Gardeners' Holidays 2017: Late Harvest

As the 2017 gardening season heads into its final weeks, I've been taking stock of how all our crops did this year compared to previous years. The results appear very mixed. Our basil, which in past years was so prolific that we couldn't even figure out how to store it all, has given us only the equivalent of a couple of bunches. Last year we got massive amounts of cucumbers; this year, most of the cucumber seeds we planted never germinated, and we ended up harvesting only a handful of cukes from the few vines that survived. Even the zucchini plants gave us only a few good-sized fruits before yielding to borer damage. (We thought we'd managed to thwart the borers by burying the stems in dirt, but apparently all we did was delay the inevitable.)

On the other hand, our pepper plants have done pretty well; the new Gilboa variety, a sweet bell, was disappointing, but the Carmen and Jimmy Nardello frying peppers have both produced about nine good-sized peppers and are still going. Ditto for the tomatoes; the Black Prince and Mr. Fumarole were disappointing, but the new Pineapple variety has been hugely productive, and the Sun Golds were as abundant as ever—and there are still a few of those out on the vines as well. (We'll have to bring them all in for box ripening before the first frost hits, but according to the weather report, it's likely to be late this year—possibly not until after Thanksgiving.)

And for the piece de resistance, yesterday Brian brought in the rest of our butternut squash crop off the now-withered vines: a total of 11 squash, not counting the two we've already eaten. This is probably the best squash crop we've had since the year a rogue vine sprang out of our compost bin and took over the entire side yard. If we consume them at the rate of two squash per month, we can make them last until spring. (We probably can't spare one to use in place of pumpkin for a Thanksgiving pie, but we still have plenty of home-grown rhubarb to use for the other one.)

Of course, at the rate of two squash per month, that doesn't leave us any for tonight's dinner, but that's okay; we happen to have several ripe tomatoes that need using up, as well as an eggplant we picked up on Friday at the farmers' market. So we'll be celebrating the Late Harvest with a dinner of Baingan Bharta—made from this recipe—and top it off with some tea and cookies as we enjoy a round of role-playing games with friends. How cozy is that as a way to spend a chilly fall evening?

What do to when IKEA lets you down

Regular readers of this blog know that Brian and I are both big fans of IKEA. We've bought all kinds of goodies there—patio furniture, towels, foodstuffs, rechargeable batteries, kitchen gadgets, and holiday gifts. We've hacked IKEA furniture to fit over our space heaters and to make a sitting/standing desk for Brian. We've even celebrated our anniversary there, preferring an afternoon of bouncing on POANG chairs, exploring the model apartment layouts, browsing the collection of kitchen tools and kids' toys, and eating Swedish delicacies to such traditional, pricey entertainments as dining and dancing.

But lately, I've started to feel like IKEA has been letting us down. It started last year, when we noticed that its selection of LED light bulbs wasn't that impressive. The bulbs weren't really any cheaper than the ones at Home Depot, and they didn't have any that were particularly bright. Then, on our last anniversary trip there, we found that several of the things on our shopping list weren't available. My beloved MELLANROST decaf coffee, which I'd been planning to stock up on, had been supplanted by a new line of organic coffee called PÅTÅR, which doesn't come in a decaffeinated version. And worse still, when we went looking for a refill brush for our old LILLHOLMEN toilet brush holder, we discovered that both the holder and the LOSSNEN refills that fit it were no longer available. Instead, they had a new brush insert, called HEJAREN, which was sized for its newer toilet brush holders and probably wouldn't fit our old one. This was a major bummer, because the whole reason we'd bought the LILLHOLMEN in the first place was because it was so much more ecofrugal to replace the brush with a cheap refill when it wore out, rather than being forced to discard brush and handle together. If the refills were no longer available, the whole piece was now useless—even though the screw-on handle and holder were still perfectly good.

However, we thought there was a chance we could make the LILLHOLMEN work with the new HEJAREN inserts, so we decided to take a $3 risk and buy a couple. After a bit of tinkering, Brian was able to get the new insert screwed into place, and it was just short enough to fit into the base—but it wasn't exactly secure. Every time I tried to brush the toilet bowl with it, the slightest amount of pressure caused the brush to bend and threaten to snap. And eventually, on maybe the third or fourth use, that's exactly what it did, breaking off right at the point where the insert attached to the handle.


To add insult to injury, another IKEA tool that we used all the time in our bathroom, our little shower squeegee, chose the same week to break. I just went to wipe the shower walls with it as usual, and it snapped right off at the handle. I suppose I can't complain too much about this one, since it only cost us $2 to begin with and we'd been using it for several years, but it did feel like all our IKEA products were failing us at once.

Our first thought was to try to repair the damaged items, since that's usually (though not always) more ecofrugal than buying new ones. Brian tried fixing the squeegee with epoxy, fitting it around the join and molding it into all the cracks, but to no avail; the first time I tried to use it, it snapped right in the same place. As for the toilet brush, we could probably have glued the broken end of the insert back on, but we quickly realized there wasn't much point, as it still wouldn't fit the handle. It would still be subject to the same stress every time we used it, so it would almost certainly break again.

So then we headed out to Bed Bath & Beyond to try and find replacements for the two damaged items. And there, we got a quick, sharp reminder of just why IKEA, despite its shortcomings, is still our favorite place to shop for small items like these. The store had a fairly large assortment of shower squeegees, but none for less than $10, when the perfectly functional IKEA one that we'd been using for years had cost only $2. (Even with inflation, a similar item there—made with recycled plastic, no less—costs the same today.) As for the toilet brushes, Bed Bath & Beyond was charging $15 and up for a perfectly plain, utilitarian model such as you could buy at IKEA for under a dollar. At those prices, we could spend the $8.50 in tolls for a trip up to IKEA and spend the same amount (and we'd be able to get a new toilet brush that would be refillable, so it would cost less in the long run).

So we walked out of Bed Bath & Beyond pretty much convinced that there was no reason ever to go back; nothing there, as far as we can tell, is ever going to be a good deal, even with the inevitable 20% off coupon that arrives regularly in our mail. But on the other hand, making a trip up to IKEA for a cheaper alternative is a much bigger undertaking, and we wouldn't have time for it until the next weekend at least. Letting water build up on our shower walls for a whole week didn't seem like a good option.

In the end, we compromised. We picked up a reasonably priced squeegee at Target for $3.50, and Brian took another crack at repairing the old toilet brush using Sugru, a nifty product that's like a cross between Superglue and modeling clay. We can't be sure how well the repaired brush will hold, and even if it does, it will no longer be refillable—but at least we'll be able to use our existing brush a little longer, which will give us time to shop for a more reasonable replacement.

Money Crashers: Cheap Computer Games – Best Free & Affordable Options

As a complement to my Money Crashers article on the joys of tabletop gaming, I've also done one on how to enjoy electronic games on a budget. I've checked lists at gaming publications to find the top-rated games in different categories - war games, fantasy games, MMORPGs - that you can play for free (although some of them are only trial versions, and others charge for in-app purchases).

I've also added a section on my favorite type of computer game, old-fashioned text adventures (like Zork). There's a huge number of these available for free online, they don't require a sophisticated computer setup, and the best ones are, in my opinion, even more compelling than the best graphical games. Sure, I know computer graphics are more realistic than ever, and I know we're on the verge of a revolution in virtual reality that will make it possible to experience the game world even more fully—but I still maintain that there are some things a well-written story can do that no visual experience can ever match. In an IF (interactive fiction) game, you can experience not only sights and sounds, but also smells, tastes, and more importantly still, thoughts and feelings. How can graphics ever do that?

If you've never tried it before, I urge you to give just one of these text adventures a try and see for yourself. Andrew Plotkin's The Dreamhold is a good one for new players, but any of the games in this "starter pack" list could be a good choice.

And to see the rest of the game choices, check out the full article: Cheap Computer Games – Best Free & Affordable Options

Money Crashers: “Free” Stuff

In this 2013 post, I talked a bit about the psychology of the word "free," and how it can lure us into making decisions that aren't necessarily in our interest. In my latest Money Crashers post, I explore this idea in more detail. I talk about how the use of the word "free" affects consumer behavior and give several examples of "free" offers—free shipping, free trials, free gifts with purchase—that end up costing you money in different ways. Then I wrap it up with a few pointers on how to avoid falling into the "free" trap.

As a side note, you may find the title of this piece—How to Avoid Bait & Switch Advertising Scams Offering “Free” Stuff—a little confusing, since the article isn't really about "scams" and is only loosely related to "bait and switch." My original proposed title was "When 'Free' is Too Expensive," but my editor explained that "there really wasn't any search traffic opportunities" for this topic. So instead, he decided to give it a title about "how to avoid bait and switch scams," a topic that attracted "plenty" of search traffic. Ironically, this means the article itself now is a bait and switch scam, because it's trying to lure in people looking for articles on a completely different topic. But at least I managed to talk him into tacking on a reference to the word "free" in the title, so readers won't be completely baffled.

[UPDATE, October 2021: This piece was recently revised, and it got a new title that's less misleading and a new URL to go with it. You can find the updated piece here: The Psychology of Free – How “Free Stuff” Causes You to Spend.]

Recipes of the Month: Wilted Lettuce and Roasted Veggies with Quinoa

This month, Brian and I haven't tried any brand-new vegetable recipes yet, but we have made two new variants on recipes we'd done before. So I figured I'd just share these two variants, and it would add up to the equivalent of one complete Recipe of the Month.

The first one came about because last week we bought a bunch of green leaf lettuce at the farmers' market, and when we tasted it, we found it was unusually tough and somewhat bitter. It wasn't very good as a salad, so Brian came up with the idea of trying it in a different form: wilted lettuce, which he remembered having as a kid. He thought his mom had given him the recipe for it, but when he went through his recipe file, he couldn't find it, so instead he just prepared with the same dressing we use for dandelion greens: chopped, cooked bacon with the drippings, red onion, cider vinegar, and brown sugar. However, instead of just pouring this over the greens the way he does for dandelions, he actually put the torn lettuce leaves into the pan and let them heat until they looked wilted, but not soggy. And the result was...not bad. Maybe not quite as good as the same recipe with dandelion greens, but it certainly made this tough lettuce more palatable. I'd certainly consider using it again if we find ourselves with a head of lettuce, or any other kind of greens, that's too stringy or too bitter to eat raw.

The second recipe was also kind of an accident. At the time we bought the tough head of lettuce, we also picked up a couple of zucchini, intending to grill them. This is a dish we've made several times before; what Brian typically does is to slice the zucchini into narrow spears and toss them with a mixture of olive oil, soy sauce, sesame oil, and garlic powder, then grill them until they're tender. We usually make these alongside free-range turkey franks from the Amish market, since the long and narrow zucchini spears can be tucked into a roll either along with or instead of the hot dog, depending on how you prefer to eat them.

However, a combination of rainy weather and busy schedules conspired to keep Brian from being able to grill throughout the week. And over the course of that week, we also harvested quite a lot of tomatoes. Our new Pineapple tomato is continuing to produce big, plump fruits, and the Black Prince and Mr. Fumarole (which would be a great name for an alternative band) are producing smaller but steady yields. So I'd gone hunting for tomato recipes and discovered one in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything Vegetarian for Grilled Tomatoes with Basil, which basically is just what it sounds like: cut the tomatoes into thick slices, brush them with olive oil, sprinkle on salt and pepper, grill them until they start to caramelize, and serve them with chopped basil.

So my idea was that, as soon as the weather allowed, we could grill these tomatoes along with the zucchini, and serve it all up "on a bed of quinoa or something." (I chose quinoa more or less at random because it seemed like the kind of thing a chef probably would pair with grilled veggies; rice or pasta would probably work also, but quinoa has more protein, so it makes for a more complete meal.) And by this time, farmers' market Friday had rolled around again and we'd grabbed a couple of eggplant, so Brian decided to slice one of those and throw it on the grill as well. He used a modified version of our usual recipe for the zucchini, omitting the sesame oil, which he thought wouldn't go well with the tomato; the tomato and eggplant he just sliced and grilled plain.


The results of this experiment were a bit mixed. The zucchini spears cooked up to their usual tenderness, and the eggplant came out firm and nicely browned, but the tomatoes—two of our big Pineapples—sort of fell apart. Bittman says five minutes on the grill should get the tomato slices "soft but not mushy," but these tomatoes were fairly soft and juicy to start with, so they ended up without much structural integrity. Brian transferred them to a bowl, and we dished them out as a sort of sauce to accompany the other veggies. We rounded out the meal with quinoa, cooked in our favorite Penzey's veggie stock to boost the flavor, and a bit of pesto out of our freezer that Brian added to the assortment on a whim.

I tried various combinations of these ingredients and found that the zucchini, eggplant, and quinoa all went together very nicely. Adding some soft tomato to the mix was okay too, but didn't really do anything to enhance it. As for the pesto, I didn't think it worked that well with the other veggies, but Brian quite liked it with the quinoa. Since we didn't finish it all, he decided to re-freeze the rest of it and plan to make quinoa alla pesto at some later point, so perhaps I'll cover that in a future Recipe of the Month post.

While this "recipe" wasn't a complete success, the parts of it that worked—the zucchini, eggplant, and quinoa—made a very good dish by themselves, and I would recommend the combination to anyone who feels like throwing some veggies on the grill. We'll probably be making some version of this dish again, but I think we'll skip the tomatoes. There are plenty of other good things to do with fresh tomatoes and plenty of other good things to cook on the grill, so there's really no need to put the two things together.

The perils of refilling printer cartridges

In the past, I've indulged in a little bragging about how much money we saved by refilling the ink cartridges on our printer, rather than buying new ones. A great big bottle of black ink, I pointed out, cost less than a single black ink cartridge, and we were able to get so many refills out of it that it actually outlasted the printer. And it kept all those plastic cartridges out of the landfill, as well, making it an ecofrugal no-brainer.

Well, pride apparently goeth before a fall. Because as it turns out, this thrifty habit that we plumed ourselves on has actually backfired on us with our new printer—possibly costing us more money in the long run than we would have spent just buying new cartridges in the first place.

The problems first started last spring, when the printer suddenly started rejecting our refilled cartridges. We were puzzled, since we'd had it for over two years and had no problems refilling it until then, so we did some research and determined that apparently, this printer has an age limit on the cartridges it will accept. Since the original equipment cartridge was over two years old, the printer considered it unusable. So we decided to invest $14 in this chip resetter, which can basically trick the printer into thinking it has a brand-new cartridge. We tried this on the black ink cartridge and it worked, so we figured that was $14 well spent; it was still less than the cost of one new cartridge, and it should allow us to go on refilling our cartridges ad infinitum.

Thus, when the colored ink showed signs of running dry last month, we didn't hesitate to refill that too. This printer, as I mentioned back when we bought it, has three separate reservoirs for colored ink, so you can refill them individually as needed—but in this case, all three were low, so Brian did them all at once. The cyan and magenta inks posed no problem, but when he tried to refill the yellow ink, he saw through the little window in the ink reservoir that the refill ink he was using (from a set we'd bought years ago, back when we had the old HP printer) was reacting with the dregs of the Brother ink that was left in the cartridge, leaving behind a flaky precipitate. So he hastily emptied out the whole cartridge and rinsed it to remove all the precipitate before topping it back up again with the refill ink.

Well, okay, we figured, that was a bit of a nuisance, but at least we'd cleaned all the old ink out of the cartridge, so from here on out, we should have no further problems with the refills. Alas, what we completely forgot about was the ink already in the lines. This week, when I printed out a document in color for the first time since the refill, we found that we weren't getting any yellow ink. Brian tried running the cleaning cycle several times to no avail, so I did a quick search and found this video on cleaning the nozzles—and it was at that point that Brian realized all that precipitate he'd so carefully cleaned out of the cartridge itself had probably formed in the lines as well as soon as we started putting the yellow refill ink through them. In hindsight, he realized, he probably would have been better off just pulling out the yellow tank the minute he discovered the problem and buying a yellow refill from Brother.

But of course, it was too late to undo what we'd already done, so the best we could do was try to get those lines cleaned out. So we spent another $9 on this cleaning kit, complete with cleaning solution, a rubber tube to feed it into the nozzle, and a syringe to inject it. And today, Brian hauled the printer down to his workshop and got to work with the kit, trying to clear the lines. Since we'd been having a little trouble with the black ink as well, he tried it on that first, and it worked just as shown in the video, running right through the lines and pulling out the dried residue. However, on the clogged yellow line, it didn't go so smoothly. He had to apply more pressure to force the fluid into the lines, and when he tried to draw it back out, he wasn't able to clear them fully. So as of now, only the black ink is working. He plans to work on the yellow some more in the next few days, but he doesn't know whether he'll succeed in clearing it or not. If he can't, our only options will be to replace the printer or ditch the colored cartridges and use it only in black and white.

The moral of this story? If you plan to refill your printer cartridges, make sure you're using an ink that's compatible with your particular printer. If we'd sprung for a $26 Brother-specific refill kit at the time we bought the chip resetter, that would still have been cheaper than a new set of color cartridges, and a lot cheaper than having to replace the whole $100 printer.

An ecofrugal homemade cocoa mix

Since I work from home, it's easy for me to fix myself an afternoon snack every day (usually a bowl of popcorn). For Brian, however, noshing on the job poses more of a problem. Most days he's fine between lunch and dinner, but occasionally his blood sugar takes a dive and he needs a little something to get him through the afternoon. Unfortunately, he's found that he can't keep candy or any other kind of goodies in his desk drawer, because he can't resist munching on them, and then they're not there when he really needs them. So for a while, he had to rely on vending-machine snacks at around 60 cents a pop.

But a couple of years ago, we hit on a solution. I'd been given a gift of some fancy hot chocolate mix for Christmas, and while I liked it, I found I wasn't going through it very fast. It wasn't that much better than my regular homemade cocoa, and it wasn't any easier to make, so I kept saving it for a special occasion that never came. So I offered the mix to Brian to take to work as an emergency blood-sugar booster. This turned out to be just the ticket: it was easy enough to brew up a cup if he needed one, but that extra bit of work was enough to keep him from dipping into it at other times.

So, for the past couple of years, whenever he ran out his supply of cocoa mix, I'd pick up another container for him. We tried the chocolate-mint hot cocoa from Trader Joe's (okay, but not his favorite) and, more recently, the organic hot cocoa mix from Equal Exchange, which was sold at our local Ten Thousand Villages store. It was a bit pricey, but since he didn't go through it very fast, it seemed like a reasonable splurge.

Recently, however, our Ten Thousand Villages store closed down (waaah), leaving us looking around for a new brand to try. Unfortunately, the offerings at the local supermarket were pretty limited. Basically, we could choose either a fancy hot chocolate mix that came only in individual packets, which we deemed both too pricey and too wasteful, or Swiss Miss in a canister, which would probably serve the purpose, but didn't seem like much of a treat.

At this point, Brian decided to take matters into his own hands and try mixing up a hot cocoa mix from scratch. He checked out a variety of cocoa mix recipes on the Web, and they all seemed to have the same basic ingredients—dry milk, sugar, cocoa powder, and sometimes corn starch as a stabilizer. But most of them were missing one key ingredient: vanilla. The only ones he could find that included it called for "vanilla powder," which is an ingredient we've never seen in stores and weren't about to send away for just for this purpose.

Fortunately, my husband is a trained chemist. He was able to come up with a protocol (that's what scientists call a recipe, apparently) for turning our homemade vanilla extract into a form that could be used in a dry mix. He's still tinkering with the proportions, but here's his current protocol:

BRIAN'S HOT COCOA MIX
2 tsp vanilla extract
3/4 c sugar
3/4 c powdered milk
3/8 c cocoa powder
1 Tbsp corn starch
Put the sugar in a bowl and sprinkle the vanilla onto it. Allow to dry for about 2 hours, then stir it with a fork. Place the vanilla sugar and the rest of the ingredients in a food processor (NOTE: Brian used our Freecycled Magic Bullet) and grind to a fine powder.

You can then store this and use it just like a commercial hot cocoa mix, tweaking the proportions to suit your taste. Brian prefers to make it into what he calls "the cocoa equivalent of espresso," adding two heaping teaspoons to around half a mugful of hot water, but the same amount for a full mug would probably give you a standard-strength mixture.

I did some back-of-the-envelope calculations and found that the ingredients for a batch of this come to about $2.25, using organic cocoa (purchased in bulk from Dean's Beans), organic sugar (from Costco), and our homemade vanilla extract. That works out to about 10 cents per serving. By contrast, the Starbucks hot cocoa mix from Costco would cost around 32 cents per serving, and the snacks from the office vending machine around 60 cents. Combine this bargain price with the organic ingredients and the reusable packaging, and you've got an ecofrugal afternoon snack that any cubicle dweller—well, at least one who isn't a vegan or lactose-intolerant—can love.

Money Crashers: Repair Cafés & Fix-It Groups

As regular readers of this blog will know, whenever anything breaks around our house, our first instinct is always to look for a way to fix it. Over the years, we've repaired a book that lost its cover, patched ripped jeans, created a new stand for a broken desk fan, restrung our old Roman shades, and done numerous repairs to Brian's bike. In most cases, this is an ecofrugal no-brainer, since a DIY repair is both much cheaper than buying a replacement and much greener than throwing an old item into the landfill and buying a whole new one when only one part is broken.

However, sometimes we find we can't fix things on our own, and that's when the repair or replace dilemma rears its ugly head. Is it worth paying someone to fix it, or would it be a better value in the long run to just replace it?

For some people, it turns out, there's a third option. In my latest Money Crashers post, I discuss the new and growing trend of Repair Cafes: regular gatherings where neighbors come together to pool their fix-it skills. So, for instance, this month you could bring in your bicycle and get help from a local fixer to repair the brakes, and next month you could show up to help another neighbor clean the clogged print heads on their printer. Just like Freecycle, these exchanges don't have to be tit-for-tat; everyone helps out where they can or gets help as needed, and no one keeps score. And also like Freeycle, everything is free of charge (though most Repair Cafes will accept small donations to help keep them running).

In the article, I explain how Repair Cafes work, what kinds of things you can get fixed there, how to find one in your area, and how to start one of your own if you can't find one. Read it all here: How Repair Cafés & Fix-It Groups Can Save You Money and Avoid Waste