Dreaded Drywall and Pecks of Pickles

Drywall Monotony
With weeks of very little to write about, we finally have some progress to show! Our work at the conservation district came to a close last week and we've found the time and willpower to really make some changes in the tiny home. For review, our home has been in a sad state of sheetrock and drywall for the past month. (A MONTH!!) Neither of us particularly enjoyed this stage of construction and thus we found it difficult to rally each day, finding other tasks in the garden (our tomatoes really needed trellises) or around the cabin to fill our time. We are also both fairly sure we will never build a home with sheetrock again. So very slowly we taped, compounded, and sanded until a few days ago when we realized we were almost done, and in a last-ditch effort to relieve ourselves from the mundanity of drywall, we pushed 8-hour days to finish at last. (The bathroom remains unfinished due to a light circuit in need of fixing, but we are ignoring that.) For all intents and purposes, we are ready to prime and paint! Oh give us some color at last...

At this point we've realized we won't be living very long in the tiny home this summer. In fact we are really hoping we can complete it before moving back to Illinois to be married in September. But the fact is that time gets away from us and plans change and events crop up to alter our original ideas, and we are content with that. We'll finish the tiny home before we leave, and we'll know it's here for us to come back to, for others to stay in, or for us to one day transport to another location.

Garden Developments
The garden continues to produce and amaze us. In a few days we collected enough cucumbers to feed all of South Dakota, and in one 5-hour morning we canned the whole lot of them using dill from the garden. If you like dill pickles, one of these jars is yours! Connor's watermelons are almost the size of soccer balls but when we cut one open to try, we found unripened, white flesh... not what we were hoping to eat. On a brighter note, most of our popcorn is ripe and Connor spent an afternoon harvesting, husking, and hanging them to dry in the garage. They'll dry for a few weeks before we can test pop them. The tomatoes are ripening slowly... one here and one there but never more than two on a plant. The ripe ones never make it to the kitchen.

Cutting a small mountain of cucumbers for pickling

Canning pickles for long-term storage

Three batches and five hours later... a display worthy of any store front!

So proud of our first watermelon...

Until we realized it was unripe:(

Harvesting popcorn

Bee hives at the edge of the property

Morning feeding - the chickens are so excited they follow me to and from the shed. Still going strong on egg production - we remain unaffected by the recent egg price hikes.