I didn’t want a long smoke today so I thought for a while about what ingredients I had that would make something fast and easy then decided on meatloaf. I didn’t want to deal with leftovers and get up early due to planning on working on projects late into the nights this weekend. I had bought ground beef planning on burgers but wanted something more to go along with vegetables.
Since I don’t have oats and wanted to use them instead of breadcrumbs I used some Quaker Instant oat meal (an opportunity to use an item that will help me clear space in my kitchen pantry) with strawberry flavors. It was delicious even with that hint of strawberry flavor from the instant oatmeal. This will now be a go to for me in my bag of BBQ recipes.
Earlier this week I clipped my rose bushes and did some weeding in the front yard and the flowers are looking spiffy, plus my vegetable garden is producing! I have a bunch of “Lemon Boy tomatoes” “Red Cherry Husky tomatoes”, “Beef Eater tomatoes”, zucchini squash and Ichiban eggplants.
I roasted the eggplants and some tomatoes on the gas grill to go with Ahi Tuna and “skirt steak”. One night and then for lunch another Ahi Tuna steak.Then made some Pico De Gallo from some of the tomatoes.
I had a storage alarm on my storage array start screaming today because it lost power to one of its redundant power supplies plus had slight temperature high reading on CPU #1. I found out that the power supply without any power was going to one of my UPS’ I utilize for my workstations and not my servers so switched that to the proper UPS and that worked.
That power supply was not connected to the protected battery side of that UPS outlets. I will look at why the UPS switched modes on me later but since its only for workstations and nothing else was plugged into that unprotected side of the UPS.
I decided to take the storage arrays down and blow the dust out of them since they have had a very long up time of several months. I had one of the fiber cables hang up and I had to get a small screwdriver to disconnect it, then putting them back in I had to realign the rails of my rack to make them go back in and not knock the cove back of my main storage chassis and cause an intrusion alert.
I found it was really good to login on IPMI on my Supermicro motherboard to view the sensor data before and after cleaning up my chassis. Just looking now there’s a wide disparity between my CPU #1 and #2 temperatures so I will plan a maintenance window and make sure that the heat sinks are seated properly and reapply heat sink compound. I was able to observe the fans look fine and blew the fins of my heat sinks out so the airflow looks fine.
Once the storage array came back up I checked the connections were on the proper networks and XCP-ng could see the paths to my storage and brought my VM’s back up as you can see since this site is back up. My music stream stayed up since the streaming server and the relay server are 2 separate physical servers. That’s all for tonight!
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.
