James Alexander Nielsen

So a little over a week ago, on my birthday, my son arrived! James Alexander arrived at 4:58pm on June 11. 6lb 14oz, 20 in. He was facing the wrong direction and the cord was wrapped twice around his neck which resulted in the need for a c-section. Thank goodness for drugs because the doctor was really tugging to get him out but baby was fine and Genny is recovering nicely now. Genny's Mom came up to help out for a few days which was nice. Getting into a groove now with feeding and diapers. Long story short, he's pretty damn cool.

Signs of Spring and updates

Azaleas bloomed a week or 2 before memorial day. Rhododendrons had just a few blooms on them by our Memorial Day party.

I've got all the sheetrock up in the kitchen and a coat and a half of spackle so that's coming along.

All my tomatoes are planted! Yeah! Still have some other stuff under grow lights to get into the ground.

Spent yesterday smoking some ribs on my new smoker and they came out awesome. Also we were getting rooms ready for baby. He'll be here soon!

Oh, and my allergies were the worst for about 2-3 weeks before memorial day until now they are dying down again.

(Some of this stuff is just notes to myself....)

Update from the last few weeks.

Two weekends ago, Genny's Dad came up to help us out with some work we're doing in the kitchen. What a big help. We got all of the electrical work done and got the counters cut and in place and the sink and stovetop are in. Still no drywall up, but it's nice to have counters again! I did manage to give myself a little bit of heat exhaustion working in the attic because there was a freak heatwave and it was in the 90s that day. The attic must have been at least 100.

Sunday of that weekend after Gen's Dad left I got to try out my new roto-tiller that Genny got me for Easter. I only tilled a couple rows of the garden. Just enough space to put my asparagus in the ground. People keep saying be careful it tends to take over but I say yum. Either I'll eat more asparagus or I'll cut it back, big deal. The weekend before I got a bunch of free horse manure and added it to my compost pile and gave it a good mix. It was up to 130 degrees!

So Genny ordered the tiller online and went to pick it up at the store. They gave her the wrong model but it turned out to be the $300 one not the $200 one she ordered. She tried to tell the person that she thought it was the wrong one but they insisted that it was the right one so Genny brought it home. Yeah, there's no way I'm going to go fix that error...

Ok, on to this past weekend. Last fall I was in the habit of buying half dead plants from the home centers at huge discounts and nursing them back to health. It seems to have worked out very well. I bought 3 big black eyed susan plants and divided them into about 16 plants and put them in my vegetable garden which by that time of year was done with veggies. Some russian sage, salvia, and a couple varieties of echinacea. Well they all came back this spring so I dug them up and planted them in the various beds around the house. They are all deer resistant varieties so hopefully the ones I put in the un-fenced rock garden will make it. We fenced in the garden by the driveway with the daylillys, spiderwort and hosta because the deer broke through the netting last year. Hopefully this will keep them at bay this year. The rock garden we built out back though we want to keep unfenced. So far they only thing they never eat are daffodils but at least we like daffodils. I stuck some of our divided plants in there so we'll see how that goes. Also, I mulch both of those beds with compost. It looks good, it's good for the gardens and it was free (aside from my labor in turning it a few times) Speaking of which my compost was down to about 80 degrees so I gave it another good turn and it's back up to over 100 again. Nice.

So the neighbors are great but one of them has a big winnabego in their backyard which is kind of an eyesore. So we've been planting along the property line there in hopes that it will be hidden eventually. We've got mostly forsythia along there up until this past weekend. I bought Genny a little lucky bamboo plant last year because she liked the pot it was in (an elephant). Since it was starting to look a bit sickly, I took all the individual bamboo pieces and planted them along the yard too. Hopefully the will grow fast and take over. If it gets out of hand, I'll just have to import some pandas. I'm ok with that. Ok, time for some pictures...

Oh yeah, you know those raspberry bushes they sell at the home center that look like a couple twigs sticking out of a box? This is one of those things after only 1 year. I never thought it would be this enormous. Awesome!

Signs of Spring - right around earth day

Finally have some hostas peeking out!

Compost

Last week I went on craigslist.com to find some free manure. I found a horse farm in Morristown that was happy to get rid of some. I could not believe the size of the pile they had. Unfortunately I don't have a pickup or I would have filled it up but instead I took 3 contractor-type garbage bags full. So this past Saturday I went to work on my compost bin. It's 3 bins and I had one bin sitting since last fall and another that I have slowly been adding to just this spring. I took the new pile and turned it into the empty bin and added some layers of manure and layers of shredded leaves. It's about 3 feet tall and 4 x 4 feet. I have a 16 inch long thermometer that is supposed to be for grilling but I bought it for checking my compost. It's 50 degrees out today and the inside of the pile says 120 degrees! I also took the old pile and turned that. I added a little bit of manure in layers while I turned that pile too because it didn't really look finished enough for me yet. That pile however has not heated up at all although it did last fall. I guess it all of that out if it's system already but I figure a little extra manure never hurt anybody's compost.

Signs of Spring - First weekend in April

We have a few flower beds that are all starting to look pretty good. Tulips are starting to get big and you can kind of tell what color the hyacinths are going to be. I've never grown garlic before but all of the cloves I planted have sprouted up through their layer of mulch. About half of the Lilacs I tried transplanting last year have small buds on them, the other half don't look so hot...

Crocus

Daylily or Spiderwort, I'm not sure yet

The bulb garden. Lilly, daffodil, tulip, hyacinth. And you can see my grow light and seedlings inside.

Hyacinths and tulips

Daffodils. One is even starting to show where it's going to flower

Lilac buds

Garlic sprouting through the mulch

Signs of Spring - Last week of March

Frogs! At night, the frogs have started chirping away. When we first moved in 2 years ago, it was a big change going from hearing the highway in the background all the time to the sounds of nature all around us. The frogs were ridiculous. We read in the paper that it was a particularly good year for frogs in terms of weather conditions so that's why they were so vocal that year. It's not quite so loud but they have started up again.

Starting Veggies from Seed

I have a vegetable garden and I've tried to start my plants from seed but it never seems to work out and I end up buying plants. This year I bought a shoplight and some plant/aquarium tubes and got it all set up. Hopefully we'll see a big improvement over previous tries.

Signs of Spring - March 25

First crocus popped up! Keep it up spring. 60s on Sunday.

Turkeys

Here is the video of they turkeys in our backyard I mentioned in an earlier entry.

Signs of Spring - 3rd weekend in March

Found the first tick of the year attached to poor Red. I've definitely gotten pretty good at removing those little blood-suckers. A bath and some frontline were just the day before. Don't know if the tick was already on there and just missed during the bath or if the frontline takes a few days to do it's thing or what. We frontline him and the cats (even though the girls really don't go out all that much, conga does like to lay on the driveway though...) all the time and they still seem to jump on him all summer. He must be tasty.

Signs of Spring - 1st weekend in March

We have a little bulb garden up against a sunny little patch next to our house. They started poking out the first weekend in March. We noticed them when we returned from our trip to VA to see Phish's return at Hampton Coliseum.

Signs of Spring - Last week of February 2009

It seems like it's been a long winter here in lower Sussex County, NJ this year. Spring is definitely my favorite season so I've really been looking forward to it this year. I know it's far from time to plant anything in my vegetable gardens but the other weekend I thought I'd get a head start and throw some compost onto my beds. Sadly, spring was not as ready as I was and my compost pile was still frozen solid.

I've decided to start keeping a list of when certain things happen to remind me that the warm weather is on it's way.

Last week of February 2009

- Plants being fooled into sprouting - we had a few warm days and a few bulbs started to peek there heads out. I say they were fooled because they have not done too much since then...

- Woodpeckers pecking - we are far enough away from the hustle and bustle that there are plenty of nature sounds in our yard.

- Pheasants on CR 605 - they are really beautiful birds but they have to be the slowest stupidest things ever. There is a stretch of 605 that I can't drive along without seeing a dead pheasant on the side of the road. How do birds get hit by cars that frequently unless they are slow and stupid?

- Flock of 15 turkeys in our backyard - Our dog Red warned me that there was something going on outside in the yard. So I came upstairs to see what he was barking about. About 15 wild turkeys were jumping around in our yard. I have video of this and I'll see if I can post it later.

Welcome

Sure there are already a pile of home and garden blogs out there. But I want to write one too so deal with it.

I plan on using this more of a diary of my home improvements than anything else. Hopefully some of you will find some of my successes and failures useful in some way.