Connor and Claire Live on the Prairie: Wrapped, windowed, and doored

A visit from the Ault’s!

One rare sunny Saturday my parents and sister Emily rolled into the driveway of our homestead for a weekend stay and to help out with our garden and tiny home. We let our chickens out of the coop and allowed our little old Shetland sheepdog, Belle, roam amongst them to see what she made of these new creatures. The chickens paid zero notice until her herding instincts kicked into gear and she started rounding them up. My dad and Connor made quick work of cutting the remaining window openings with a skill saw while my mom, Emily, and I took shovels in hand to mound and till summer garden beds.

The rest of the weekend was on and off rain but the days were far from wasted. In between bursts of rain, my dad, Connor and I ran out to the tiny home with our notched roof rafters to test their spacing. When the rain became too much we played games inside and watched the world soak up the shower.

Cutting out window openings with skill saw

Photo cred. Emily

Bill finds his calling in construction:)

Photo cred. Emily (just love the tree in the window)

Photo cred. Emily

Emily with the chickens

Mounding and tilling summer garden beds

Belle decides she likes chickens

Planting Our Forest

The conservation district had an annual tree sale in an attempt to clear the cooler of remaining trees. We couldn’t resist. We purchased 350 trees. These trees will be used to restore the cabin’s existing shelterbelt and to establish more wind protection around the cabin itself. We designed a six-row shelterbelt with layers of shrubs, medium trees, and large trees. Each species was picked based on form, color, drought tolerance, usefulness, and most of all wildlife habitats. We will plant the trees individually with a soil augur. Claire and Connor’s Forest: Common Lilac, Elderberry, Caragana, Buffaloberry, Eastern Red Cedar, Black Hills Spruce, Crabapple, Bur Oak, Hackberry, Little Leaf Linden, Black Walnut, and Highbush Cranberry.

Memorial Day Weekend

My Aunt Sara and Aunt Amy visited on Memorial Day weekend, along with Izzy, Robby, and of course, the dogs. Saturday was overcast and breezy so we all worked in the garden raising the last four beds. It is a complete and total relief to finally have our garden beds and grid trail system finished. Popcorn, sweet corn, sunflowers, bush beans, runner beans, marigolds, potatoes, and cucumbers were seeded into the soil. The rest of the weekend was rainy and cold but many a games had been brought to compensate. On Sunday we did laundry in town at a friend of Sara’s! We watched television, took showers, and simply relaxed.

Connor and Rob and Layla

Laying Fabric

The Thursday before Memorial Day weekend, Claire and I planted our last tree for the Clark Conservation District. We had planted 18 shelterbelts throughout the county, totaling to 65 acres and thousands of trees. These shelterbelts will act as wind and snow breaks, sound barriers, and eventually good deer habitat (and hunting). The next step was to lay a fabric weed barrier over each row of trees. We removed the planter from the tractor and replaced it with the fabric-laying machine. An 80-pound roll of fabric attaches to the “layer” and as the tractor moves forward, the fabric rolls onto the field and over the trees. One of us sat on the “layer” and sprayed a dot of paint on the fabric every time it rolled over a tree, while another followed behind the equipment with a utility knife and cut out every tree and a third stapled the fabric every couple of feet. It was truly back breaking work. However the fabric allows the trees to be free of competition and weeds while they become established over the next couple of years, and it will eventually decompose into the earth.

The fabric took us two weeks to lay, and now our job for the conservation district is coming to a close. We have a couple of hand-plants to do for some landowners, but then we can (finally!) focus entirely on our home projects.

Power auger

Hand planting trees in a two-year old shelterbelt

Gardening

The five beds that make up the spring garden are green and growing. Kale, spinach, lettuce, and arugula will be ready for picking in a couple weeks. The peas are climbing towards their trellis and the carrots are just poking through the soil. Feeling high on our spring garden success and the nice weather, we planted three of the summer beds with our best tomato, pepper, and broccoli transplants, along with nasturtium, beans, many herbs, and cucumbers. We learned a hard lesson a couple of days later when we were hit by strong, cold winds that whipped and shredded our new, utterly unprotected seedlings. Most of our tomatoes, peppers, and broccoli plants withered away into nothing on top of the soil, along with our hard work in raising them all winter. We’d been incredibly stupid in thinking they could thrive exposed to the elements, but none of our gardening books stressed wind protection and we forgot all about our harsh prairie gales. We took the liberty of bringing home some of the thick cardboard rolls from work, cut them up and placed them around the surviving transplants. Thankfully we still have plenty pepper and tomato seedlings in the garage, waiting for a calm spring day.

The problem with having more seeds than we know what to do with is that we are now planting every available space along the perimeter of the fence with potatoes, flowers, extra beans, and watermelon!

Potato spuds line the fence

Peas beginning to climb their trellis

Kale!

Carrots in between radishes

Cucumbers in hills

We are proud of our corn

Bush beans

One ravaged but surviving pepper

Radish!

Power House Weekend

For the first time in four weeks, we had a beautiful weekend without rain. We took advantage of the weather and invited John and Maureen to come help us put up the rafters and shingles on our tiny home roof. With scaffolding erected outside and inside the house, Connor and I nailed rafters one after the other, almost as fast as John was cutting them. The rafters gave the one room home a defined sense of space, and curiously made the whole area seem larger than before. Next was the roof sheathing, just one layer of OSB particleboard nailed to the rafters, and then a heavy duty strip of ice guard around the edges. The ice guard prevents ice from building up underneath the shingles. Thick roofing felt was laid in rows in the center of the roof, and with that we were ready to shingle! Two layers on the bottom and the rest overlapping all the way up the roof in a simple pattern, we worked until it was to dark to see the nails we needed to hammer in. Upon reaching the top of the roof slant, we realized why most roofs have a peak. The peak allows water to run off on both sides of the roof without trickling beneath the shingles, but our roof design leaves the shingle edges exposed on the highest point of the roof.

It took all four of us to roll out the 9-foot tall Typar building paper and staple it to the exterior walls. Connor and I carried out windows one by one and with extreme trepidation lifted them into their rough opening slots. There was room to spare around each one where we wriggled in a couple shims, leveled the whole window, and nailed the flange to the studs. Our most expensive $25 window was the only one that gave us trouble with a warped flange (irony?) but a couple hours later Boom! Three windows and one door were proudly decorating our wrapped walls.

Connor and I spent many days discussing our off-the-grid pursuit – the dream, the difficulties, the money, and the future uses of our tiny home – and we made the decision to forgo this aspiration temporarily. We realized that living off the grid here and now would mean more survival than living. We don’t have and couldn’t afford solar powered technology right now, and that would mean candles and lanterns, few options for keeping food cold, and no way to charge phones or laptops for communication. But the biggest reason to run electricity through the house is due to the fact that we’ll be traveling with this home to who knows where, and the option of hooking the house up to an available electrical source can only be made now, before we install interior walls. One day we dream of true off grid living (and earthships and goats and month-long backpacking...) but for now we're taking one project at a time.