My tomatoes are increasing in production and being anxious to devour my garden produce today I decided to make some Pico De Gallo. I found a nice recipe online that was simple and delicious. I made it all from items in my garden except the onions, garlic and I used lemon juice instead of lime juice.
I used mostly my Lemon Boy tomatoes and some cherry husky red tomatoes from my garden plus cilantro and, jalapenos. I cooked my chicken on my gas grill in on of my Corningware dishes which is way quicker than doing it in my oven in the house and doesn’t heat the house up. I have to say I will be making this Pico De Gallo a lot as it came out very well!
I must give props to where I found this delicious yet simple recipe:
Picked up a snail trap product that uses beer as bait for my garden and it immediately started working once setup. I placed this trap called Slug X from Garland in place put some beer in the traps then went inside and looked up reviews and usage. 15 minutes later I decided to go and top off the 2 slug traps and the slug trap near my tomato plants already had a slug moving up the outside of the container. I went inside to get my phone to take a picture and that fast a slug had moved inside seeking the beer.
I really hope this continues to work this well as I just put some slug poison pellets down 2 days ago to kill the slugs on the outer edges outside of my gardens. I like the non-poisonous solution less toxic and better I found these Slug X snail traps at the Habitat for Humanity store here In Sacramento.
Slug X snail trap near green leafy vegetables.Slug X snail trap near tomato plants.Inners of Slug X slug trap with first customer after just 10 or 15 minutes being in place.
So much in this little backyard space but made it my little oasis by design with the garden, pool, strips of grass and BBQ pits. Nothing like doing a little gardening and then taking a dip in the pool and doing something quick on the gas grill or slow on one of the BBQ pits. Then either way sipping a cold beverage in the shade or poolside. I also enjoy seeing some of nature like my favorite dragon fly or blue jays coming through. I miss the swam of bees my thai basil plant used to bring and I may plant another one just for the bees.
15 years with this and still going though I would love more room for a workshop and my boats plus other vehicles I would like plus storage for when going to auctions. Added the solar a couple of years ago and now have a nice energy credit so I have lowered my energy footprint and I’m somewhat self-sustainable, definitely not burdening the electric grid and producing some of my own foods.
I’m growing collard greens, okra, carrots, beets (once I get the seedlings in the ground), Swiss Chard, raspberries, grapes, white, black and Ichiban eggplants, mixed greens, lemon thyme, parsley, yellow squash, zucchini squash,sweet basil, purple basil, mad hatter peppers, Serrano peppers, habanero peppers, bell peppers, chili peppers, ancho chili peppers, Cilantro, chives, green onions, yellow onions, Mexican tarragon, chamomile, mint, sage, rosemary, yellow pear tomatoes, black plum tomatoes, Early girl tomatoes, Lemon boy tomatoes, husky red cherry tomatoes, peas, beans, dill, red ghost peppers and lunch box orange sweet peppers.
I need to make a special place for asparagus that can grow yearly and not overturn that part of the garden.
Well time for some vittles with slices of garden tomatoes and then perhaps a dip into the pool. Then will make some tea from my garden herbs later.
Lemon 🍋 Boy Hybrid tomatoes 🍅.Picked today 06/05/2021 Swiss Chard, Lemon Boy Tomatoes, one Husky Cherry Red Tomato and zucchini squash.PVC trellis for raspberry and grape vines to climb over with squash. cucumbers, Swiss chard, peppers, mixed greens in the foreground plus gourmet collards against the fence. The weekly work of picking weeds out of the vegetable gardens. This is about half of a 5 gallon bucket.Putting some liquid feed fertilizer on drip systems so it feeds my garden every time it waters. Love this setup and its been in place since I built the garden.West part of the garden. Notice I keep my herbs in the front so that I can walk out right before dinner and clip with little effort.Ichiban Eggplants growing like crazy. I haven’t planted this variety in a number of years.Parsley and Ichiban eggplant.Look close enough and you can see dozens of habanero peppers getting bigger and a lot more blooms about to turn into habanero peppers.Chili peppers getting strong.Herbs to the front! Showing Mints, purple and sweet basil, chives not see are right behind them with tarragon barely visible to the right and parsley to the left.Serrano peppers thriving next to biggies in the garden grape and squash vines.Part of the herb tea collective chamomile, Mexican tarragon and more mint. Cilantro is to the left.Early girl tomato starting to ripen.
So many Husky Red Cherry tomatoes about to get ripe!
Lemon boy tomatoes.
Lemon Boy tomato leaves,
Dragon fly companion. A dragon fly of this color dominates my backyard every year. I know it can’t be the same one but seems like it.
One of the frequent Blue Jays in the backyard.
Glimpse at the small backyard oasis.
East vegetable garden.
West vegetable garden.
Both sides of the vegetable garden.Purple basil coming up from a seed from last years plants.Letting beans run and take over Swiss chard going to seed.Sage holding its spot in the garden.Peas in their pods.
Checking my site and saw my ssl certificate had expired as I was checking some new post to the site a few moments ago so downloaded the current site from GoDaddy and moved the new ssl certificate into place. I thought the certificate was for a few years but obviously it was not.
The vegetable gardens in the backyard are producing vegetables and the rose garden some beautiful flowers. This week earlier picked some jalapenos and today some husky red cherry tomatoes and a small beef eater tomato that was barely larger than the cherry tomatoes.
I planted a “red habernero” and green bell pepper plus dill and parsley plants. I put some stakes in and started training the peas, beans and tomato plants. The tomatoes will be producing in large amounts in a week or two.
I also picked about 2 gallons of very small grasses and weeds from the garden along with their weeds.
Here’s some pictures
Newly planted green bell pepper and red habanero.Newly planted dill and parsley next to eggplant, lemon thyme and mint.West side of garden 05/22/2021.East side of garden 05/21/2021.Training bean plants with stakes and garden Velcro.Training pea plants and big beef tomato plant with stakes and garden Velcro.Trussed up husky red cherry tomato plant with stakes and garden Velcro.Holding back best possible with stakes and garden Velcro the lemon tomato plant.Front rose bushes after trimming earlier this week.Both front rose gardens.Another view of the front rose gardens.First harvested jalapenos this year on vine.Clipped jalapenos. Getting jalapenos and other veggies ready for crab boilJalapenos in crab boil.Quickly put together crab boil.
The garden saga has most spots in the garden full or ready to be filled with seedlings I currently have growing. I do want to research some herbs and spices that make great teas. I want to make sure that the herbs I plant don’t have a tendency to overrun the garden like mints do.
I added cilantro, Serrano, mad hatter and Ancho chili peppers. I love having a variety to make different dishes but also mke a nice pepper relish like my dad used to make. I added the cilantro and Serrano peppers Saturday and the mad hatter and ancho chili peppers Sunday.
Now most of my gardening will be weeding, re-positioning and maintaining of my drip system. For instance today I switched out a rotating drip sprinkler for a bubbler on a high mount and replaced a bubbler with a down spray sprinkler which I may go to more as they focus all the water down from a nice height instead of sideways with a spray.
I harvested my first tomato of the season and have some jalapeno peppers looking pretty nice that I will pick in the coming week or days.
I also put down some spray grass seeds in my grass strips in the backyard and repaired some sprinklers.
Beef Eater tomatoes reaching that ripening state earlier in the week.Lady bugs getting busy/ mating on squash plant leaf. As I went to video instead of photo they took their action underneath the leaf.This nice Big Beef Tomato was he first tomato of the season picked and eaten, it was delicious.Cilantro plant in the ground folks.Serrano peper in the ground.Wide view of west side vegetable garden Saturday.Wide view of east side vegetable garden Saturday.Sprinkler repair in the strip of gras to the east of my pool.Sprinkler repair number 2 in grass strip on east side of pool. Sprinklers on other grass strip seemed fine.Madd Hatter peppers! Had them for the first time last years and I do like them.Ancho Chili peppers behind the Serrano plant next to my greaps and raspberry.Jalapeno peppers almost ready to be picked.
Getting it done in the backyard fleshing out the vegetable garden plus fed my always yearly beautiful roses in the front yard not the normal rose food but some rose food with something in it to control the aphids. On top of that picked up a nicely priced pork shoulder so put that on my indirect smoker a bit late again but wanted to familiarize myself with the indirect grill using my oak and fruit wood plum and peach logs making some pulled pork.
Sadly pulled up my Thai Basil bush that has been going big and strong the past 3 years and attracted a swarm of bees.
Thai Basil bush all dried up no longer producing.
Moist healthy soil under old Thai Basil bush.
Another example of rich garden soitl.
Newly planted Lemon thyme in front of Georgia Collards and Swiss Chard with gourmet collards just planted today by the fence.Newly planted gourmet collards.Newly planted chamomile next to Mexican tarragon and mints.West side of vegetable garden with my grapes and raspberry trussed and getting trained this year to go up.East side of the vegetable garden.Shot down the short sidewalk in front of my house of my roses.Front yard shot of my roses with neighbors grass in the front yard.Roses and ferns front yard near garage.Roses on opposite side of porch away from my driveway.Pork shoulder with my custom rub.Starting to smoke my shoulder on offset grill.Chimney’s for lighting my wood for offset grill plus propane torch and fire poker.Chimney’s all lit with oak and plum wood.
I added some more plants into the 2021 vegetable garden today. I added baby collard green, swiss chard and mixed greens mesclun seedlings along with starters bought from a garden nursery consisting of egg plants, cucumbers, relleno chili peppers, big bertha bell peppers, black plum tomatoes, yellow pear tomatoes I always plant and some sweet yellow onions I normally stay away from.
Collard green seed experiment. The pack of $4.54 gourmet collard green seeds not growing at the same fast rate as the $1.99 pack of Georgia collard greens.All the vegetables I planned on planting and did plant today.Plants moved near garden for planting.West side of vegetable garden planted with tested drip system.Row of swiss chard and collard greens, mesclun mixed greens next to row of squash, cucumbers and egg plants.Row with chives, yellow onions and behind that row of peppers, relleno chili, big bertha bell, habanero and jalapeno.Yellow pear tomato planted today with sage and mint in background.Black plum tomato plant with basil and cherry tomato plant in background.East side of vegetable garden.
I put in some peas and beans into the garden this evening I had started from seeds. Interestingly the mustard greens and okra seeds I started at the same time showed no signs of budding yet. I have some collard greens, mesclun greens mixture and more swiss chard and green onions, plus some peppers I am also waiting to pop up I started in other pots as seedlings after I started these. The collards, mixed mesclun greens and swiss chard seem to be budding and will go into the ground soon.
Today I lost the XCP-ng networking to 3 XCP-ng hosts in a pool of 4 hosts. I logged in to check XCP-ng Center from a Windows workstation and couldn’t connect to the pool. I logged into the master of the pool with putty and had no issues. Yet when I ran commands against the pool it would say “lost connection to the server”. The logs on that workstation from XCP-ng Center said “The server that you are talking to is a slave” during that time period.
I thought maybe this was an issue with XCP-ng center and went to a laptop I had and it exhibited the same issues even after removing the configuration and trying to import the server. Then just as on the workstation it would note this server belongs to a pool would you like to import the pool master, I said yes and it wouldn’t import the pool or the system thus not completing the operation.
I performed a xe-toolstack-restart and still had the same issues. Finally logged into the physical console and all of the network information was gone from the console, yet I was still in the system via ssh with no issue, connected and able to perform commands.
This whole time all of my VM’s on this system, the pool master was up and working just fine. The other two systems didn’t have VM’s on them at this time as I was transitioning away from them.
On the physical console I went into the “Local Command Shell” and ifconfig showed all my physical interfaces and I could ping out on any of them. After a reboot I could still ssh into the system but still no management interfaces. I tried several times performing xe-toolstack-restart that’s when I started seeing physical interfaces in the local shell disappear. After trying xe-toolstack-restart a few times only my local loopback was left!
Now of course my VM’s on this pool master system are down now and not operating.
Finally on the one XCP-ng host that was still up I decided to login via ssh and made that the pool master with “xe -pool-emergency-transition-to-master” and that worked. I could now connect to the pool with the one host in it with XCP-ng Center.
Then I wanted to get the VM’s up on the new pool master and did a “xe host-list” “vm-list resident-on=<UUID-pool-master>” then “xe vm-reset-powerstate resident-on=<UUID-pool-master>” and I could now see the VM’s I wanted to start on the new pool master but couldn’t because the one host system left operating with networking was in maintenance mode.
I finally re-installed the original master with an XCp-ng 8.1 iso and then got the networking back and had it rejoin the pool as a slave and everything is starting to look good again and the new pool master is out of maintenance mode. I started my VM’s and they are working. I am concerned that I lost the network configuration on 3 of my 4 XCP-ng hosts though.
The only thing I can think of is that about a week and half ago I transitioned from an older pool master to a new pool master using this command “xe pool-designate-new-master host-uuid =<host-uuid>” then since I was transitioning to new more updated hardware powered down 2 hosts leaving the 2 hosts I wanted to keep. I was planning to remove the old hosts from the pool this weekend. These were my only changes and there were no issues I observed until this morning. These servers have been the part of the same pool for months now.
The good thing is that once I decided to just re-install the former XCP-ng pool master, recreate the networking (thank goodness I didn’t have complex networking or VLAN scheme) everything worked well. Having the storage for my virtual systems on FreeNAS storage utilizing ZFS gives you great reliability.
Earlier this week my dual 10GBE Intel 10 Gigabit XF SR Server Adapter went dead on my Windows workstation which has made it really a strange week in my computer lab. Thank goodness I had a spare Intel 10 Gigabit XF SR Server Adapter and I was able to recover my virtual environment!
