I’m sure the gardening books are right when they advise us to test the pH and plant this plant early and that plant later and rotate the crops and don’t put these plants together etc. etc. But I’m impatient. If I’m in charge of the garden I put the seeds in the ground on one …

Here’s our greenhouse with the surviving warm-weather plants that will remain there all season—peppers, watermelon, anything that can’t live outside. At the bottom center you can just make out the chipmunk trap.
chipmunk (chip’ munk) n. Any of several small striped terrestrial squirrels of the genera Tamias and Eutamias; has cheek pouches and a light and …

I went down with Jess this morning to take some pictures with our camera which is just begging to be put out of its misery. Jess let out all 23 poultry, fed and watered them, and gathered eggs, while I wandered around taking pictures. Usually I’m upstairs studying scriptures at this time in the morning, …

Just like last year, Jess has started this year’s garden indoors, in the window-seat just off my studio, in a sunny south-facing window. Out of the window you can see down our steep driveway to the Forest Service road, and the long slopes of mountains beyond with their heavy cape of trees. But inside, we’ve …

Well, the glass is finally on the greenhouse. Yahoo! All I have to do now is finish wrapping it with plastic sheeting to keep the snow out of it. You can see that we’ve put our bikes and various other summer paraphernalia in there to keep them out of the snow; but later on this …

Here we have quite possibly the oddest photograph yet posted on The Self-Reliants. If you can guess what it is in two seconds or less, you win! Time’s up, it’s carrots. I had to stir up these few from their long winter’s nap so I could get a picture. They look curly and squat like …

Well, this year our garden pumpkins were dinky (again), and I was going to say I didn’t know why– but I think it do. They need feedin’, and we didn’t feed them. All the manure went to the other plants and flowers, and our pumpkins struggled along as best they could.
Enter Jean, an older lady …

Well, it did its best. I should have had Jess hold her hand in this shot for scale, but this is actually a cantaloupe about the side of an egg. It’s actually an Alaskan cantaloupe (that’s what the folks at the seed catalog called it), so we thunk it would do well up here in …

Adam and Jen posted a note Sunday at church: Help! Come pick beans and I’ll give you half of what you pick! So on Monday evening, we went.
Their garden must be half an acre in size. String beans, corn, tomatoes, and I don’t know what all. The beans apparently came on too late for them …

1. Jessica took a picture of her harvest yesterday morning. Clockwise from left, we have cucumbers (can you believe it? We’ve never been able to raise cukes!), tomatoes, the outlet that’s still unfixed because I left too little room for the screws when we installed the tille (I should just fix it with construction adhesive …