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.

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Cottage Life

Can’t go south? Go north instead

Your Letters

Mark your Caldendars! Winter is Here. • Oh! You don’t have a calendar? We can help you with that. To order a copy of the official 2021 Cottage Life calendar, featuring beautiful photo contest images like this one, check out cottagelife.com/calendar. It’s the best calendar ever. Truth. We are not biased.

The men, the legend

Some Wicket Good Fun

Winter Activity

Bills up, fish & frost fix

If she reads it, they will come

When Cookers Attack • No-fail recipe? Wrong! Sometimes a slow cooker recipe can fail. But it’s not the machine’s fault, dammit. Slow cookers aren’t meant to cook everything.

About Time

Workshop • Making Krazy Karpets and old motorboat seats useful since 1988.

Sander sort-out • What’s the next—or first—sander you need in your tool shed?

The little engine that couldn’t

What wee do in the shadows

Five-minute heater tune-up

Keep your car battery toasty

Learn after reading • Looking to introduce a young cottager to the workshop? Here are some books to get them (and you) started.

Shingle, shake & shim

A Mushroom of one’s room

How do I banish that smoky smell?

The gang’s all here? • Lending your precious retreat to a pal is a kind gesture, sure. But things can get uncomfortable if they treat the cottage as their own

A bolthole in the bush • My camp is rough, filled with kitsch…and blissful. What is it about the old rustic cabin that appeals to us? I’m beginning to understand

All the world’s a page • Cottaging may be Canadian, but Colin and Justin’s new book, Escapology, shows how design inspiration can come from all over

Portrait of small town life in winter, in two parts • COTTAGE COUNTRY IS A DIFFERENT PLACE ONCE THE COTTAGERS HAVE GONE HOME. TAKE A LOOK BEHIND THE SNOWY CURTAIN

Life in a northern town

Have Cottage, will Travel • The commute. Sigh. But wait, it doesn’t have to be boring or stressful. For best-advice tips, we went to the experts—from mechanics to cops to doctors. (Doctors? Yes. Because, um, is it okay to hold your pee if you can’t stop?) Read on: soon you’ll love the cottage drive just as much as the rest of the weekend

Same old lake, fresh new season • How the deliberate pace of winter paddling, one j-stroke at a time, offers a different view on the familiar

The viewfinders • More of you picked up the camera and entered our annual photo contest than ever before (almost 10,000!). Our judges crowned these shots the winners

It’s a numbers game • The up-and-down red-backed vole population influences life in the forest, from fungi to small mammals

The page-turners