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 …

Okay, here’s what Jessica canned last week: 91 quarts of nectarines45 pints of salsa33 quarts of diced tomatoes30 quarts of tomato soup11 pints of nectarine jamWith help from the kids of course. Natalie ties on her apron in the midst of the chaos. Middle left you see our satellite-dish-sized bowl with the latest batch of …

Well, I finally recovered our Utah vacation pictures off my camera, which now seems rather to eat pictures than give them up. I’ll have to get a new card with all my spare money. Anyway, one of them is this one of the Manti Utah Temple, where Jessica and I were married 14 years, 4 …

We have a Bushy-Tailed Wood Rat building, and rebuilding, a nest in the engine of the BGF. So technically, I suppose we have a BTWR in the BGF, or ABTWRNDBGF. How do we know it’s a BTWR? I met him one morning, trapped under the recycle bin on the back porch. The dogs had been …

The surprising thing is, there’s another ten feet or so of wood extending out to the left of this shot. It goes behind the BGF, though, so you can’t see it all. Of COURSE I just had to go out this morning and re-stack Woodpile #5 that tumbled down last week. I figure we’ll have …

So we took the kids out behind the Church on Friday and picked apples. The branches were loaded down and the neighbor said they were ripe, but I’m having my doubts. Anyway, Katie, Abby and (temporarily) Natalie got up in the tree and threw apples down (not at the rest of us, of course); Jess …

I have a good job, but I’m keeping my eyes open. Any suggestions? This October I will have been at this company for 11 years. It has financed the purchase of our home on three separate occasions. Its insurance has paid for the births of five of our children; its dental plan, for all our …

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 …

Well, I just can’t quit blabbing about how great it is to make your own food. Here is supper from the other night. The bread is my homemade wheat bread, toasted and slathered with butter.* The water’s from our well, which at 705 feet deep had BETTER be producing clean water (the county has tested …

Thank goodness for neighbors. Actually, Diana lives an hour away, but she was getting rid of her chickens (I got the last two, actually) and while I was there she decided to get rid of her chicken stuff. So on Monday night when I came home with two Production Reds in a cardboard box in …