2025, Family, Farming Update, Seasons, Uncategorized, Weather

First False Spring?

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The weekend Farm Report comes to us from Ben.

I feel like I’ve been really busy the past week. I don’t know why exactly, I don’t know what exactly I’ve been doing, I just feel like I’ve been running from one thing to the next.

However I know spring is coming, I heard a kill deer! And the Sandhill Cranes! And I got out the pot with the chives in it. There’s still some ice on the north side of the house and I saw a small snowbank in a patch of grass, but we’re getting there. As I write this on Friday, they’re predicting thunderstorms for Friday evening. ” They” say, the first frost will be six months after the first thunderstorm. Which gets us into mid-September which, while not ideal, wouldn’t be unheard of either. There was a large halo around the moon Wednesday night. Google says spiritually, some traditions see a lunar halo as a positive omen, indicating a time of good fortune, spiritual alignment, and harmony. Good, let’s run with that one.

I spent Thursday at a meeting on nitrogen management in Southeast Minnesota. A continuing education course of sorts. Focus on the southeast Minnesota region is relevant because of the karst geography and sink holes and how rapidly ground water can enter drinking water. Please know, farmers care a great deal about their farms and the water we are drinking, and our soils as well. Putting on more fertilizer or chemicals than a crop can use is a waste of money. There were a lot of charts, and graphs, and a lot of data presented. If you notice from this picture, commercial fertilizer started being available shortly after World War II and greatly accelerated in the 1960s.

Soybeans came into play in the 1940s.

It’s interesting to think how much of our farm practices are not really that old.

One of the comments made was that we could do a lot better with our fertilizer practices if we could more accurately predict the weather. A lot of fertilizer and nitrogen is applied in the spring as pre-planting or at planting. And yet the following picture shows the plants greatest need for Nitrogen is tasseling through ear development.

While the greatest amount of precipitation and the greatest chance to lose nitrogen happens in the spring.

So why do we apply it in the spring?

Well, that’s kinda just how it works. Corn does need some starter fertilizer to get going from seed. And we do soil testing to know how much nitrogen is already in the soil, and it’s just easiest to do it before anything is planted. I have done some ‘side-dressing’, which is injecting anhydrous nitrogen between the rows when the plant is 18-24” tall, but there’s also more damage to the standing corn when turning at the ends, or not driving straight. And some guys, with the right equipment, can apply liquid nitrogen when the plant is 6’ tall just before it tassels, but that takes tall sprayers, and again, there is crop loss. In my small fields, I’d damage so much turning around on the ends that it would defeat any gains.

 I’m greatly simplifying a lot of this, it’s too much to get into here, but it was all really very interesting.

And much of the data presented yesterday really didn’t show much difference between spring applications and later applications. We just have to know that we are going to have less available for the crop. It was also noted, we see so many new products claiming to save money and time. But if the cost of the new ideas ultimately don’t create much of an improved crop yield, ($$$), then they fall out of favor.

The bathroom! Here is a before photo-

And finally, minus the shower glass yet, the after photo-

It looks really nice. It IS really nice. Kelly has already enjoyed the bathtub several times. I really like the rich color of the cabinets in the laundry room.

The heated floor is nice.

It was hard finding room for towel bars and grab bars, and we probably gave up some storage that we hope we don’t come to regret. But it sure is an improvement.

We had a bidet in the old bathroom, one of those simple ones from Costco that you simply add to the toilet seat. This time around, we ordered an actual bidet seat. It’s quite the deal. Or at least so I’m told. I haven’t used it yet. I haven’t used that function yet.
When you approach the toilet, the lid opens on its own and a nightlight comes on. For us gentlemen, there’s even a light inside, I guess so we can tell what we’re aiming at. Our contractor said he’d seen a lot of toilets, but he didn’t think he’d seen one that fancy before. Lest you think otherwise, it is not gold plated.

Later this summer we’ll start on the downstairs pink bathroom remodel. I do not expect a bidet in that one.

WHAT WOULD YOU ADD TO YOUR BATHROOM? WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN AT NIGHT LATELY?

41 thoughts on “First False Spring?”

    1. Yeah, a little more room would have been helpful. We had a wall moved 18”, making the laundry room smaller and the bathroom bigger. Tough to do much given the size.

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  2. i had a hot tub as part of the program that got lots of use in the master bath a couple houses ago. im my current blueprint drawings i put it on the roof rather than in the bedroom bath
    both would be nice. i am a soaking kind of guy. my daughter pointed out on our february birthdays where we gave each other sessions in our respective cities bath house’ that 4 of my 5 kids are bath takers who live to unwind in a hot soak ( i bought a monster bag of epsome salts recently and damn theyre nice

    at night….night skies and old movies. got a star app that tells me whats up and tcm oscars celebration with 31 days of oscars just ended and ill bet i have 50 movies ready to watch. my fair lady and mrs miniver recently i see i saved born yesterday twice ( i love born yesterday)

    ben why isnt there a feeder tube running between the rows addinf fertilizer on an as needed basis with injectors or feeder tube placed to add stuff to mazimize at the perfect time . is it all financial. the feeder tubes would last a long time and pay for themselves i believe

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  4. Like Bill – more space. We really should do a bathroom do-over before we ever sell this place – very old and funky tub/shower, and the one corner of the tub is actually UNDER the (pretty high) sink. So you can’t do one of those quickie conversions to a walk-in shower… at least without figuring out replacing the sink somehow.

    We tried to do our Full Moon gathering on the Wagon Bridge, but people’s schedules didn’t mesh, so Husband and I barely went to see it on Wednesday, when moonrise was before sunset. We didn’t spot it till it was way up there because of some clouds on the horizon. It always surprises us how much it moves from month to month, where it actually comes up.

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  5. Rise and Shine,Baboons,

    We had coyotes in the neighborhood last night that appeared on someone’s camera two houses down. So Phoebe only goes outside under close supervision. Yesterday she got to the Dog Park–a really big thing for her, so she is tired today and not really wanting to go outside.

    One year ago our upstairs bathroom was under destruction/then construction so we had a walk in shower that really allows Lou to live here. (It was a year ago Lou was hospitalized, then in rehab faciility). He is now very unsteady. We dropped a lot of cash on that one, so our bathroom needs no improvement. Ben, I have laundry room envy after viewing your picture. That is wonderful and spacious. Wow!

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      1. Oh, pussy willows! Dad used to bring some home for mom, and that was always a sign of spring. I did it for Kelly, until the trees died. Haven’t found any more. Thanks for the reminder!

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      3. A little poem I had to recite once in a program:

        I KNOW A LITTLE PUSSY

        I know a little pussy
        Her coat is silver gray
        She lives down in the meadow
        Not very far away.

        Although she is a pussy
        She’ll never be a cat.
        For she’s a pussy willow.
        Now what do you think of that!
        Traditional

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  6. Well, last night I slept really hard. I don’t think I even saw the inside of my eyelids for very long. Rain will do that for me.

    We had some nice gentle thunderstorms here last night. Lots of lightning displays on the way home! Quite a bit of rain, too, but I don’t have my rain gauge out.

    My bathroom is about 7×5 feet total, and the vanity, toilet and tub/shower take up most of that space. I have about a 3×4 foot square to stand in. Pippin used to love to be in there with me. It made it awfully hard to move around. So I guess the only thing I really want in there is more space.

    Your bathroom looks fabulous, Ben!

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      1. I agree about the light switches. For 35 years my bathroom light switch was actually on the outside wall, in the hallway. Now it’s on the inside and it took me several months to stop reaching for that outside switch.

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  7. False spring! It has been in the 60’s here this week until today, when it is currently 19°. It may snow a little next week. We were bypassed by the snowstorm currently hitting inMinnesita and eastern ND. March is my least favorite month on the Great Plains.

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        1. Our house was built in 1968. So with the bathroom stuck in the middle, we couldn’t change the depth, just the length.
          The laundry room used to be much larger, and mom had a desk in there and she used it as an office. We cut it in half when we added an addition just before daughter was born in 1995. (otherwise there was only the master bedroom upstairs. Mom admitted this wasn’t a house for newborns; there are 3 bedrooms downstairs, which is what was needed in 1968).
          We took the laundry room desk out, and put our sons crib in there for his first two years. He jokes that’s why he can sleep with laundry running.
          So we cut the room in half, adding a wall and sliding door, as a hallway to the addition.

          The depth of the bathroom and laundry room is about 6′. The bathroom now is about 10.5′ long. There’s enough room in the laundry to open the washer / dryer doors, but that’s about it. We haven’t figured out yet where we’re putting the laundry baskets. I said we took 18″ off the laundry for the bathroom. But we also lost 5″ with a stub wall for the plumbing due to the supporting former exterior wall they can’t cut though for plumbing. And it’s easy to forget to count the depth of the other walls. “Yay! I have 10′!” No, subtract 5″ for this wall depth, and 5″ for the opposite wall depth and now you have 9′ and the tub fits, but the shower ends up pretty small. Oh. And you need 30″ for code between the sink and toilet. You wanted to get a wheelchair in here as forward thinking? Well… compromises were made…

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        2. I don’t have 30” between my vanity and my toilet. I doubt there are 30” between the sink and the toilet if I measured. The edge of the vanity is about 8” from the toilet. My condo was built in 2000. I don’t know what the code was then, but there are a few dozen condos identical to mine here.

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  9. I’m impressed, Ben. That’s one heck of a bathroom improvement. I love that the floor is heated, and that you have both a separate shower and tub, not to mention a real bidet. Your laundry facilities aren’t too shabby either.

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  11. For pure luxury, I think heated floors would be wonderful. I experienced them on a trip to Norway and wished we had installed them with a bathroom remodel. Otherwise a big enough shower but it doesn’t need to be huge.

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  12. For me heated floors would be a luxury. Shower needs to be big enough but not huge. No tubs for me- too much of a fall risk after escaping a tumble in a curved bottom British tub.

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  14. When we had our bathroom done year and a half ago, we did look into the heated floors, but it was just too far above our budget. That would probably be the one thing that I would put on the top of the list. But it’s certainly not crucial. The one thing we did get that I really like is a window shade. In fact, we hadn’t had a window shade before and it was a big wish for YA. She chose an accordion window shade, which I didn’t really know existed and I love it.

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  18. I’d love to have a heated floor in my existing bathroom, but I’d settle for some sort of baseboard heat along the exterior wall. In times of polar vortex, you can actually see some frost forming along the baseboard. I have a little space heater in there that would probably be considered a trip hazard. If the temp is above zero, I don’t really need it.

    If I had a second bathroom put in the upstairs, definitely a heated floor, glow-in-the-dark tile grout, and a bidet.

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