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 …

Well, there it is—our yearly harvest of garlic. Think it’ll be enough? If it’s too much, you’ll know because my posts will start smelling of it. This batch has actually been drying inside the shoop; it’s just taken me a while to post the picture. Someday when we have time (say, in about a hundred …

Jess found strawberries for six bucks a flat the other day, and brought home four flats. Yes, they’re from a factory farm somewhere in the western hemisphere; yes, they were probably genetically designed to withstand nuclear bombs while still retaining a remote taste of strawberries. But our strawberry bed is not up to this level …

Jess doesn’t like me to take pictures of her, so I had to crop her out of this image. (Besides, the picture is out of focus.) The other two beauties in this shot are a Romaine lettuce (left) and Chinese cabbage she brought up from the garden this morning. On the counter behind her is …

Maybe I should start marketing pictures of our Romaine lettuce (I think that’s what it is) to seed catalogs this year as champions of Romaine-ness. And if you steal a copy of this picture to represent as your own lettuce, I wouldn’t blame you. I don’t think anything we’ve ever grown has looked that healthy. …