Below I have some DIY trellis pictures I am trying out to grow my vegetables vertical this year with several varieties. I want some sturdy trellises that will fit the dimensions of my garden so DIY is the key. Most trellises from the stores have cheap connections and aren’t the correct dimensions nor are they adjustable like I intend my trellises to be. plus cost a lot more than they are worth.
I think I will go with four 5 foot 3/4/ inch PVC braced at the top with 1/2″ PVC and plastic stakes with flexible metal core at 9″intervals for my tomatoes. I played with drilling in the PVC pipes and threading the flexible plastic stakes with the metal core through the PVC pipes and then tying them off with Velcro. I will not be drilling through the PVC using that technique it took too long and the PVC chipped off or broke a time or two.
Will go with this for my tomato plants at 9″ steps.. 3/4″ PVC, plastic stakes with flexible metal core tied with tie wraps.Will use this style for tomatoes this year 3/4″ 5′ high, connected at the top but using 1/2″ PVC at the top so I can breakdown easily.Was going to go simple with 3 /3/4″ 5′ long. Without braces the tops come in on each other. The 4 post 5′ braced trellises I will go with are in the back ground.3/4″ PVC with the flexible plastic stakes and flexible metal core drilled through the pvc pipe and tied with garden Velcro 9″ apart. Thinking o using this style for squash, cucumbers or maybe peas would me the best choice.
On the larger west part of my garden, I got the whole garden foundation set finally. After nearly emulsifying the soil, roots, and remaining plants that I didn’t transplant I made rows and redid the drip system Sunday.
I ended up making 12 inch rows with 10 inches between the rows to get my cultivator through later when I want to get weeds easily and also so I can service the crops and remove weeds from on top of the rows with ease.
This year I wanted to try some ¼” soaker hoses instead of my typical drip fittings with sprayers and bubblers. I ended up running them both in parallel with a water faucet splitter to go back and forth and test with. Should this work, I will use on the other side of the garden as well. The goal is to use less water and let the water soak in the soil and hope the roots go deeper to get the water. So far it seems the soaker puts a lot of pressure on the system and comes out way too slowly. I switched over to my old system for the night and foreseeable future until I can test some more.
I ended planting dill, yellow bell peppers, poblano peppers, jalapeno peppers, Ichiban eggplants, summer squash, black beauty squash, 2x yellow pear tomato plants, 2x red cherry tomato plants, celebrity tomato plant, minefield tomatoes, Bok hoi, more Swiss chard, mixed salad greens, more sage, and bush beans
I also started from seed, mustard greens, spinach mustard greens, beets, turnips, burgundy gush beans, bush beans, peas, potatoes, and red onions. I think I missed some plants and seeds that I planted but will list them later.
I still have some areas to fill in and have some more tomato plants from a discount six pack. That’s way too many tomatoes but will find a way to utilize them.
For now, I will turn my attention to cleanup and building some DIY trellises to grow my squash and cucumbers vertically this year to save space in the garden. I will use pvc pipe and fittings that I already have plus another 10 feet I got from the store to cut up. I did some vertical gardening last year. It’s going to get interesting
I even used my GoPro camera to show some footage of making my rows. Boring I know but I must use that equipment sometime since I haven’t been fishing. I have been waiting to finish this post until it finished joining the various video chapters into one video but it’s taking too long and I’m going to bed.
The rows are made 12 inches wide and 10 inches in between for my cultivator to remove weeds in the future.Laying out plants and seeds prior to planting for planning purposes.Faucet splitter I’m using to test out 1/4″ soaker hoses and my normal drip layout.Everything laid out for now.The other side of the garden currently with my replants not recovered yet.
This is the weekend to get this vegetable garden in full gear. Check out the changes as I get the garden set. I chopped up the roots pulled some weeds and the pesky mint plants and roots. I then threw some mulch into the mix with the rototiller. I also got a chance to use my new electric cordless 80v Kobalt cultivator that I just picked up.
I took the 5HP Intek Crafstman rototiller down 2 feet to turnover the soil and chop things up going over the garden twice, then a 3rd and 4th time to get the mulch mixed in.
Next to get the rows in and this year I will try out some 1/4″ soaker hoses on my drip system to see if they can lay between the rows and still effectively water the plants. I’m thinking this will get the roots to go deeper and help me use less water as well.Many plants will do well without getting the leaves wet constantly I believe. I tried this years ago at this house and about 15 – 25 years ago at my other house I used a 3/4″ soaker hose connected to my hose pipe controlled by a mechanical timer.
I updated my dhoytt.com Linux web server, my W2019 Data Center music streaming server, my Linux IceCast and ShoutCast streaming servers with the latest security patches. I also updated several other backgrounds servers.
I also updated the CMS WordPress to the latest version along with the plugins and themes.
Contending with rototiller issues not off to a smooth start with the vegetable garden so went with a different approach this year. The rototiller stalled on the east part of the garden last week so after the small engine came by again I finished turning over the dirt in that part of the garden.
I then made some rough rows moved some transplants from the west part of the vegetable garden to the east. I set my drip system back up and we will see how my transplants do! I have had good results with transplants in the past as long as there’s green in the stem and roots.
The transplants were jalapeno, poblano, chili relleno, habanero, bell peppers. I also transplanted collard greens and Swiss chard.
Earlier I also trimmed up the front flower gardens so they will bloom big very soon.
I have a bunch of seedlings yet to plant so stay tuned.
Bizarre looking start to this years vegetable garden. Trimmed up front yard.Trimmed flowers to prep for major blooming.
Finally on the last day of the year I migrated my Zoneminder CCTV/Plex physical server to Rocky Linux from CentOS 8 using the script from Rocky Linux https://docs.rockylinux.org/guides/migrate2rocky/ . Came back from a trip to Costco saw a reference to Linux and ding hey I still need to migrate away from Centos 8 since it will no longer be supported after today. I checked from my Rocky Linux VM that Zoneminder was in the Rocky Linux repos, then did my last update at Centos 8 rebooted and started my Rocky Linux migration after downloading the files from the Rocky Linux GIT repositories.
I have been using Rocky Linux for a few months on one of my VM’s and it seems to be keeping pace with the updates and kernel versions out there. I don’t have a VM testing out Almalinux https://almalinux.org/ yet but it seems solid from everything I have seen and I may start using that as another long term stable CentOS 8 alternative as well.
I currently am running Fedora 35 the latest version on my physical Linux workstation and will switch to Ubuntu on my older physical Linux workstation eventually to test out a few things. I have Windows 10 Workstation version on my other main physical workstation. I’ll switch my prior physical Windows 10 server over to gaming uses with a couple of other physical workstations I have but will make one a Linux gaming station as well.
My servers are running various flavors of Red Hat from CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 8.5, except one running Windows Datacenter 2019 on. I have CentOS Stream 8, different versions of Fedora and Rocky Linux in my XCP-ng virtual environment. I will reintroduce a VMWare ESXi server on one of my C7000 blade servers eventually once I have the time. I like the XCP-ng for most of my virtual systems as I can do my hardware migrations and server migrations without added costs of licenses or scripts unless I feel like paying. Then of course I’m running FreeNAS on my NAS of FreeBSD origins and will eventually move to TrueNAS Core still consisting of FreeBSD. May test out TrueNAS Scale at a later time which has Debian as the base OS.
That is an overall of OS’ in my environment with Rocky Linux forecast as my main stable OS from this point into the future. My Plex and Zoneminder came up just fine so now it’s on to the next project!
Script checks your current repos, then packages plus runs updates all going quite smoothly (skipped to the end to miss all packages being updated and reinstalled) so you can see how painless the process is from a pure OS perspective absent of proprietary applications and other down time considerations of course.:
migrate2rocky - Begin logging at Fri 31 Dec 2021 02:16:31 PM PST.
Removing dnf cache
Preparing to migrate CentOS Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 8.
Determining repository names for CentOS Linux 8.....
Found the following repositories which map from CentOS Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 8:
CentOS Linux 8 Rocky Linux 8
appstream appstream
baseos baseos
extras extras
Getting system package names for CentOS Linux 8..........
Found the following system packages which map from CentOS Linux 8 to Rocky Linux 8:
CentOS Linux 8 Rocky Linux 8
centos-logos-ipa rocky-logos-ipa
centos-backgrounds rocky-backgrounds
centos-gpg-keys rocky-gpg-keys
centos-logos rocky-logos
centos-indexhtml rocky-indexhtml
centos-linux-release rocky-release
centos-logos-httpd rocky-logos-httpd
centos-linux-repos rocky-repos
Getting list of installed system packages.
We will replace the following CentOS Linux 8 packages with their Rocky Linux 8 equivalents
Packages to be Removed Packages to be Installed
centos-backgrounds rocky-backgrounds
centos-gpg-keys rocky-gpg-keys
centos-logos rocky-logos
centos-indexhtml rocky-indexhtml
centos-linux-release rocky-release
centos-logos-httpd rocky-logos-httpd
centos-linux-repos rocky-repos
In addition to the above the following system packages will be removed:
centos-linux-release
centos-linux-release
Getting a list of enabled modules for the system repositories.
Excluding modules:
libselinux-python:2.8
Found the following modules to re-enable at completion:
container-tools:rhel8
httpd:2.4
javapackages-runtime:201801
llvm-toolset:rhel8
mariadb:10.3
nginx:1.14
perl-DBD-MySQL:4.046
perl-DBD-SQLite:1.58
perl-DBI:1.641
perl-IO-Socket-SSL:2.066
perl-libwww-perl:6.34
perl:5.26
php:7.2
python36:3.6
satellite-5-client:1.0
virt:rhel
Running dnf update before we attempt the migration.
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:49 ago on Fri Dec 31 14:16:53 2021.
Dependencies resolved.
Nothing to do.
Complete!
Added rockyappstream repo from https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/AppStream/x86_64/os/
Added rockybaseos repo from https://dl.rockylinux.org/pub/rocky/8/BaseOS/x86_64/os/
rockyappstream 19 MB/s | 8.7 MB 00:00
:
Complete!
Subscription Manager found on system.
If you're converting from a subscription-managed distribution such as RHEL then
you may no longer need subscription-manager or dnf-plugin-subscription-manager.
While it won't hurt anything to have it on your system you may be able to safely
remove it with:
"dnf remove subscription-manager dnf-plugin-subscription-manager".
Take care that it doesn't remove something that you want to keep.
The subscription-manager dnf plugin may be enabled for the benefit of
Subscription Management. If no longer desired, you can use
"subscription-manager config --rhsm.auto_enable_yum_plugins=0" to block this
behavior.
Some Subscription Manager certificates were restored to /etc/rhsm/ca after
migration so that the subscription-manager command will continue to work:
redhat-entitlement-authority.pem
redhat-uep.pem
If you no longer need to use the subscription-manager command then you may
safely remove these files.
Done, please reboot your system.
A log of this installation can be found at /var/log/migrate2rocky.log
I wanted something for the cold weather that had that comfort food vibe Saturday so picked up a chuck roast and was planning on doing this in a slow cooker yesterday but did too much running around and ran out of time. I stayed up too late last night working on some systems that didn’t affect what I put out on the internet, thus slept in this morning.
Since I still needed some ingredients and I started cooking later than I wanted I went with the dutch oven instead of the crockpot slow cooker. Turned out just fine as I seared the chuck roast, browned the onions, garlic and got my rosemary, cilantro ,in place of fresh thyme, from my garden. Then put that along with the chuck roast in the oven for a couple of hours and then put in some potatoes, celery and carrots for the next 1.5 hours and after checking decided to let go another half hour.
The pot roast turned out nice and delicious! I put some pictures of my new thing now which is making bread in my new breadmaker down below as well!
Looking for a nice small brisket to smoke and instead found some short back beef ribs and some plate beef ribs. I made my custom beef rib rub with a new twist, put that on the ribs and decided to start smoking them on my Traeger in the early morning at 2 am so that I would not be into the evening waiting for them to get ready.
The ribs came out excellent and were ready a little before noon, but I was not so let them sit staying warm on the smoker a bit too long without lowering the temperature below 225. A little overdone but still fall off the bone delicious! Had sides of corn on the cob, asparagus, and made a small batch of potato salad.
Showing my prep, making fresh batch of beef rub, removing membrane,seasoning the ribs.
I created a new Linux web server and moved over to it so that I could use the latest versions of applications like PHP, MariaDB, Apache etc. without over modifying my source repositories for updates. I went from Centos 7 to Fedora 34. I was going to move to Centos 8 last year until they forked to Centos Stream 8.0. I figured if I was going to be out ahead of RHEL 8 may as go all the way with Fedora. This will also help me stay current by prompting me to update my Webserver more often. This is full circle from when I didn’t want to update the Webserver so often, but security and performance is much better with updated OS and applications.
I ran into your typical needs to setup Selinux policies, open and close appropriate ports, make sure that networking to the proper domains was set, transfer over domain certificates etc. I swapped over a bit early actually because in syncing the database from my old system to my new system I had to constantly edit the database on the new system and my WordPress CMS sites before proceeding on to make changes. WordPress holds many changes in the databases as well, so targeted syncs were a pain and so after a certain point it was way too much work or go with a more fruitful approach of creating another isolated vlan at this point.
I also had to get my ftp setup correctly I use locally as it was working but with a great deal of hesitation pausing at specifying the password but then a minute or two later successfully resolving. Seemed to be a slow network resolution issue so I made sure my /etc/resolv.conf was updated and even made entries for local systems that feed my webserver in /etc/hosts but still the slow performance. Then in comparing settings in /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf between old and new systems I noticed that the “Listen” parameter was off so that defaulted to IPv6. I enabled the “Listen” directive and then vsftp wouldn’t restart saying it had to run two instances of vsftp for IPv4 and IPv6. Going back into /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf I commented out the IPv6 setting and vsftp restarted and vsftp is fast as ever now. I use VSFTP to load updates to my WordPress so that was critical to get working with ultimate performance.
listen=YES
#
# This directive enables listening on IPv6 sockets. By default, listening
# on the IPv6 "any" address (::) will accept connections from both IPv6
# and IPv4 clients. It is not necessary to listen on *both* IPv4 and IPv6
# sockets. If you want that (perhaps because you want to listen on specific
# addresses) then you must run two copies of vsftpd with two configuration
# files.
# Make sure, that one of the listen options is commented !!
#listen_ipv6=YES
pam_service_name=vsftpd
This past week I had some good food adventures making Ahi tuna paired with my garden vegetables plus sticky rice and then made some chili a couple of days later also using garden vegetables. The tuna dish I kept simple with the fillets and used this for my base recipe: https://www.bowlofdelicious.com/six-minute-seared-ahi-tuna-steaks/ . The tuna turned out excellent with eggplant, green beans, tomatoes, jalapenos and okra from my garden brushed with olive oil then dusted with salt, pepper, garlic, fresh basil and rosemary on both sides. The okra I will never do like that again but the other vegetables turned out delicious. I used the sauce to marinate the tuna and made another batch for dipping, it was so good!
Next I took a chuck roast and placed it in brine overnight and cooked it nice and slow on my Traeger grill. The chuck roast came out with the right tenderness and flavor but when I put it back in it’s au jus which I didn’t taste beforehand it became too salty. I made a few side dishes the past days like tacos and breakfast dishes as I always do when I smoke meats but wanted to do something wholesale to be able to use this chuck roast and diffuse the salt and decided to make some chili. I used this recipe as the base: https://www.cookingclassy.com/slow-cooker-chili/ leaving out the salt and beef broth so I could soak the salt out of the chuck roast meat. I also added some more beef cut into taco meat sized chunks not totally ground and that worked out well. I used tomatoes from my garden plus come canned diced tomatoes. I put a habanero pepper from my garden to provide some kick!
I had a couple of spoons of the chili to test out while watching the Dodgers game and it was so delicious I decided to have a couple of small bowls late after the Dodgers beat the Braves and took first place from the SF Giants who lost to the Brewers.
The chili is so good but now I have to stay up late, wait for it to cool and put in the refrigerator where I already cleared space. The overnight process that will blend all the flavors and spices together will be awesome. The saltiness is gone from the chuck roast and I like the addition of that cocoa powder to the chili, which gives good depth. I just recently found the powdered cocoa on the very top shelf in my spice cabinet way to the back wondering when I would use it. Now I can’t wait to eat this chili out of a bowl traditionally, in breakfast meals and with foot long beef hot dogs I have with sesame seed gourmet buns. I may even freeze some of this chili!
