Final weeks on the prairie

A collection of photos from our last month and a half in South Dakota. 

In mid-August, Connor's sister Jenny and her friend Elizabeth came to visit us, and they were soon joined by Connor's aunt Judy, uncle Travis, and cousin Miranda. It was a welcome chance of pace and we had a wonderful time visiting with everyone. 

Throughout the summer Connor and I sat through many high-severity storms with fast winds that pushed water underneath the garage door and into the cabin. None of our blanket tricks worked. 

Connor picks wild plums for a berry crisp

We can hardly keep up with our daily produce - in season now are cucumbers, beans, tomatoes, popcorn, herbs, green peppers, and jalepinos.

Mati and Emily shell beans while I make sage bundles

Giant carrots continued to grow without our noticing

Sweet corn, carrots, runner beans, bush beans, and tomatoes to be frozen or stored

Another hopefully ripe watermelon to test, this one over 25 lbs...

Turns out to actually be ripe and delicious!

Yield from our popcorn plants after drying for 3 weeks. 

My sister Emily helps us paint with colors donated from Maureen Fischer. We went mostly with browns...

With a splash of pomegranate red in our kitchen.

Mati and Connor build a front porch

The front is complete

Michael Fields and his friend Ben help finish our interior painting

Door trim

Window trim with a stool and apron

The beginnings of a kitchen counter

Turquoise blue bathroom and kitchen, both in progress

Our laminate flooring, 95% complete

Our boss from the conservation district agreed to take our chickens and their coop - they didn't seem to mind riding sideways on their roost and their new home means no slaughtering!

A full box of cherry tomatoes for my mother

And a box of canning tomatoes brought home to Naperville

Connor and I will return to finish the Tiny Home after our marriage on Sept. 26th, and plan on living in it for a few weeks after our honeymoon and before our next adventure: Colorado. We'll post once more on the finished interior and living in a 128 sq.ft. living space!

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike. - John Muir

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. 

Please come help us eat all of our peas! (And other things...)

Hot, sticky, and stormy.  Summer is here and both Claire and I welcome it with open arms (even though it makes hard work miserable).  Insects, spiders, ticks, snakes, deer, ground squirrels, song birds, pheasants, coyotes, and many more creatures roam freely through the tall grass and trees, occasionally gracing us with their presence.  We believe, however, that nothing enjoys the summer heat more than the variety of plants in our garden.  50 beans, 29 tomatoes, 20 potatoes, 8 cucumbers, 2 peppers,  and 1 nasturtium have flowered.  Claire and I eat from our garden every single day.  Some times it's simply a salad mix (chard, spinach, lettuce, peas, kale, cilantro, parsley, etc.) while other times we are treated with radishes, young potatoes, and even shallots.  Our peas have exploded with delicious green pods and it is not uncommon to have a basket full of them.  I once read that plants are holy.  They must be treated with the utmost respect and handled with love and care in order to thrive and give nourishment to our bodies.  We have found this to be true. We strive to give each individual our attention and praise, and we are rewarded with strong, healthy plants that have resisted insects and disease. Our garden is undoubtedly the largest and most time consuming task we undertook this summer.  It has halted work on the tiny home countless times but it has taught us to be patient and understanding. Whether it's in produce, beauty, or wildlife, our garden has found a way to give back to us and we are greatly appreciative. 

Claire with a hefty harvest for dinner!

Connor replacing spinach with winter onions.  Thank you Bob and Barb for the absurd amount of onions, we love them!

On July 5th, a storm from the Northwest blew down all of our sweet corn!  This was emotionally straining but we acted fast and built a support system for each row.

First nasturtium flower!

Cucumber flowers

On July 2nd, I drove Claire to the Sioux Falls airport so she could catch a flight to Los Angeles to spend the 4th with her family.  Beach time, board games, and relaxing is what she had to look forward to.  I had a different sort of weekend planned.  My dad spent the weekend with me and we worked diligently on the tiny home.  To begin, he taught me how to wire a house.  I applaud him for this because I am not an easy person to teach things too and wiring is not a simple task.  After endless drilling, stringing, cutting, and even some shocking, we finally finished!  Six lights and seven outlets now litter our little home and give us the ability to work through the night.  Insulating was the next step.  Sadly, this step began mid-day on a 90 degree afternoon.  Dressed in long sleeves, pants, and face masks, we stapled twenty rolls of R-15 insulation to the walls and ceiling.  A plastic vapor barrier was stapled on next, followed by Sheetrock.  We are currently in the middle of taping joints and holes but hope to be painting soon!

          

We decided to add a loft for storage over the middle of the house and bathroom.

Connor cutting out the bottom of the bathroom door frame.

Our kitchen with outlets and drywall

Here is our attempt at a composting toilet!  It was good practice considering we have decided to build all of our own cabinets and shelves. The toilet will sit on legs and hide a 5-gallon bucket.   

Lights in the bathroom and over the middle table

Kitchen lights

We are kept constantly busy during these summer months but we love the challenge.  Hopefully one day soon we will have time to write a long, detailed post with a video or two.  Until then, enjoy this Common Lilac seedling!  Peace and love.

"The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you, don't go back to sleep." ~ Rumi