Jessica took this shot out of our front window the other morning (or maybe Emma did; she’s into photography). You can see the snow has already moved into the high country, including the cliffs and long rocky slopes of Wanderer’s Peak. (That’s my mountain; but I let others visit it when they want to.) You …

Well, a couple of months back Jess and I were driving into town, admiring the elderberry bushes heavily laden with the tiny light-blue berries. Next time we were out together we threw a pair of kitchen shears and a couple of smallish boxes in the back of the Jeep. We drove along a back road …

New England has its maples. We have our aspens, birches, and especially our tamaracks. Tamarack (Larix laricina) is conifer whose needles turn orange in the autumn and fall off the tree. There is a stand of them on the northwest border of our property, and when the sunrise moves south in the fall it illuminates …

“The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.“ Didja recognize that? If not, my friend, it’s time to go back and read the United States Constitution. In fact, I think our nation would be quite a different place nowadays if more people (especially in Washington) were familiar with that …

Jessica wrote today’s post. Her soups are some of my favorite foods, no matter what kind they are. She knows what I like. I am a recipe fanatic. I will admit it. I love recipe books. I clip the recipes I like out of every magazine I legally can. I ask for recipes from those …

Jessica met me on the stairs last night carrying a fresh load of laundry up. She held out Jacob’s freshly-washed baby blanket and said, “Feel this!” With my keen sense of the obvious, I said that it felt soft and fuzzy. She said, “It’s way soft and fuzzy! And clean! It seems like since we …

Here is Sarah examining the first batch of laundry washed with our homemade laundry soap. It was just coming out of the dryer (no clothesline; autumn is pretty rainy around here) when Sarah, age 2, came galloping in to help. She put her head into the dryer and –which is cuter, a dumb old batch …

Well, there it is. When Jess was putting this year’s cider into the root cellar, she had me bring up these two jars—the last of last year’s cider stash. It’s kind of funny that our quantity of cider from last year lined up so tidily with what we produced this year, but there you are. …

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 …

We were running out of our previous batch of window/surface cleaner last night so I whipped up some more. Last time I refilled this commercial Windex bottle was the first time I had ever made my own concoction, and it worked so well I don’t think anybody noticed (except the color was a little different). …