No Till Potatoes

Will this really work? No till article.Get some straw throw it in the yard and then stick seed potatoes in it. Keep it damp, rain should be enough and then harvest potatoes in a few weeks. This seems to easy but I’m going to try a few bales of straw and newspapers this year. Some pictures of this method can be found here.

I’ve started my own potato patch for next spring. Four bales of hay at $5 each and four kinds of potatoes from RH Shumway. Yukon Golds, White Superior, Red Pontiac and Blue Russian $26.90. Potatoes at the local Price Rite are $2 for five pounds. So to break even I’ll need to gather 117.25 pounds of edible potatoes and then eat them. This could be very tough for three people to do, I don’t know how much we consumed last year but I don’t think we had twenty three five pound bags go through this house, that would be just under a bag every two weeks.
From some of what I have been reading you  can expect five to six potatoes per plant. This might be two to three pounds per plant, I think I will have around twenty to thirty plants and I think I’m in trouble already.
$20+$26.90=$46.90
$46.90/$2.00=23.45
23.45×5= 117.25 pounds of potatoes.
At $2.50 a pound (this weeks Price Chopper price 1/8/2012) I only need to eat 93.5 pounds of potatoes.

If I could find some place that sold potatoes at $4.00 per five pound bag, I can beat that price easily and I think we do eat ten pounds in a year. At $5.00 per five pounds I’ll be making money hand over fist.

June 17th

From 2012 Flowers and garden

July 7th

From July 7th Garden
From July 7th Garden

Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade from 11.04

After the upgrade I ran into a few problems during boot up. The first one was an error during boot regarding vga=733 and gfxpayload. To fix this I changed a line in /etc/default/grub.
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=” splash vga=640″
GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x24,1024×768
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=”quiet splash”
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=””
I suppose I only needed that one line.

GRUB_GFXMODE=1024x768x24,1024×768
And to comment out the line.
#GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=” splash vga=640″

Next I have to figure out why it stops booting at a line about pulseaudio. Dmesg has nothing about this error and in order to get to X I ctrl fn F2 and log in with my user, then sudo gdm start and it goes back to the failed screen and starts X.
Boot fails here
PulseAudio configured for per-user session
saned disabled; edit /etc/default/saned
Sometimes I would see a message about checking battery state, which led me to some posts about nvidia drivers causing similar problems. I have an Intel chipset so I figued this was a wrong answer. I did find some references to lightdm and gdm being part of the problem.
I uninstalled  lightdm “apt-get remove lightdm” and then reinstalled “apt-get install lightdm” this also removed and reinstalled ubuntu-desktop. A quick reboot and I’m booting into X with no visible errors unless I look in the logs.

It had to bring a glimmer of pride to the old mans eye.

Years ago a man had a Model T that he stored out back and he removed the rotor from the distributor to keep the kid from running around with the thing when he should be going to school or doing some other more productive thing with his time.
A short time later it was noticed that the Model T was being run on a regular basis by his son. It seems he had fashioned a rotor from a nail and some wood. Figured out the timing and put things together so it would run.
Now he was a upset since he told the kid not to use the Model T but you’d have to think there was a certain amount of pride in the fact that the boy had figured out a way to make that thing run like it should.

IPod Nano Recall

My brother sent me a link for a recall on my Nano, what do you know Apple is sending a new IPod out to the house to replace the one that we have that is several years old.
A box showed up from Apple this week and the IPod left with FedEX the next day. So far so good.

12/23/2011The package has arrived back from Apple with a new to us IPod Nano. It is about half the size of the original but seems to be just as useful.

NSLU2 replacement

I’m looking for a possible replacement should my NSLU2 die off suddenly. I found Raspberry PI today and thought it might be a good deal if it is ever released for sale.
Twenty five bucks for the A series but I think I’ll need to wait for the B with built in/on networking. No case doesn’t seem like a big problem I am sure I could find something this will fit inside of.

I’m running wview for my weather station on the NSLU2 and since the Raspberry Pi will run Debian I think this should work just fine for my needs.

Pork Short Ribs

I got up early to put Pork Short Ribs in the slow cooker, five to six hours of cooking time on low. Not really a lot of work just patience while it cooks.

3/4 cup packed brown sugar
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/2 cup ketchup
1/4 cup honey
2 Tbsp white wine vinegar
3 garlic cloves minced
1 tsp salt
1 tsp ground ginger
1/4 to 1/2 tsp crushed red pepper
5 Lbs bone in Pork Short Ribs
1 medium onion sliced
2 Tbsp sesame seeds toasted
2 Tbsp chopped green onions
Combine first nine in large bowl add ribs and coat them. Place onion chopped in bottom of slow cooker; top with ribs and sauce. Cover and cook on low five to six hours or until the meat is tender.
Place ribs on a serving platter and sprinkle with chopped green onions and sesame seeds. About five servings.