 4k -- gardening.stackexchange.com/privileges/trusted-user

@winwaed - congrats on 4k

2:12 AM

@winwaed - thanks! give us a chat star and I'll get another bronze badge to make up :-) (that request has to be more legal than writing a bot to get the 100 day gold)

2:28 AM

I meant @bstpierre of course - talking to myself.

Pruning roses, updated: gardening.stackexchange.com/questions/43/… Far from a final answer, so feel free to add more info.

Couldn't really add much on the bark - nothing in my books (Sperry says don't damage the tree and what to look for, but nothing on what to do to fix a problem!), so I've just added some preventative notes in a comment to an existing answer.

1 hour later…

3:58 AM

@bstpierre Yes certainly. That's a very nice way of turning an off-topic Q back on topic. Thanks for leaving the comment to the user. If he makes the edit, do cast a vote to reopen and also flag it and one of us will open it. The community is not active enough to reopen that fast (doesn't happen even on SO!)

@bstpierre Thanks for the info. I knew I was off on that one, but wasn't feeling up to searching for the priv page :)

@bstpierre Also, you were correct about the glass question earlier today. Although I do believe that the way the title was phrased, it was off-topic, it was only an edit away from being a good fit for this site and I should've edited it rather than close it. Anyway, I reopened it in about 15-20 mins, so no harm done.

I withdraw my comment re: answering an off-topic Q and my apologies :)

7 hours later…

11:24 AM

@yoda No apology needed. You're doing a good job staying on top of things, thanks.

Good morning folks

@waxeagle Good morning, what's happening in the garden today?

@bstpierre not much. My tomatoes are still struggling. I have about 2 vines I planted this year that are producing and 1 volunteer from last year that is doing well. I have one container plant that is thriving and looks like it may start fruiting soon and 2 container plants that need to get repotted tonight...

banana peppers out my ears and my green peppers are producing well....and I just shredded about 19 cups of Zuchinni this weekend...

its been a pretty good year except for the tomatoes...

Not bad. My zucchini haven't taken off yet, though it rained yesterday so I should go check it. We've got several jars of cucumber pickles (my wife has declared the end of cucumber pickling, so the rest we'll have to eat fresh or give away). Just pulled out peas. And I should have a ripe tomato this week.

@bstpierre nice, I've been harvesting Zuchinni for a few weeks now and those things are just crazywhen they get going. 4 plants could feed a small army

1 hour later…

12:40 PM

Good Moaning

@winwaed good morning too you too

12:58 PM

Good morning both :)

@Lisa ah good I was about to ping you :)

No problems, I thought I should finally venture here since I am getting addicted to Gardening stack ex.

@Lisa excellent :)

we like addicts :)

@Lisa in fact we both crave and need addicts

Anyway I caught your message about the tree-shaping tag.

All fine by me.

The tag itself I imagine will survive, but probably not on my particular question.

What is the customary way to accept or veto new tags? I noticed with high enough rep I can "accidentally" just create new ones, but perhaps there's a more collaborative way to do it?

@Lisa there is no way to accept/deny new tags systematically. what happens as far as I know are that unpopular tags are automagically pruned every 6 months or so

1:02 PM

I see.

@Lisa egregiously bad tags can be taken care of by mods and high rep users by just removing them from questions. And there is a question on meta for tag synonyms.

Presumably an unpopular tag is one without any posts - those seem to hang around at the moment.

@winwaed yes there is a minimum threshold (1 or 2 questions?) that will get pruned in the future (like i said its like 6 months or so)

Right, unless its a synonym for a popular tag, presumably

@Lisa yup. I think if they are defined as a synonym they will stay, but I don't know that for sure

1:09 PM

hello

yawn

@yoda good morning sir. Somehow we have resuscitated chat in less than 24 hours :)

aye!

Hi yoda

hi lisa

@lisa @waxeagle tags w/o any questions are pruned every 24 hours :)

except synonyms

@yoda didn't realize it was that fast.

1:17 PM

yeah, it's pretty quick

@yoda but am I correct on the low question prunings?

@waxeagle oh i just saw that... no, i don't think so. i think if there's a tag w/ even one question, it stays.

@yoda k

number of questions in a tag comes into play only for tag badges

ok

(studying for MS exam in background, pls excuse slow response times)

1:24 PM

@waxeagle for bronze/silver/gold bags to be awarded, a tag must have atleast 100 questions. That's why @bstpierre still hasn't received his bronze badge for vegetables even though he meets other criteria such as 100+ rep in tag and 20+ answers in tag

@waxeagle, @yoda Are you IT people of some description? As I understand it, most on stack exchanges have come from Stack overflow first.

@Lisa no, I'm not an IT/programmer of any kind

Well you are a gardening superstar, that's what counts ;)

I'll not ask question about MS exams then!

haha, i just get by. Most of my answers are only related to plants I have in my garden and mistakes i've made :) There are some folks here with amazing knowledge on pretty much everyhting under the sun

@Lisa I am a web programmer. Work in VB.net and SQL server

1:28 PM

@yoda So true! I feel like the stack exchange style environment is incredibly underrated if you really want to learn quickly (i.e. without in-depth reading). As a real novice (only had a backyard since January) I feel like I can learn rapidly.

@waxeagle Cool. C# myself, but not religious.

@Lisa me neither

I only use VB.net because its what they use at work. I don't have a pref

Yep

@Lisa you do web stuff or are you in applications?

@waxeagle predominantly web

@Lisa cool. Anything I've heard of?

1:33 PM

A topic I've been thinking of raising is how to find seed-saving groups for gardening beginners (like me). I'm keen to subvert business models that rely on terminator seeds and just be a seed saver for others to come to in the future... but haven't had time to find groups around who are saving seeds.

@Lisa that may be too localized. I know we are allowing stuff more localized here because of the nature of gardening, but I would ask meta

@waxeagle Probably not. Being in Australia most of the economy rides on what we export out of the ground - that is, mining. So I work on webapps or apps which help evil multinationals keep track of their oil/steel/gas/desalinated water production.

@waxeagle even keep track of chocolate production in a chocolate factory :)

@waxeagle and you? Any web apps in the public domain?

Svalbard Global Seed Vault

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault () is a secure seedbank located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen near the town of Longyearbyen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, about from the North Pole. The facility preserves a wide variety of plant seeds in an underground cavern. The seeds are duplicate samples, or "spare" copies, of seeds held in gene banks worldwide. The seed vault will provide insurance against the loss of seeds in genebanks, as well as a refuge for seeds in the case of large scale regional or global crises. The seed vault is managed under terms spelled out in a tri...

@Lisa thats pretty cool. I write an internal web app for a mid sized engineering firm in the South east us

@yoda Yeah I heard about this! A guy at a uni research facility here was delivering a public speech (through the localised TEDx talks thingy) and I was totally gripped by it!

1:37 PM

@yoda I saw an article on this a while ago. Sounds like an awesome project

Yeah, wonder how many people would've thought this was a crazy idea though...

I haven't really grasped what the Community wiki aspect of stack exchange is yet, but possibly it's a good place to build a directory of seed-saving groups, or, indeed, just seed-saving individuals.

good thing norway is damn rich that they can just pooh pooh those chaps

Something that's hard to find out there in the wild web

@Lisa Community wiki has had a bad reputations since it was introduced

originally it was intended for hard questions for which the community collaboratively came up with an answer

1:40 PM

Right. Is it seen as a content graveyard?

e.g., multiple answers on different sections rolled into one answer

@Lisa pretty much.

and also for questions of a more subjective nature (e.g., what are good books, etc)

soon people started abusing it by asking too many subjective Qs

a question like what's thebest book out there is only as good as till the next book comes out!

and what A thinks is the best need not be what B thinks is the best...

so this just started becoming a big 100+ answer dumpyard w/ constant activity and spamming, etc... it fell out of favour w/ SE once SO became really popular and established itself...

...but it is useful to know which books there are and relative merits. Of course the topic has to be constraint ("best gardening books" would be no good!)

@winwaed exactly. And some CW questions have enough agency to be kept around even if we don't like it. (See the gardening tools question)

1:45 PM

Oh, and the other reason community wiki became notorious is that the threshold for editing is absurdly low

I see. I guess there are limitations to what SO and other stack exchanges can be. Definitely an excellent way to get precise answers on well-defined questions, but bad for laundry lists and directories.

On a graduated site, you only need 100 rep to edit a CW post w/o approval whereas you need 2000 to edit normally

@Lisa exactly

SO looks pretty clean and professional these days and very focussed, right? Well, it wasn't so in its early days and I bet they were letting things slide only to build a strong user base

@Lisa this

On stack overflow it took me about a year to get to 50 rep points. It felt like forever but it was mainly because I was reading and not answering -- so many good answers already -- and didn't have the 15+ rep to even vote. Definitely worth making the effort to figure out what to do to at least get to 15! So to me 100 is a massive amount. Yes, I'm a newb :$

I can see all the old deleted questions on SO... it was chaos. It was no better than a bikeshed and merely an extension of reddit

You'd have questions like "what's the best coffee for a programmer" or "what are fun commit messages?"

"what should I put on a wedding cake for my programmer hubby?"

terrible for a programming Q&A site, yet fun to read

1:49 PM

Oh spare me

such posts are incredibly popular with the community... especially they get shared on reddit, etc and go viral.

so clamping down on such questions is as unpopular as it has ever been

but I see merit in doing so

oh, btw. Chat is a perfectly fine place to ask if you have a quick off-topic question.

@yoda true. or if you want a quick sound board on whether a question is on topic orn ot

@waxeagle i meant ask the off-topic question here!

right now, chat is not used that frequently by all users, but eventually, when it does, you can just drop in a line and see if someone knows the answer

no harm in off-topic chatting

I'm a sucker for some of these questions too but can see the value in keeping the place clean.

Too much clutter and I wouldn't come back.

@Lisa exactly...

Also, such questions have insanely high upvotes and are extremely difficult for the community to delete

29

Q: Do programmers usually possess the "wake up late, go to bed late" personality type?

This question exists because it has historical significance, but it is not considered a good, on-topic question for this site, so please do not use it as evidence that you can ask similar questions here. More info: http://stackoverflow.com/faq Inspired by this question: Are ...

polls psychology human-factors

close/reopen votes are always 5... but to delete a post, the number of votes required scales with the total rep on the question + all the answers.

some of these require 150+ votes to delete!!

not happening

1:56 PM

@yoda thats just crazy

yep.. that's why the supervote comes in handy.

@yoda amen

@Lisa Have you checked out seed savers exchange? seedsavers.org

@bstpierre No I haven't. Partly, just haven't gotten started yet with planting much (new house, so much structural stuff to do first) and partly just feel like it has to be a localised thing and a north American community is too distant to offer much practical help -- i.e. the seeds

As a matter of interest regular ppl can't import seeds into Australia (or anything that was once alive pretty much!) without declaring to customs and most likely having them confiscated or having to pay to get them treated for potential diseases (which is fair enough, but means seed saving can't really go on over the web for me).

@Lisa can you create a secret compartment in the soles of your shoes and smuggle some in? ;)

2:09 PM

@yoda For that effort I'm sure there's stuff sexier than seeds I should be smuggling :)

@yoda You do raise a funny thought for me though. You've seen that movie about the South American girl who swallows grape-sized capsules of cocaine and flies to the US... Well I could just swallow the seeds -- pretty legit really :)

@Lisa well, there you go! poop in the garden and sprout a tree!

@Lisa Lol

@Lisa I guess I was thinking more along the lines of education / starting point

Yep, noted. Thanks.

Also useful: amazon.com/Seed-Growing-Techniques-Vegetable-Gardeners/dp/… and amazon.com/Gardening-When-Counts-Growing-Mother/dp/086571553X

2:24 PM

@bstpierre ta!

Good to chat; midnight so must leave for bed; thanks all 4...

@Lisa have a good one.

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