March 4th, 2010
I moved a Coulter pine the other day that had been in the ground for about 10 years +/-
It never did that well and has a trunk only about 1/2 inch diameter and probably 2 feet tall. It was usually not that healthy looking, but recently it started looking better than ever.
Digging it up, I saw that it was pretty much strangled by roots from nearby Arizona cypress and Eldarica Pine (Mondell pine). The roots were incredibly thick especially considering the other trees were about 20+ feet away (they are about 30 years old though).
I dug a good size ring about 2 feet deep around the whole tree leaving a large rootball area. Digging was tough through the roots and also because the roots were so thick that they really prevented much water from absorbing into the soil so it was pretty dry even after 8 inches of rain in the last month or so which to my mind was pretty incredible.
After I had the root ball encircled with a 2 foot deep trench, there was really no way to dig it out with a shovel because of all the roots of the nearby trees and the hard ground. So, I resorted to my rock moving tricks and picked up an 8 foot log and jammed it in the trench and used it as a pry bar to break the root ball free. The final product weighed about 200 pounds, too much for me to lift out of the hole. I used a hand size garden fork and scraped enough dirt off the ball to lighten to load to about 150 pounds and lifted it out. It was too big to fit in a 15 gallon pot so I wrapped it in a plastic bag an loaded it in the truck. I transplanted it the next day.
If it survives my transplant job, it will be much happier as it now has nothing to compete with (except gophers, but I am working on that problem!)
Posted in Trees & plants | 1 Comment »
March 4th, 2010
This makes a nice size serving.
2 whole eggs + 2 egg whites, scramble, cook in coconut oil.
3 collard green leaves thinly sliced (like wide noodles)
1 zucchini cut down the middle lengthwise then sliced
1/3 sweet onion, roughly chopped.
Take these and cook just till hot in coconut oil.
Add eggs back in and warm up.
Can add cheese on this if desired. Also could use other vegetables…. red pepper, mushrooms, etc.
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March 4th, 2010
Made this up tonight.
Defrost a salmon fillet.
Place fillet in glass cooking dish on top of a large collard green leaf turned upside down (so it holds all the juice in).
Drench salmon in melted coconut oil and rub in.
Add salt, pepper, dill weed, minced red onion, and shredded coconut to both sides of salmon.
Sprinkle 2 sliced carrots around.
Wrap another collard green leaf over the top.
Bake in oven. I did 350F for 25 minutes with the lid on the dish and it was a little overdone. Adjust as necessary. Still it was good. Serve with lots of lemon. Be sure to eat the collard greens, they are delicious with the lemon.
Also serve with peas, brown rice, and large spinach salad.
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February 28th, 2010
Gluten free coconut pancakes
DRY INGREDIENTS (MIX)
1/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/4 cup brown rice flour (sifted to remove unground kernals)
1/4 cup millet flour (sifted to remove unground kernals)
1/8 cup soy flour
1/8 cup tapioca flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp cinnamon
WET INGREDIENTS (MIX)
2 whole eggs
1 cup hot water
1 tsp heaping coconut cream concentrate
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp maple syrup grade b
Mix up eggs in a medium bowl. Mix coconut cream concentrate in hot water over heat in a sauce pan to make a coconut milk. Add coconut milk to eggs, add in maple syrup and vanilla. Mix very well with wire wisk until layer of foam forms on top.
Mix dry ingredients in a large bowl. Add wet mixture into dry mixture and mix with wire wisk. Cook on a cast iron pan with coconut oil. These are delicous. Makes about 8 x 5? pancakes. Batter should be fairly runny and spread out quickly on pan. Be sure to oil the cast iron pan each time before pouring more batter on. Cook them on whatever you want, I just like my cast iron pan and metal turner.
After cooking, put some butter on them and some grade B maple syrup. They taste better than wheat ones I’ve made and they are wheat free.
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February 24th, 2010
Yeah, back to growing this year. Manzanita from cuttings, california junipers from cuttings and seed, rabbitbrush, sagebrush, of course coulter pine (Pinus coulteri), singleleaf pinyon pine, and various fruit trees. I’m also propagating some grape vines and pomegranate cuttings and plum tree cuttings, and blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and rasberries. The rain has been good this year. I’ve recorded about 7 inches in Phelan, CA and more may be on the way soon.
A few years ago I moved to Colorado, had to give up my whole stock before leaving, including about 30 x 10 year old coulter pines that I started from seed. What a shame. Well I hope they’re still all alive. Coulter pines can be a bit touchy, especially when potted or moved or 2-3 years after transplanting. Now that I’m back in southern California, I’m back at it again. I am always getting emails from people wanting to buy Coulter pines, probably more emails now, than when I actually had them. The biggest Coulter pine that I grew from seed is now about 15′ tall with a spread of about 10′. This particular tree was a fast-grower from birth approx 13 years ago.
Posted in Trees & plants | No Comments »
February 24th, 2010
I had a bunch of hacked links all over this site. Just upgraded to the latest version available. I couldn’t do the upgrade where the site was hosted because the mysql version was not good enough. So I had to move the site to a different host and then the upgrade went perfectly! Whew, glad that’s done!
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February 24th, 2010
I had wanted to build some cabinets in my garage. The garage is about 1000 square feet and attached to the house. I intended to build some cabinets and put them up along the south wall of the garage between two windows. This is about 16 foot long area. I didn’t want anything fancy but just some extra storage. Anyhow, as way leads to way, the weekend came along and I somehow picked up a computer virus _ex-08.exe and monnid32.exe. Figuring this out and cleaning up my system took most of Saturday so the prospect of getting these cabinets built did not look good. (Btw…. for the virus issue, just incase someone stumbles on this page with the same problem, I used Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and it did a great job at cleaning the system). Now, short on time, as this was a weekend project, I remembered a friend of mine, William, had told me weeks earlier when I was talking about the cabinets that he just simplified it and lined the wall of his garage with ordinary gym style lockers. I looked more into it late on that Saturday and decided to give myself a break and put the lockers in instead. Well I went shopping for the best price (actually I had only my budget for the cabinet materials to spend). I didn’t realize the selection I’d have but I ordered ones like this locker. I got 4 of these for a total of 36 compartments. Since my budget allowed it I went and upgraded to assembled. They arrived about 2 weeks later on a freight truck and after unpacking, I put them into place, screwed them into the wall, and viola, 36 cabinets. For the situation at hand, it can’t be beat. No time wasted, computer is clean and the cabinets are in and I’m back to work… oh yeah. Bye!
Posted in Miscellaneous | No Comments »
December 21st, 2009
DRY INGREDIENTS (MIX)
1/4 cup buckwheat flour
1/4 cup brown rice flour
1/4 cup soy flour
1/8 cup millet flour
1/8 cup tapioca flour
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
3/4 tsp cinnamon
WET INGREDIENTS (MIX)
1 whole egg
1 egg white
1 cup vanilla soy milk
1/2 tsp vanilla extract
2 tbsp maple syrup grade b
Add wet mixture into dry mixture and mix with wire wisk. Cook on a cast iron pan. These are delicous. Makes about 8 x 5″ pancakes. Batter should be fairly runny and spread out quickly on pan. If it’s too thick, add more soymilk until it’s right. Buckwheat gives them a dark color. Next time I will try cooking on coconut oil. This time I used butter on the pan. They cook rather quickly. Be sure to butter the cast iron pan each time before pouring more batter on. Cook them on whatever you want, I just like my cast iron pan and metal turner.
After cooking, put some butter on them and some grade B maple syrup. They taste better than wheat ones I’ve made and they are wheat free.
Substitute other gluten free flours too.
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October 23rd, 2008
As a web developer I get a lot of inquires from business owners who are trying to find a stable, reliable, and affordable webhost. I have spent the last 12 years dealing with different hosting companies on a daily basis and I’m in a position to offer sound advice regarding at least my various experiences with some of the companies offerings and services. I have seen some hosts that get better over time and some that get worse. One of the most frustrating things are companies that seem to offer a lot of storage space and bandwidth for a low price but put severe limits on CPU usage which can in some cases cause severe and sometimes completely disabling downtime to an ordinary website. Clients of mine want stable webhosts, at the same time they want to know that they’re getting a competitive price.
Delving more into the issue of stability, further stability comes from a webhost that does not overload it’s servers. An overloaded server simply does not perform well. It may have programs that die due to the server being overloaded. At first glance this might not seem critical but it is very critical. For example, suppose that program that dies is the MySQL server. I bring this up because it has been a common problem I have seen over the years. When MySQL dies, any database driven website will die with it. This has been critical for some of my e-commerce customers who simply cannot operate without a database. Consider alternatively if the web server (e.g. Apache) dies. Then the website doesn’t function at all, it’s as if the DNS is sending the potential customer directly into a roadblock the cause of which is an overloaded server. The only solution is for the host to restart the server. This can all be avoided by selecting a quality host that does not overload it’s servers and has the measures in place to correct a problem should it occur.
A few months ago, I had a friend of mine who manages a 501(c)(3) nonprofit contact me regarding hosting for her website. Initially she wanted me to host the site for her, when I told her that is not something I do I began to explore hosting options for her. One main requirement in her situation was for the hosting company to be as affordable as possible as her nonprofit funds are limited. I explained to her the problem of sometimes ridiculous CPU usage limits of low cost companies and overloaded server problems as I explained above. I also wanted to find her a cPanel-based hosting platform as I’ve found that clients prefer this system over other web-based control panels. After looking into it, I found a Nevada based company McKremie, LLC which offers their business hosting plan free to any US-based registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit or to public schools including all the features of their paid plan.
I directed her to the webhosting for nonprofits form and she was up and running with her website shortly thereafter. She has been happy with her hosting, I have done some work on the site and have also been delighted to deal with a quality webhost. Uptime has been fantastic as well as server availability and stability with quick access times of the pages on her website.
Posted in Internet, Web Development | No Comments »
October 3rd, 2007
lentil burgers
1 cup dry lentils (green)
2 small to medium russet potatoes
1/2 yellow onion chopped
4 cloves garlic, diced
1 red seranno chili pepper
7 mushrooms, coarsly chopped
1 6oz can tomato paste
Handful of fresh spinach leaves, chopped
1/3 cup oat flour (approx)
1 tbsp raw pumpkin seed
1 tbsp flax seed
1 tbsp sunflower seed
1 tsp parsley flakes
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried basil
some black pepper
1/4 tsp ground cumin
1/4 tsp ground tumeric
1/4 tsp curry powder
1-2 tsp sriracha hot sauce
1 tbsp worchestershire sauce
Add 1 cup lentils in 3 cups water. Boil for 5 minutes uncovered, then cover and simmer for 45 minutes.
Drain water off. Pour into a large mixing bowl.
Add 2 cooked russet potatoes with skin, 1 small, 1 s-m size to lentils. (Cooked in microwave).
Mash it together with a potato masher for a while.
Add tomato paste and mash.
Add onion, garlic, red pepper, mash together.
In separate small bowl, try to mash up the seeds together.
Add seeds to lentil mix, add spices and mash up.
Add mushrooms, spinach and sauces, mash up.
Add oat flour and mash up.
Form 12 burgers and cook on george forman 5 minutes, flip and cook another 3 minutes. They did not stick.
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