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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 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 …