How did these tomatoes end up costing so much?  Enough to give me telekinesis!  (AI-generated)

Tariffs have been in the news a lot lately. As a home gardener, how much will it impact you?

Right now you probably won’t see much of a difference. Most seeds, cuttings, pots, soil mixes, and fertilizers for the 2025 spring season were already ordered before tariffs were enacted. You might see higher prices on soil mixes after your first frost-free date, so if you’re watching your budget it could make sense to stock up now.

If tariffs continue through the summer, expect price increases on fall offerings like bulbs, chrysanthemums, and cool-season vegetables.

If they’re still around by winter, many 2026 seed orders will be affected, and you’ll likely see noticeable price jumps on spring vegetable starts, ornamentals, and the supplies used to grow them.

Why will our prices go up if tariffs are imposed on other countries?

Well, there’s no guarantee that they will — but it’s very likely. Basically, the U.S. is charging other countries more money to bring their goods into the country. To maintain their profit margins, those suppliers will often raise their prices to offset the tariffs.

That means a U.S. distributor or grower will now be paying more than they used to for the same materials — at least until a less expensive alternative is found. Since they also need to make a profit, they’ll likely raise their prices as well.

Essentially, that cost increase gets passed along the entire supply chain — all the way to the end: you.

So what exactly comes from other countries?

The United States imports more than 50% of its seeds from other countries.  If tariffs persist, we may see higher prices and fewer variety options.

Where do most US sellers source their seed stock?

What’s still grown domestically?

• Open pollinated heirlooms from small farms and domestic seed savers
• Most corn seed
• Some beans, peas, and squash
• Many native plant seeds

These may become more prominent in future seasons if import prices continue to rise.

What else should you know?

While gardening for food may go up in price because of seed and supply costs, ornamentals from certain nurseries may not be hit as hard. Some nurseries source their stock from wholesalers who import materials from the countries listed above, but others — especially smaller mail-order nurseries — propagate plants directly from their own gardens. That means they might collect seed, take cuttings, divide plants, etc., so those particular plants wouldn’t be subject to tariffs.

That said, they’ll still be affected by rising prices on pots, fertilizers, and soil mixes.  Less directly, over time, costs for things like irrigation and greenhouse supplies, tools, lighting, vehicle repairs, etc. will also indirectly increase the cost of raising plants.

There’s one last caveat: the economy is complicated. The actual impact of tariffs could shift depending on how the U.S. dollar performs against foreign currencies. If the dollar strengthens, tariffs may not increase prices much. But if it weakens, the added cost could be even more significant.

I’ve had some free time lately and have been spending it working on hort.net. Some of the pages still had design elements from 2000 (tables galore!) that I’ve been converting to a more responsive layout. The design is still, well, what it is (I’m not a graphic designer), but the tables and colored pixels stretched to all different sizes are mostly gone. I did uncover other weirdnesses, but more on that later.

The site leverages mod_perl on Rocky 9 heavily and the logs would occasionally say something like

[Sun Sep 15 05:55:53.652955 2024] [core:notice] [pid 1475:tid 1475] AH00051: child pid 8943 exit signal Segmentation fault (11), possible coredump in /tmp

Of course, there weren’t any core dumps to look at, and I never really saw the logs in time to do anything about it anyhow. Today, I decided to change that.

The first thing to do was allow core dumps in systemd, so I created /etc/systemd/system/httpd.service.d/91-core.conf:

[Service]
LimitCORE=infinity

CoreDumpDirectory /var/crash/httpd

mkdir /var/crash/httpd
chown apache.apache /var/crash/httpd
systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl restart httpd

I arbitrarily decided that I only needed the last twenty core dumps, but I also knew that I needed to get a notification any time a core dump was generated. This would give me a sense of frequency, a time stamp outside of the system to use when looking at logs, and an automated cleanup process.

inotify seemed like a great tool for this. It watches for filesystem events in a given directory, so I wrote a script that used it for my earlier plan.

First, I installed inotify-tools:

dnf -y install inotify-tools

#!/bin/bash

# the directory to monitor
WATCH_DIR="/var/crash/httpd/"
# who to notify (this isn't the real address)
EMAIL="devnull@mallorn.com"

inotifywait -m -e create "$WATCH_DIR" | while read path action file; do
if [[ "$file" == core* ]]; then
   # Send an email notification
   echo "A new core dump was created on `hostname`: $file in $path" | mail -s "Core Dump Notification" "$EMAIL"
   find $WATCH_DIR -type f -maxdepth 1 | sed -e '1,20d' | tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 rm -f
fi
done

And then I ran the script:

nohup ~root/watchforcoredumps > /dev/null

What do you need to change if you’re running this script on your own site? Change WATCH_DIR and EMAIL to what you need for your site. If you want more than twenty files, change the 20 in ‘1,20d’ to however many you want to keep. If you want 50, make it ‘1,50d’.

And finally, one last comment about the deletion line.

You don’t know what filename you’ll end up with for your core dump, or if you have non-core files (like a file upload site) you don’t know what characters will be in the filename. What if there’s a semi-colon in the filename? An exclamation point? Generally speaking you’re probably safe from ne’er-do-wells, but the best way to protect against command injections via filenames is to remove the newlines. If there’s no newline, no command can be run.

So how do you get rid of newlines?

We take the output of our find command that’s piped into sed and run it through tr:

tr '\n' '\0' | xargs -0 [command]

That takes every linefeed and makes it a NULL character. xargs has a -0 argument that uses NULL characters as the end of the string, helping to prevent exploits due to weird character trickery.

Now I’ve delayed things long enough, and I probably need to start loading up these dumps with gdb. That’s not going to be nearly as fun…

I’ve had people ask me how to schedule a reboot of their system via puppet if a kernel upgrade was installed. I like to use the ‘at’ command

class yoursite::common::rebootforkernelchange {

   exec {'schedule-kernel-reboot':
      command => '/bin/echo "/usr/sbin/reboot" | at -m 4:00',
      path => '/usr/bin:/bin',
      unless => ['test `atq | wc -l` != 0', 'test `uname -r` = `rpm -q kernel --queryformat "%{RPMTAG_BUILDTIME} %{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}\n" | sort -nr | cut -d" " -f 2 | head -1`']
   }
}

This compares the current kernel against the latest built kernel that is installed, and if they don’t match it sets an at job to reboot the system at 4am.

If you want to check the latest installed kernel instead of the latest built kernel, change RPMTAG_BUILDTIME to RPMTAG_INSTALLTIME.

It’s important to know when frost could damage your plants. Although frost may come later than the first frost date or end sooner than the last frost date, this table will give you a good guideline to help plan your garden.

If you don’t know what hardiness zone you are in, you can visit the USDA Web site and enter your zip code to find out.