The garden grows, the house gets a bathroom.

Our days as tree planters and fabric layers are over, making way for some intense house and garden work. 

Earlier in the month we had ordered 800 pounds of compost and by now we were just itching to mix it into the garden's soil. By the wheelbarrow load we scooped earthy black crumbles and spread the nutrients around tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, peas, and corn alike. The sun and rain has been good to the plants and most everything has just erupted in size, providing us with more salad greens, radishes, and peas than we know what to do with! 

One morning's harvest

Corn and red salad bowl lettuce being companions. The corn provides shade for the lettuce and prevents it from bolting.

Three green tomatoes were spotted one morning!  Connor started this plant from seed in January.

Our favorite mix (from bottom to top): zinnia's, marigolds, tomatoes, a pepper, a broccoli, amish deer tongue lettuce, and nasturtiums. A true collage. 

Pea plant climbing: all of our trellises were made from reclaimed/repurposed wood.

Pretty proud of our garden space

Our home was looking a little lost and lonely, so we rolled flashing (a sticky, tar-like substance) around the windows and door and nailed fascia under the drip edge with 1x8's. Two of our windows hadn't been installed yet because we had acquired them without a nailing flange, so we ordered one long strip to attach to the vinyl windows ourselves. A couple of minutes into comparing the nailing fin to the window, trying different positions and ways to possibly connect the two, left us no closer to installing the windows than before. Feeling way in over our heads, we solved the problem by boarding up the bathroom rough opening.
With the bathroom window gone we realized we had stumbled onto some new possibilities. The ceiling could be build lower than 8 feet to provide storage space on top, and we could have a window in front of the sink. We built the bathroom walls and door opening in an afternoon, planning to use an old bathroom door from the Fischer house. We are very fortunate in that all of our windows and doors were either free or very cheap. There was some debate over what kind of plumbing and toilet system to have, and we've decided to build a simple composting toilet that we'll be able to mix with our outdoor compost system. More on this when we tackle that project - we are working on wiring the place and no telling how long it'll take to figure that out! Peace and love, friends.

Connor nails the bathroom wall to a stud, with our boarded up window behind him.

Bathroom!

Our kitchen space

Floppy, Big Mama, and Sauron chomping on weeds. We love them all equally.

And our beloved and attention needy Aussie.

And some crazy South Dakota weather patterns

"As soils are depleted, human health, vitality, and intelligence go with them."
Louis Bromfield