When the cold weather hit a few weeks back, Jess was forced to pick all of her tomatoes, even though few of them were ripe. The adolescent fruit* huddled in the mud room for a few weeks, huddled together in boxes and buckets, awaiting their transition from green to red. Then they started all turning …

I’m a big believer in global warming. It happens every year, and around here we call it “summer.” This year, though, “summer” stumbled on its appearance. The climate didn’t warm up all that much, though it did rain a lot. Our carrots, beans, and lettuce loved it. Our tomatoes and squash? Not so much. The …

Noodles the cat turns her back on some of this year’s onions, just like many a child. I grew up with onions in my food, so I like them. Jess didn’t discover cooking with green onions until she married me, and now she’s a devoted fan. (Thus the next generation is unwittingly drawn in to …

These are out of the raspberry patch down by the garden. You see a couple of varieties here, golden and red, as well as some of the honest debris that accompanies home-grown foods before they’re washed. We got enough to make 15 pints of freezer jam (more on that later) and to eat some early-morning …

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 …

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 …