Cottage Life

The go-to source for cottagers, the award-winning Cottage Life offers valuable advice as well as profiles, how-to articles, recipes, essays, issues pieces, and lifestyle stories that help readers look after their cottages, entertain guests and, of course, kick back and have fun.

S’more stuff • Watch every show on the Cottage Life channel for free from Feb. 26–Apr. 28!

Contributors

Spotlight • Hooray for the Cottage Q&A

Masthead

Editor’s Note: In butter tart eaters we trust

Your Letters: Murmurs and mumblings

Waterfront • Bust out the boats; hit the the dock or the water. Brrr. But you can handle it! Think warm thoughts.

A themed hammock made from discarded tug lines

How this cottager started a new scholarship program

Recipe: Cheesy beer bread

The origin of seven wild-species-inspired idioms

A community group rallied together on Facebook to save this fox’s life

Reporter: Phrag fight, eco cops & call stall

A gaggle of blue jays and some funny comments • We posted this shot on Instagram, and you blew up our feed with comments about blue jays…and about Blue Jays.

In Town: Carley Fortune’s favourite spots in Barry’s Bay

Buy the Way: This cottage purchase took a leap of faith

Workshop • Opening up better cottage experiences since 1988

Portable power station buyer's guide

A Finnish-inspired reader project

Repair strategies for those leaky fridge and woodstove seals

Cut PVC pipe in tight spaces with this trick

A Leopold bench you can build in one weekend

These materials will lower your cottage's carbon footprint

Cottage Q&A: Best mattresses for humidity; gray fox or red fox?; a mysterious rash from the lake; capital gains and selling the cottage; how many wildfires do trains cause?

A super structure • The built-in bat boxes and a repurposed building material are the heroes of this sky-high retreat

Our totally debatable, not-at-all logical, completely unscientific best of all things cottage country • WITH RESPONSES FROM YOU, OUR LOYAL READERS

Meet Her at the Lake: How bestselling novelist Carley Fortune got her start at the cottage • When Carley Fortune started writing her bestselling novels, she didn’t have a plot, a cast of characters, or even a genre in mind. But she sure had a setting

Our handy guide to mastering seven key knots (while maintaining the life of your lines)

Here’s how wildlife babies learn to navigate the world • And so are the cubs and the chicks and the fawns. Wildlife babies don’t have books to guide them, but they have their own ways of learning how to navigate the world. Here are their secrets

The snow is still on the ground when spring beauty bursts to life • The snow’s still on the ground when spring beauty bursts to life beneath the leafless trees

A fun, made-up name that makes getting your kids into their PFDs a lot easier