Staking our plum tree

A couple of weeks ago, I showed you the jury-rigged solution Brian and I cobbled together for getting our plum tree upright in the wake of Tropical Storm Isaias. At the time, we knew it wasn't really a permanent solution, because the wooden stake we'd belted the tree to wasn't dug in deep enough to stay put in the face of another severe storm. So we began a hunt for equipment that could secure the tree in place more permanently. After examining several types of stakes that could be used for this purpose, Brian settled some 30-inch "earth anchors," which have a spiral-shaped bit that bites into the earth as you turn the spike. These came as a set of four — more than we'd need for this job — along with some short bits of fastening wire, presumably intended for use with a tent (which we wouldn't need) and several clamps for tightening it (which we would).

This four-stake kit had to be specially ordered from Home Depot, so we had to wait about a week to pick it up at the store. Once it arrived, we made one trip into the store to pick it up and ferry it out to the car, then went back in to pick up the other items we needed. First, we bought 30 feet of wire rope that said it had a "working load limit of 340 pounds." The entire tree may weigh more than this (we can't really get it onto a scale), but since we planned to install two cables and neither one would have to support the tree's entire weight, we figured it would be adequate. Brian also spent an extra 25 bucks on a tool specially for cutting the wire rope, having learned while constructing the raspberry trellis that neither tin snips nor a hacksaw is really adequate for this job. Even if we never used them again after this job, it would be a worthwhile investment to minimize the hassle involved in what was likely to be a pretty tricky task. We didn't bother spending extra for protective sleeves to keep the wire from cutting into the tree trunk, because Brian figured he could just cut a couple of one-foot lengths off our old garden hose (which he'd already needed to cut down once already to eliminate a leak at one end). If the hose ended up becoming nonfunctional, eh, we'd just go back and buy a new one.

Before he could get started with the staking process, Brian pruned off one more low-hanging branch from the tree, since he'd determined it would get in his way while he was installing the ropes. After that, he moved on to the first step of the actual staking: finding appropriate locations for the stakes and screwing them into the ground. And, unexpectedly, this proved to be the hardest part of the job. Upon close examination, the stakes said that they were suitable only for use on "uncompacted soil," and the heavy clay in our yard fits this description only marginally at best. But since it was what we had to work with, Brian decided to just set a stake in, start turning, and hope for the best. However, his first attempt was a bit of a disappointment. Pictures he'd seen of these stakes showed them drilled right down into the ground with only the eye sticking up, but the first stake he selected hit a rock or some other barrier when there were still about 7 inches of it above ground level, and it simply would not go any farther.

So he gave up on that one and hoped he might do better with the second stake, which he set at about a 90-degree angle from the first. But the longer he struggled with this second attempt, the more apparent it became that the first, which had managed to get about two feet of stake below ground level, had actually been a rousing success. The second one got stuck while it was sticking up by a good 10 inches, and despite his attempts to gain more leverage — first with his wrench threaded through the eye of the stake, and then with another of the 30-inch stakes — it wouldn't budge. It turned, but it didn't go in any deeper. Thinking perhaps he'd just chosen a particularly bad spot, Brian tried again with a third stake a little distance off from the first. This one was even less successful, getting stalled while the eye was about a foot above ground level. He tried again with the fourth stake and managed to get it in a little farther than than the third, but not as far as the second. So he ended up pulling the third and fourth stakes back out, leaving little dimples in the turf, and using only the first and second.

Next, he had to thread the wire rope around the tree. He had previously cut two sections from the garden hose without issue, so he ran the wire through one piece of hose, then around the tree, and secured the loose end with not one but two of the nuts provided with the stakes. He figured this would add an extra layer of security, since if one nut came loose there would still be one holding the wire. The other end of the wire ran down and through the eye in the stake, passing through a little metal trough that came with the kit, and was likewise secured with two nuts.

After snipping off the end of this first wire — and marveling at how easy this was to do with his new wire shears — he repeated the entire process with the second stake. Through the hose, around the tree, two nuts to hold it, then through the stake with another two nuts to secure it. (He did all this while leaving the original wooden stake and strap in place, since it had to keep the tree upright until the new lines were installed.)

The last part of the process was to tighten the clamps on the wire ropes. Having two at each end also made this step easier, since he could let one fastener hold the rope in place while he adjusted the other. To increase the tension on the rope, he kept the outer clamp fastened, loosened the inner one, then clamped onto the rope with his Channellock wrench and pulled more of it through the hole into the gap between the two clamps, thereby shortening the part that was between the clamp and the tree. He then twisted this segment of rope to hold it taut while he tightened the nuts on the clamp back up again.

Once both ropes were tightened up as snug as they would go, Brian loosened the luggage strap that had been holding the tree in place, removed it, and pulled out the wooden stake that had been holding up the tree. And since the tree did not promptly fall over, we can declare the staking process a success for the time being. But we won't know for sure until the next big storm.

In the meantime, we had one new gardening problem to solve: what to do with the patch of lawn that was now unmowable on account of the wires. And this was where I came into the process.

Since we have tons of barren strawberry plants growing wild in our back yard, it had occurred to me that maybe if we could successfully establish some of these plants in the front, we could get them to take over that corner of the front yard as they had in the back. (Heck, as far as we were concerned, they could take over the whole yard, barring the new flowerbed, and then we wouldn't have to mow it at all.) So, earlier that weekend, I'd gone out back and pulled out a whole bunch of these plants (which needed thinning anyway, as they were starting to impinge on the area set aside for our honeyberry bushes) with an eye to transplanting them to the front.

Brian helpfully turfed out a section of grass for me (and by "grass," I mean "mostly weeds") roughly two feet in diameter, and I got to work planting the strawberry plants in it. These are all long runners with clumps of little, shallow roots at various intervals, so I just sort of stretched them out across the bare patch in various directions to cover as much of it as possible. Then I dug a tiny hole for each clump of roots, buried it, gave them all a nice top-dressing of compost, watered the patch thoroughly, and crossed my fingers.

Two weeks later, the strawberries seem to be reasonably happy in their new home. They haven't filled in the area entirely, let alone spread beyond it, but the individual plants look green and healthy. If they continue to hold up well, I'll try turfing out and replacing more sections with them, with an eye to eventually getting at least that corner of the yard filled in with a no-mow ground cover. If they don't, maybe I'll look into filling in the gaps with clover or some other "no mow" lawn alternative (though I have my doubts as to whether any of them can truly live up to their name).

Vegan Recipe of the Month: Mujadara with Fried Eggplant and Red Peppers

Since I first started my Veggie of the Month experiment back in 2013, I've found ideas for new recipes to try in a variety of places. Some came from cookbooks, some from newspapers and magazines, some from the back of a food package, and some from blogs and other sites online. And, of course, there are some that Brian just made up himself or heavily modified. But this month's is the first I can ever remember learning about on a TV show.



Since the pandemic started, Brian and I have been watching a lot of Netflix (especially during the first four months, when we were without our beloved Critical Role), and one of our favorite shows is "Queer Eye." This is a remake of the early-2000s series originally named "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," in which each week a team of five gay men would do a whole-life makeover on some poor schlub who didn't know how to dress right, eat right, fix his hair, decorate his home, or interact with people. In the current version, the new "Fab Five" do makeovers not just for straight guys, but for women and gay men as well. And in the last episode we watched, the "hero" (as the Fab Five call their clients) was an eighteen-year-old  activist spending her gap year before college working for an environmental organization in Philadelphia. She lived with several of her coworkers in a group house owned by the organization, and they all took turns cooking for the whole group — always a vegan meal.

I was curious to see how Antoni, the Fab Five's food expert, would rise to this challenge, since he's a devoted lover of meat, cheese, and butter. But he handled it with aplomb, presenting a vegan dish featuring a base of lentils and rice topped with a savory eggplant-and-pepper combo. The cooking of the eggplant struck us as particularly interesting: he sliced it thin, salted it to remove some of the moisture, and then fried it until it was browned. At the time we saw this, we already had an eggplant in the fridge, and Brian was so intrigued by this new way of cooking it that he decided to scrap his original plans for it and try to find the recipe for this dish instead.

After hunting around on the fan forums for the show, he found links to not one but two separate recipes. The lentil-rice base, which he found at Cookie + Kate, turned out to be a Middle Eastern dish known as mujadara, spiced with cumin, garlic, and bay leaf and topped with crispy fried onions. (If he'd had any doubts about making this recipe, that last ingredient definitely erased them.) The eggplant topping appeared at Food & Wine under the name "Tangy Twice-Cooked Eggplants with Red Peppers"; it featured onion, garlic, smoked paprika, and a generous splash of fresh lemon juice. Since the eggplant we had was about big enough to do a half batch of the second dish, he did a half batch of the first to go with it.

As usual, he ended up making some modifications to these recipes. For the mujadara, he had to substitute white rice for the brown rice, which we didn't have (I know, we're pathetic excuses for vegetarians). He left out the green onions and cilantro, which seemed like unnecessary fillips given that we were going to be topping this with the eggplant-pepper mixture. And rather than cook the lentils and rice together on the stovetop as recommended, he saved some time by doing them in the pressure cooker. He did the lentils on their own for 15 minutes, drained off the excess water, added fresh water along with the rice and seasonings, and cooked it all together for 6 minutes more.

For the eggplant dish, the changes were even simpler. For a half recipe, he replaced the large Spanish onion with a small yellow onion, substituted red wine vinegar for the sherry vinegar, and used plain salt in place of kosher salt. Everything else he did as instructed — slicing and salting the eggplant, letting it sit for an hour, frying it and draining it, then cooking the other veggies separately with a touch of smoked paprika before adding the eggplant into the pan and spiking it with the vinegar and lemon juice.

Here you see the final result: the lentils and rice topped with crispy onions in one bowl, the eggplant and peppers in another. Together, they made an exceedingly flavorful combo, though I found it just a trifle unbalanced. The lemon and vinegar in the eggplant make the flavor very tart, and I thought that brightness overwhelmed the subtler flavors of the onion, garlic, and smoked paprika. Without the lentil-and-rice mixture underneath it for ballast, I would definitely have found this dish overpowering. However, the texture of the eggplant was lovely, crisp on the outside and meltingly tender on the inside.

Would we make it again? Personally, I’m not sure it was good enough to be worth the trouble. These two dishes together have a lot of parts and a particularly long lead time, which means a very late dinner if you cook it on a weeknight. But Brian pointed out that you could cut this down by setting up the eggplant in the morning and returning to drain it and fry it in the evening (and possibly prepping the other veggies at the same time). Personally, I would be more interested in using this method for preparing eggplant to serve in some other way, since the texture of the eggplant was my favorite part. But Brian really liked the entire combo, and if he thinks it’s worth the effort to make it again, I’m okay with that. Or, if he wants to make just one or the other of these dishes (serving the eggplant over plain rice or quinoa, or the mujadara with a green veggie), that would be fine too.

How to recycle textiles (or try to)

Over the past year, I've been making more of an effort to get rid of things that I'm just not happy about using any more. Many of these items were textiles of various sorts: a baggy sweatshirt that I never liked the way I looked in; some towels that were frayed, threadbare, or stained beyond my ability to clean; old pairs of underpants that had lost all the elasticity in their leg elastics. Rather than forcing myself to keep using these things because they were "still good," I gave myself permission to discard and replace them with things I'd actually be happy with.

However, being an ecofrugal person, I couldn't simply toss these unwanted items in the trash. Instead, I've been accumulating a pile of them on the floor of the closet, saving them up for a run to the nearest textile recycling site. Over the years, we've disposed of old clothing and textiles in a variety of ways. Clothing in good condition, of course, can be donated to our local thrift shop, but many of our items are far too worn out for anyone to use, so I've had to seek out sources of true textile recycling — places that would turn the old fabric into new products.

Back in 2013, I was able to just drop my unwanted textiles in the collection boxes of an organization called Repurpose NJ, but that organization no longer exists; we once took a bag of stuff to a local drop-off center, but it's shut down too. Our most recent batch went to a collection bin at the nearest H&M, but not only is that site a bit of a pain to get to — being located in a mall we never visit if we can avoid it — but we've also learned that much of what gets collected there is never actually recycled. In 2017, WGBH reported that only 5 to 10 percent of the material goes into new clothing, while the rest is "downcycled" into lower-value products like insulation. A CBC Marketplace story from 2018 reported that while "most" of the material collected by  I:Collect, the firm used by H&M and several other retailers, goes to secondhand clothing markets overseas, a lot of it doesn't get used even there; in Kenya, for example, one used-clothing dealer says he "just dumps" vast amounts of unwanted clothing into piles and bonfires.

So, this time around, I decided to do some research to see if I could find a place that I could be confident would actually put our old textiles to good use. And this turned out to be a much taller order than I expected.

The first place I looked was Middlesex County's official division of solid waste management. This site says that "Every resident and business in Middlesex County is required to recycle their textiles" — but the county doesn't actually provide any facilities to do so. Instead, the website lists six private companies you can turn to for help recycling your unwanted fabric. Of these six, four (Turnkey, ATRS, Catholic Charities, and USAgain) only accept clothing in good condition, and  one (Planet Aid) no longer operates any bins in New Jersey. And the sixth was apparently having problems with its website, so I couldn't get through.

So I broadened my search a little, Googling "how to recycle textiles." On a site called (amusingly) Trash is for Tossers, I found an article purporting to explain how to recycle all old clothes, "even ratty ass old underwear," but it didn't really deliver on its promises. It first suggested reselling (only practical for pricey clothes in pristine condition), donating (only good for clothes in usable condition), or "upcycling" your old clothes into rags (of which we already have plenty, and anyway, isn't that downcycling?), before getting to what I was really looking for, recycling. It claimed there were "tons of amazing sustainable resources and organizations" that would take textiles for recycling, and it listed a dozen of them, but most of them had one of the following problems: (1) they don't operate in our area, (2) they actually only accept clothing in good condition, (3) they only want specific items we don't have, (4) their websites don't work at all, or (5) they're too expensive. (This objection applied only to the first site on the list, Terracycle, from which you can "Purchase a box to fill with clothing and fabric to ship to Terracycle to be repurposed"... for $103. Asking consumers to spend that amount to get rid of clothes they could put in the landfill for free is not what I call a sustainable system.) The closest thing to a useful suggestion on the Trash is for Tossers list was H&M, which was what we were trying to avoid in the first place.

Other sites I found with my search were equally unhelpful. Most of them just repeated the usual advice — donate clothes in usable condition, and turn worn-out clothes into cleaning rags — which I already knew and have already done for years. I remembered hearing that animal shelters can often use worn-out towels, so I checked out our local shelter to see if they could use any, but their FAQ said they were fully stocked at the moment and suggested "donating them to another organization" without naming any that would actually take them.

Fortunately, this story does have a happy ending. Today, I was able to get through to the last website on the Middlesex County list, Helpsy, and found that it genuinely does reuse or recycle about 95 percent of what it collects, with 75 percent being resold to thrift stores in North America or abroad and the rest getting turned into rags (for people who actually need them, unlike us). And it had two outdoor donation bins within a 7-mile radius of our house, which would be both easier to get to and less hazardous to our health than the mall where H&M is. One of the items I wanted to discard (an old pillow that had frayed to the point I could no longer repair it) was not on their list of acceptable items, but the rest were, and we even added some extra clothes out of our rag bin and a pair of worn-out shoes. We took it all to the donation bin outside the Bottle King liquor store in Hillsborough, and Brian took advantage of the opportunity to pop in and pick up a bottle of an inexpensive tawny port. And we even stopped off at a Starbucks for me.

So, in the end, our recycling mission was a success — at least this time around. But I confess, given that all the other organizations we've used over the years to recycle textiles have simply disappeared, I have my concerns that this one will also be gone by the next time we have a batch to recycle. Which makes me wonder: Just why it so hard to find a textile recycler? If they really are useful as a material, why doesn't anyone want them?

I realize recycling them into new clothing isn't that easy. According to the CBC Marketplace article, most clothes now are made from blended fibers, which can't easily be separated out into new fibers for making new cloth. (Maybe those Levites weren't so crazy for making this kind of fabric illegal.) So pretty much all fabric that gets recycled is downcycled — turned into rags (as Helpsy does with non-usable garments) or into insulation or carpet padding (as I:Collect does).

What I don't understand, though, is why no one these days is upcycling rags into paper. Back in the old days, paper was typically made from rags rather than virgin wood pulp, and even today "rag bond," which contains a high percentage of cotton, is considered to be the best-quality paper you can buy. But it's generally made with cotton linters — virgin cotton fibers that cling to the seeds after the cotton goes through the gin — rather than rags, while rags rot in landfills for want of use. What kind of sense does that make? Is the problem that making paper from rags is much more labor-intensive than making it from virgin cotton? If so, why? Is it not cost-effective to develop machines that can make it from rags — even when the material itself is basically free?

Is this just one of those mysteries of capitalism that's beyond my ken, or is there a simple explanation that I'm overlooking?

Money Crashers: Living on the Minimum Wage – Is It Possible in 2020?

Five years ago, I published a Money Crashers article on the Live the Wage Challenge, which I had taken in the summer of 2014. I wrote about the parameters of the challenge; the experiences of politicians, bloggers, and others who had taken it; and the limitations of the challenge as a way to understand the difficulties of living on the federal minimum wage, which at that time had not been increased in six years.

Fast-forward to 2020: The minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25 per hour, and my editors at Money Crashers think it would be a bit more relevant to show how difficult it is for real people to live on this amount today. Hence, the piece has undergone a complete rewrite. Instead of talking about the self-imposed challenge of living on an imaginary minimum-wage budget for one week, it's now about the real challenges of trying to do it for a whole year.

I've created a fictional minimum-wage worker, called Kai (the most neutral-sounding name I could think of, allowing you to picture a man or a woman of any age or race) who makes the minimum wage, 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, with no time off for vacation or sick leave. The piece goes through Kai's budget piece by piece, showing what they pay for taxes (which, yes, minimum-wage workers do have), housing, utilities, transportation, food, health care, and everything else — and how it leaves them with essentially nothing for emergency or retirement savings. And, since Kai is only one imaginary person, I also look at some media profiles of real people living on minimum wage to show what they have to do to get by.

I'm rather proud of this new piece, and I would go so far as to call it a must-read for anyone who really wants to understand the current debate over raising the minimum wage. 

Living on the Minimum Wage – Is It Possible in 2020?

Re-plumbing a plum tree

Brian and I were lucky enough to come out fairly unscathed from Tropical Storm Isaias. Unlike Sandy eight years ago, it didn't take out our power, and we'd had the foresight to stash our recycling bins and patio furniture in the shed, so we didn't lose any of those. However, there was one casualty. As we watched the storm from our kitchen window, we could see our plum trees swaying in the wind, and we realized that one of them, the Mount Royal, was actually listing to one side. By the time the storm was over, it looked like this.

It hadn't actually been uprooted, but it was completely blocking the sidewalk, and we obviously couldn't just leave it there. But at the same time, we didn't want to lose the whole tree when it was still more or less undamaged.

Brian went out and tried pulling on it from the house side, and even with his full weight on it, it wouldn't budge. But we thought there was a chance we could right it if we could sort of put it in traction: apply a continuous pull on it from the house side with a band around it attached to a stake. We could push it from the other side at the same time, and once it was upright, the stake would help keep it that way.

So Brian started hunting for tools to do this job with. And lo and behold, he found a cargo strap he'd once received for Christmas, with a ratchet attached to it for tightening it. We'd never used it for its intended purpose, but it looked like just the thing for the present task. He also found a two-by-four that he was able to cut to a point on one end with his miter saw (another Christmas gift, received from his dad) and pound into the ground with a sledgehammer (also a gift, this one from our late friend Tim). So, in a way, all of them were helping us get this job done.

Before attempting to hoist the tree, Brian thought we'd better lop off that one big low-lying limb that was blocking the sidewalk. This would reduce both the overall weight of the tree and the distribution of that weight toward the sidewalk side, making it easier to push in the other direction. But I was hesitant about removing such a big limb all at once, so I persuaded him to try just cutting off the three longest branches extending from it. If that wasn't enough, we could always take off the whole limb later.

So he got out his trusty pruning saw (yet another gift, this one from his brother) and started sawing away at the branches. And even without removing the whole limb, this took off quite a lot of mass, as you can see from the pile of branches we were left with.

Then he put the belt around the tree on one side and the stake on the other and started tightening it with the ratchet, while I pushed on the tree from the street side. As it grew tighter, it looked at one point like it might slip upward off the stake, so he got out the saw again and cut a notch in it to hold the belt securely in place.

Eventually, with a combination of pushing and ratcheting, we were able to get the tree to a nearly upright position. With the belt holding it in place, it didn't look like it was in any immediate danger of going over again, but it was still a plum out of plumb. We didn't feel entirely confident that it would remain upright if another strong storm hit.

Brian had sent an email about this to his brother, who has some training in tree health, and he sent a response saying he thought that entire large limb was going to have to come off. His view was that the top of the tree was too heavy for the roots, and it was going to need some "tough love" to cut it down to a size its root system could support.

So, a couple of days later, we were back out there with the saw, slicing off the tree limb piece by piece. We trimmed off all the remaining branches, then cut off the main limb itself in two big chunks. While we were at it, we took off all the other branches below the level of the belt, since we knew some of them were going to have to come off anyway (one of them was sticking out far enough to obstruct the driveway). By the time we were done, we had an even more significant pile of branches...

...and a rather denuded-looking tree, which we were able to ratchet up another couple of notches, to the point that it was approximately vertical.

So far, the tree is showing no ill effects from its surgery. However, what we have now clearly isn't a permanent solution. Brian is convinced that even with its lower branches shorn off, this tree can't be trusted to remain upright in any kind of heavy wind and rain; because of the way it's boxed into a corner of the yard, its root system simply can't stretch out far enough to support it. So we'll probably end up having to secure it with a more permanent anchor-and-cable system, which in turn will make it pretty much impossible (as opposed to merely inconvenient) to mow the grass in that part of the front yard.

So, one lasting effect of this storm will be forcing us to make up our minds and select a ground cover for the front yard, or at least part of it. We already have some barren strawberry plants in our back yard, and we could try to take cuttings from those and get it established in the front. They don't actually grow densely enough to block out all weeds, but pulling a few weeds from between the strawberry plants should be better than trying to cut down a whole forest of them with the weed whacker without tripping over the tree cables.

Another possible silver lining: trimming off those lower branches means fewer routes for squirrels to get up the tree, which could make it easier for us to protect the plums from squirrels by applying Tree Tanglefoot to collars around selected branches. We could even try applying it to the cables themselves, which would pose no risk of harming the tree. If these changes allow us to get more plums off this tree in future than we did this summer (though perhaps not quite as many as we had last year), it could be a blessing in disguise.

Money Crashers: Debt Settlement Negotiation

Here's a new Money Crashers on a topic I hope most of you don't have to deal with: debt settlement.

I've written articles before about paying off debt, but this piece is for folks who don't see a way to do that — who can barely keep up with the monthly payments, let alone increase them. It's for people who have already missed multiple payments and are now dreading calls from debt collectors. People, in short, who are in a very bad situation.

One way out of this situation is debt settlement: persuading creditors to discharge your debt in exchange for a lump-sum payment that's less than you actually owe. This isn't a magic bullet, since you have to come up with that lump sum and persuade creditors to accept it, and the discharged debt will harm your credit rating. But it's easier to recover from than bankruptcy.

This article discusses the pros and cons of debt settlement, other alternatives to consider before trying to settle your debt, and strategies for negotiating with creditors. If you're lucky, you'll never need this information — but if you ever do, it's better to know your options ahead of time.

Debt Settlement Negotiation – Do-It-Yourself Guide to Beat the Creditors

Money Crashers: 7 Effects of Inflation & How to Protect Yourself From the Consequences

Economists agree that the U.S. is now officially in a recession — the most severe one in most people's lifetimes. What they disagree on is what its long-term effects will be. It could be quick and brutal or long and grinding; it could permanently damage some industries while boosting others; and most puzzling of all, it could cause the dollar to either grow or shrink in value. A recent "Planet Money" episode explains how the current recession could lead to either runaway inflation, in which your money is worth measurably less each week than the week before, or deflation, in which both prices and incomes sink through the floor. Both of which are very, very bad.

To help prepare its readers for both possibilities, Money Crashers updated its article on deflation, and it fell to me to tackle the one on inflation. I explain how inflation can be both helpful and harmful — on the one hand, raising prices so your money is worth less, but on the other, boosting incomes so you have more of it. And I outline how inflation can affect all aspects of your financial life —cost of living, income, the job market, government benefits, debt, savings, and investments — and how to plan for these effects so you get more of the upside of inflation and less of the downside.

7 Effects of Inflation & How to Protect Yourself From the Consequences

Since this is a fairly big topic, there are two other articles on inflation coming out soon as well: one on the causes of inflation and one devoted specifically to protecting your retirement portfolio from inflation. Keep an eye out for those in the near future.

Gardeners' Holidays 2020: Tomatofest

Today marks the midpoint of summer. The summer heat is at its blazing height, and looking ahead, we can just glimpse the relief of fall and its shorter, cooler days in the distance. And, in a normal year, this would also mark the high point of squash season, when gardeners are rolling in so much zucchini we're beginning to think about sneaking some onto the neighbor's porch.

But sadly, that's not the case this year. Despite our efforts to keep them at bay by covering the stems in dirt, the dastardly squash vine borers invaded both our two zucchini plants earlier than ever, killing one outright and eviscerating the other. We've harvested a total of one measly squash off both plants all summer, and that's all we're likely to get. (Brian suggested relocating next year's zucchini plants out of the fenced garden entirely and into the "burn ward" he set up next to the house for our extra seedlings, but I couldn't see how that would help; the adult borers lay their eggs on the plants after descending on them from above, and they can surely do that just as easily no matter where the plants are. And even if the plants survived, the groundhogs would be liable to eat all the squash in the unfenced area before we get a chance to pick them. I think Bt spray is likely to do more good.)

Last year, we celebrated this gardeners' holiday as Plumfest, but alas, this year that's not on the cards either. Even though Brian has been diligently spraying the trees with copper fungicide every week since they blossomed, basically all of the Opal and Mount Royal plums still dropped prematurely. Most of the Golden Gages survived, but squirrels started spiriting them away well before they were ripe enough for us to pick. We tried discouraging them with shiny CDs (which are supposed to produce unpredictable glints they find disturbing) and our own hair, but to no avail. When Brian checked the trees this morning, he found that every last plum was gone. So next year, we'll have to return to our full Plum Protection Plan — rigorous pruning, regular spraying, wrapping the biggest branches in collars smeared with Tree Tanglefoot, and picking the plums as soon as they have even a hint of color to ripen them indoors.

Even our Provider green beans have been failing to live up to their name this year. Where last year's plants produced nearly five pounds of beans in total, this year we got a little over one before the supply petered out entirely. And worse, we have no idea what caused the problem, unless the unusually hot weather is somehow to blame — so we have no idea how to prevent it next year.

But fortunately, there's one summer crop we have absolutely no shortage of. Our Sun Gold tomato plants have, as usual, been producing in abundance; they've given us a total of 180 tiny tomatoes already and show no signs of slowing down. Our Premio tomatoes have proved to be reliable producers, too; though not as prolific as the Sun Golds, they've yielded 17 smallish tomatoes so far, with more on the way.

We've already enjoyed our first Pasta a la Caprese of the season (as our anniversary dinner and the prelude to our anniversary cake), so for tonight's tomato celebration, we went for roasted tomato spaghetti. The basil was also home-grown, as that's another crop that seems to be thriving despite the heat. And, looking to the future, our later-season tomatoes (the big Pineapples and the new Opalka paste tomatoes) are also looking quite healthy, as are the peppers and winter squash. So there's reason to hope the next two gardeners' holidays will give us more cause for celebration than this one.