The garden is starting to produce more than just the dominant swiss chard now, with some beans, chives, rosemary plus the swiss chard paired with medium rare trip tip that pulled apart with fingers. Sautéed the swiss char with the rosemary, basil, chives with a touch of brown sugar since I didn’t have any oyster sauce and some garlic in my wok then my friend she came up with the idea to grill the green beans on grill with garlic, salt and olive oil. All turned out excellent didn’t get finishing shots since the wine was flowing and started making plates and eating right away.
Well the 2016 garden is off to a very nice start. Already I have been feasting on the swiss chards that are replants from last year. As the swiss chard replants from last year go to seed they will be replaced with already steadily growing new swiss chard I planted this year and I will replace the older swiss chard with some peas I have growing already in pots.
This yeah I have swiss chard, collard greens, several type/colors bell peppers, different basil varieties, several tomato varieties, sweet red onions, yellows onions, chives, habanera peppers, jalapeño peppers, bush and gourmet beans, mesclun salad mix which consists different lettuce and green leafy vegetables for salads, mustard greens, stevia, cucumbers, squash, peas and beets. I’m sure I forgot some items but that’s most of what is planted.
I was especially attentive this year to getting the weeds out of the garden early this year and properly fertilizing the garden and it seems to be paying off. My first squash to pick should even be ready this week already with cucumbers, tomatoes, basil, stevia and beans, not far behind.
These are pictures that show what it’s all about, meals and meal prep of items from garden:
Updated the WordPress themes to the latest today in coordination with also updating my separate music streamingserver and web server Operating Systems. I think some more tinkering is forthcoming but for now my Windows music streaming server, LinuxWeb Server and WordPress which resides on my Linux Web Server are updated along with my Windows 10 and Centos 7 workstations.
Over the course of last night and today I upgraded my FreeNAS from 9.3 Stable to 9.10 Stable versions via the Web interface.
I first verified that my backup FreeNAS disk array was free of virtual systems and updated that system.
Actually since I keep my backup disk array off due to power usage concerns (costs a lot) I first had to reintroduce the iSCSI storage to the Xenserver environment by “forgetting” and then reading as new storage and “reattaching” to the luns.
I then migrated my Xenserver virtual systems disks to the newly updated FreeNAS system.
After migrating the VM’s off my main disk array I then updated that version of FreeNAS to 9.10
Now all my virtual systems are being migrated back to my main storage disk array and I will be able to turn off my backup storage array for energy savings until my next planned upgrade coming in the next few months!
Well this year’s vegetable garden is ready for business and as of now looks pretty good with some starter vegetables some new and some transplants from last year. The transplants from last year are the Swiss chard and chives, rosemary and sage. My new plants are my basil, bell peppers various colors, habanero peppers, edamame beans, golden tomatoes, beefeater tomatoes, stevia, crookneck squash, cucumbers. These will kick start things but more to come via seeds and greenhouse plants.
The chore this year as mentioned in earlier post was getting rid of the mint roots but I dug most out but had to go deep and dissemble my garden paver making up my raised garden to get the mint roots growing between the pavers. I also placed heavy duty weed block between pavers and dirt to replace what I had done when initially building the raised garden 8 years ago which will keep the mint and roots from growing between pavers.
I also had to replace some parts of my drip system and rearrange the watering pattern so it can grow as I add more plants. This year on the eats side of the garden I also laid my rows out east to west instead of north to south as I normally do and did on the west side of the garden. The lay out of the garden should help when it comes time to tend and harvest the garden.
I still have some work to do as far as cleaning the concrete and moving a few other things in the backyard but the garden is ready to rock!
Here is the progress via pictures:
This is my initial foray with the rototiller and removal of some vegetables I eventually transplanted back in garden:
This is my continued deconstruction of pavers to get to mint roots:
Placing weed block behind pavers:
After more rototiller action introducing new mulch and top soil:
Made rows, placed and repaired drip system, added vegetables:
Rewarded myself with tri-tip and cooked whole chicken for the week on Trager Grill I picked up in November:
Yes for all you IT folks this is the original way to perform a “root cause analysis” in a real garden pulling out handfuls of real roots that are causing me grief! l started on the garden over the weekend pulling some weeds out of both sides of the garden. Monday I tinkered with the rototiller to get it running, cleaning the already hugely modified carburetor in really a very bizarre way, by pouring carburetor cleaner into the air hole for a spell and then turning it over to pour the cleaner out. Tonight I took out some swiss chard, chives, and celery I will replant then rototilled the east side of my garden and picked out a couple of buckets of mostly mint roots!
These mints have been growing like crazy the past few years and so I went down a foot or more to go get as much of these roots as possible. I also took out the bricks from the front of my raised garden I built after piling the dirt up in the center of the garden to get the roots of the mint that were growing through and under the bricks! I’m sure I didn’t get all the roots and seeds but I really took a great deal out and the small roots left should be easier to pull out if they start up again.
This upcoming weekend the larger part of the garden will get the rototiller action and the mint roots pulled out though there’s less mint on that side and not as deeply rooted. Then its time to, make some rows, rerun the drip lines and plant my vegetables and seeds for the spring.
These are this years before pictures of my vegetable garden for 2016:
This is after my rototiller action on the east part of the veggie garden:
This is the hands and knees (note the blue knee pads) rake and shovel action getting to the root of the problem:
My UPS’s I updated and put into working order a couple of weekends ago are operating just fine though I may get one more just to spread the load out a bit better.
I have 2 Liebert GXT2-1500rt120 and 1 GXT2-1000 each with and expansion battery pack
I have no reason why this happened but after installing a slew of updates on my Centos 7 Web Server some of the firewall settings I had allowing forwarding of ports for my web server were closed. For some reason my default routes were pointing to the wrong network interfaces after the reboot as well. I didn’t notice sine I had turned off my audible notifications plus my workstations in my office displayed my sites just fine.
When I went for my workout at the gym today I noticed my stream was working from my music server but I couldn’t get my site up though to see what was coming up next on my station. Then O looked at my text messages and saw the notice that http was down.
When home from the gym checked my httpd process that was up then made sure my router was forwarding and then checked my firewall and http/https were not open! Fixed that restarted httpd and still no love for my web site. rechecked everything and then peeked at the routing table and the deafult route was pointing at the wrong interface so I fixed that in the script files taking default route definition out of the secondary interface and restarted network then httpd and presto everything works!
Never had a patch update no matter how big do that but stuff happens, plus I did see a few inconsistencies in hosts file. All working now and back to the rest of my Saturday!
I cleaned up the front yard and did some work in the backyard and the vegetable gardens in the backyard as well. I’m getting ready for the late season for when it starts to cool a bit and some vegetables grow better in the Sacramento/San Joaquin valley Here is some of what is going on in the vegetable garden at this time
Here is some purple okra, Collard greens, purple basil, with sweet basil in view as well:
Here are some peppers with stevia in the foreground:
Here’s some jalepaeno peppers going strong:
In the background is a tomato plant I had to rescue and stake up today plus some more stevia and mint in the foreground:
Here’s a top and bottom shot of my eggplants:
Some chives:
Some new straight neck squash after picking quite a few this week:
Overall of the west side of the vegetable garden with mint plants providing protection in the front concealing some of the other vegetables:
Just a clump of beef eater tomatoes, chives, mint, basil and yellow pear tomatoes:
More stevia:
East side of the garden with some new seeds I planted to get a start in planted pots first and then I will transplant them into the garden. Note the swiss chard standing strong that I replanted from last year.
I updated the WordPress blog software after I took some manual backups of the database. Everything went fine but of course I had to go in and manually put back in some customization’s I have made for the sites that the theme updates erased but that went smoothly.
I spread out my virtual machines more evenly in my XenServer environment and reset the HA settings on my XenServer pool. I had a couple of months ago replaced a motherboard that had failed on one of my XenServers and decided to double the RAM from a system I wasn’t using. That system kept randomly restarting as I increased the load. Finally earlier this week I ran memory check from memtest.org and received a flood of errors deep into the test (about 60% in).
I took the memory of the same speed but a different manufacture out of my XenServer system I had repaired then reran the memory test and everything was fine. This memory I took out ran the memory test fine in the other system as well but together the two memory modules from different manufactures didn’t perform together well. Had this went well I would have updated the other system to this memory level as well.
Now my environment is purring along and seeming very stable.
