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 …

Next time I build a shed (which will be next spring; I have to redo the wood shed before it collapses under its own ugliness) I’ll do it like this. The bike shed, so named because we prefer to store bikes and other outdoor miscellany in a shed rather under (or next to) a tarp …

I don’t think I’ve ever posted a picture of the inside of the greenhouse, at least once it started making things green. Here you see the wraparound shelves made of office light fixtures; Emma and I completed the shelves on the right after I wrote about them, but Jess found to my consternation that not …

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 feel like I’m always bragging about our lives up here. I hope you don’t feel that way. I don’t think it’s bragging to be happy with your life and you like sharing that with others. It’s a nice thing look at your life and think, hey, I wouldn’t change a thing. (Except my job, …

When the kids were younger and I mentioned home schooling to Jess, she didn’t like the idea. She was glad to have the kids out of the house during the school year, and she didn’t want them hanging around. This is understandable since when Emma was in, say, 5th grade, we had Becca in 4th, …

Long, long ago when I was considering trading in my old Camry for a four-wheel-drive something or other, I wondered if I should buy an old pickup truck. For various reasons, I opted not to; and though I’m glad we have the Jeep, we’ve had to make do occasionally. For example, when we built our …

I pulled the old toboggans out of the wood shed because I had to replace them with wood, and also because I thought it would be easier to use a toboggan than a wheelbarrow to pull firewood off the steep, overgrown hill behind our house. (I was right, but unfortunately I had already brought most …

So last Saturday our branch of the Church had a wood project, which was basically an excuse for a bunch of guys with chain saws and mauls to prove their manliness while providing wood to widows and single ladies who heat their homes with wood and cannot provide their own. After loading my brake-lightless, chainless, …

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 …