Money Crashers: Holiday gift article updated

Just a quick note here to let you know my Money Crashers article on holiday gift-giving has been freshly updated for 2020. Most of the content is the same — ways to limit your gift list, shop secondhand, make homemade gifts, and so on — but there's some new content about how holiday sales will look during the pandemic. Read it here: 5 Ways to Save Money on Holiday Gifts for Your Friends & Family

A simple shoe fix

As I've mentioned a few times before, I just have the dickens of a time shopping for new shoes. Not only do I have rather oddly-shaped feet, I'm also an ethical vegetarian (well, near-vegetarian, anyway) who won't wear leather. So finding shoes that fit both my feet and my values, provide reasonable value for the money, and look acceptable (not fantastic, just acceptable) is a major struggle every time. Walking into a shoe store, looking at every single pair on the shelves, finding maybe half a dozen worth trying on, and walking out with nothing isn't just a common experience for me — it's par for the course.

As a result, whenever I do manage to find a pair of shoes I'm reasonably happy with, I become deeply attached to it and will go to great lengths to keep it working. So when I discovered that I'd lost one of the decorative snaps off my spring-and-fall walking shoes, discarding the shoes clearly wasn't an option. In theory, I could have just kept on wearing them, since the shoes are a slip-on style that doesn't actually need the snap to function, but its absence made the shoe look untidy. So instead, I set out to find something to repair it with.

First of all, naturally, I hunted around the bedroom, looking under dressers and into corners to see if the missing snap cap would turn up (the post was still in place). When that yielded nothing, my next thought was to find a set of snaps similar to the original ones and just replace the missing cap. There isn't a fabric store near here, so I tried Michael's, where I knew they carried a few assorted sewing notions. No luck. They had some snaps, but nothing close to an appropriate size.

Fortunately, I'd figured this might happen, so I'd already come up with a a backup plan: just buy some beads of an appropriate size and replace both snaps with those. And for this, Michael's was able to offer me quite a large selection. After several minutes perusing the bead aisle and comparing options, I settled on a $3 strand of grey beads with an agate-like appearance. There were over a dozen of them, so even if my first attempt didn't work out, I'd have plenty of chances to try again.

The first step was to get the snap off the intact shoe. This proved much tougher than I expected — so tough that it made me wonder how I'd ever managed to lose the other snap in the first place. Eventually, with the aid of a knife and a bit of leverage, I managed to work the cap loose, slightly bending the post it attached to in the process. So whatever happened, I was committed now.

For my first attempt to attach the beads, I used a hot glue gun. Neither Brian nor I can remember where we first picked this thing up, but as I recall, it cost us only $5, including the glue sticks, and the repairs it's made possible have paid for it many times over. But alas, this was not one of them. It was relatively simple to apply a bead of hot glue to the stub where each snap had been and press one of my new beads into it, though I did have a little trouble with tendrils of hot glue stretching out from the bead like hot cheese on pizza. But once I'd cleaned those up and let the glue dry, it proved not to be very secure. As soon as I picked up one of the shoes and just experimentally flexed it, off popped the bead.

So, once again, I moved on to Plan B: sewing the beads in place. This went fairly easily for the first shoe, the one that started out with an intact snap: I just removed the back half of the snap, then stitched up through the back of the flap of material where it had been, through the bead, and back down through the flap. After a few iterations of this, I had a bead in place that neatly covered the hole, and I was thinking, "Hey, this will be a pretty easy repair after all!"

Needless to say, I spoke too soon. When I removed the back half of the snap on the other shoe, the fabric behind it separated into two pieces. At first I thought I could just stitch through both pieces before going through the bead, but it quickly discovered I would have needed at least three hands for this: one to hold each flap in place and a third to do the sewing. So instead, I used one hand to rather awkwardly hold both flaps while I stitched them more or less back together. Then, once I had only a single piece of fabric to work with, I was able to sew the bead on more or less as I had with the first shoe. 

I can't be sure how well this makeshift repair will hold up, since I've only worn the shoes a couple of times since performing it. But at least the two shoes match now, and at a glance, you wouldn't realize they hadn't originally been designed this way. In fact, if anything, the little beads are snazzier-looking than the original snaps. And best of all, I should now be able to keep wearing these shoes for at least one more year, spring and fall, before I have to embark on a long, grueling search for a suitable replacement.

Solving the celery problem

Every time I see statistics about food waste, my mind completely boggles. I read a news story claiming that the average family of four in the U.S. throws away $1,500 worth of uneaten food each year, and I just don't understand how it's possible. Are these people deliberately buying food they don't intend to eat? Are they discarding all their leftovers after every meal without even thinking about whether they can be useful? (In some cases, apparently, yes.) Are they making no effort at all to use the food in the fridge before it rots?

I will admit, however, that there's one particular ingredient we have often had trouble disposing of before it goes bad: celery. The problem with celery is that while there are lots of recipes that use it, there are almost no recipes that use much of it. When we buy, say, a cabbage, we usually plan to use it in a specific recipe, such as Indian cabbage or Rumbledethumps. If there's enough left over, we make a second dish with it, and if there's still a bit left we toss it in a stir-fry. All gone.

But celery is a different matter. We have lots of different recipes that use it — Pasta Fagioli, mushroom soup, sometimes tuna casserole — but as a rule, they only use a stalk or two at a time. So it's something we always like to have on hand, but not something we go through very fast. All of which means that we're often unable to use up an entire bunch of celery before the last few stalks turn limp and soggy, fit only for the stock bag, or worse, brown and squidgy, fit only for the compost bin. We've tried wrapping the celery snugly in aluminum foil, which is supposed to make it last longer, but according to WikiHow, even this can only extend its lifetime to about three or four weeks — not usually enough for us to go through a whole bunch.

A week or so ago, as we found ourselves once again discarding the sodden remnants of a once-crisp head of celery, I got frustrated and started searching the Internet for better ways to preserve it. And I hit on this article from Eating Well about a solution so obvious I wanted to give myself a dope slap for not thinking of it sooner: just freeze it.

Since most of the celery we use is cooked rather than raw, there's no reason why it needs to be fresh. Both its flavor and its texture are just as good if it's been frozen — particularly if you blanch it first, as the article suggests, by cooking it in boiling water for about three minutes and then quickly dunking it in ice water to stop the cooking process. 

So, with the last bunch of celery we brought home from the store, we did just this. We washed and chopped the entire batch, blanched it, spread it out on a cookie tray to freeze, and then transferred it to a freezer bag. Last night Brian used some of the frozen celery in a batch of mushroom barley soup, and it was pretty much indistinguishable from the same soup made with fresh celery. And it was actually more convenient to use, since it had all been chopped up ahead of time. It could just go straight into the pot  from the freezer.

There's only one problem with this celery preservation method: once in a while, we actually do like a bit of fresh celery in a salad or a tuna sandwich. Fresh is a bit better for stir-frying, too, since it retains more crunch. We could buy a batch of fresh celery when we need some for one of these purposes, but then we'd be back to where we were before: using up only a few stalks of celery and needing to preserve the rest. Of course, we could just use two stalks and freeze the rest, but if we did this every time we needed fresh celery, our freezer would soon be overflowing with the frozen stuff.

Fortunately, I had recently heard of another trick that could address this problem as well. Over the summer, I joined an online gardening discussion group called Everybody's Farm, and in one of our meetings, someone mentioned the technique of regrowing a head of celery from the cut-off base. We'd been doing this for years with scallions, another veggie that we often use only one or two at a time, but I had no idea it worked with celery too.

So, when we cut up our current head of celery for blanching and freezing, we made a point of leaving a couple of inches at the bottom, as instructed in this article from The Spruce. Since it was our first time trying this, we opted for the simpler method of just submerging the bottom of this cut-off celery base in a dish of water and putting it in our sunny southeast-facing window. (The article recommended "a bright area but out of direct sunlight," but since we didn't have any spots that fit both criteria, we figured the first was more important. The sunlight isn't all that direct.) And sure enough, within a few days, tiny leaves had started to poke out from the chopped-off stalks. After about a week, it's developed a regular little tuft of leaves like a green Mohawk.

Now that we know this is working, we'll probably transfer the celery end to a permanent home in a pot, which The Spruce says will encourage it to grow bigger. The article warns that we'll probably still get "more leaves than stalks" this way, but the leaves are good fodder for the stock bag, and the new celery plant will be able to keep our potted scallions company.

In fact, after this success, we've actually been toying with the idea of growing some microgreens in that corner as well, as outlined in this New York Times article. We've already got some takeout containers that would work for seed starting, some arugula seed left over from this year's garden, and the light from our seed-starting setup, so all we would need is a bag of potting soil. And if that actually works — and if we decide to keep up the practice as more than a one-off experiment — I think we should start referring to that sunny table in the southwest corner as our winter garden.

Money Crashers: 25 Thanksgiving Potluck Ideas

Normally, Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year. It's not so much the meal itself I enjoy as having the whole family (or at least my dad's side of it) gathered together. As we pass around the food, we share our thoughts about what it is we're most thankful for this year. After dinner, we play a rousing and usually hilarious game of charades. And then we spend the whole weekend hanging out, taking walks in town, hitting the thrift shops in Princeton, playing games, solving the Saturday crossword together. It's a whole weekend to relax and have fun with family.

Obviously, none of that is going to happen this year. Hosting visitors from out of state is definitely off limits, and given how bad the COVID numbers look for New Jersey — and the fact that it's mostly small gatherings driving the spread — I didn't even feel safe having just me and Brian go over to my parents' house for an indoor, unmasked meal. 

So we will have to celebrate Thanksgiving apart, at least physically. But I'm determined to keep as much of our traditional Thanksgiving festivities as possible. We've come up with a plan to play charades online (with the help of a Google form to submit our entries and a corresponding Google sheet to read them from), and I'm working on ways to do other activities online as well — Boggle, thrift shopping, even hide and seek with the kids.

The one thing we can't share is the Thanksgiving meal. I mean, we could Zoom while eating it, as we did for Passover, but we won't be sharing the meal itself. However, for extended family members who live closer together, there actually is a way to do that too: a socially distanced potluck. Just have each person prepare a dish, divvy it up into containers, and deliver them to people's homes. That way, you can all enjoy the same meal, even if you can't be around the same table.

My latest Money Crashers article is for all those who are having socially distanced potlucks this year (as well as for future reference for those who want to enjoy a frugal Friendsgiving potluck next year, when things will — we hope — be back to normal). It's a list of suggestions for dishes you can bring (or in this case, remotely contribute) to a Thanksgiving potluck beyond the obvious mashed potatoes and green bean casserole. Check it out here:

25 Thanksgiving Potluck Food Dishes & Recipe Ideas (Budget-Friendly)

Recipe of the Month: Carrot salmon

Although Brian and I are eating mostly plant-based these days, we haven't gone full vegan and don't have any plans to. One particular animal food we still occasionally enjoy is fish, which is both healthful and less carbon-intensive than meat. It's also more expensive, so we don't indulge too often, but we buy canned tuna, salmon, clams, and the occasional tin of smoked herring from Trader Joe's; we pick up frozen shrimp and catfish nuggets when they go on sale; and once in a while, we buy a chunk of salmon from H-Mart for homemade sushi.

However, in terms of sustainability, these choices aren't all equal. Fish farms can produce pollution, and natural fisheries can be over-fished, endangering the stocks of fish over the long term. I've always tried to avoid the types of seafood that were most notoriously unsustainable, such as Chilean sea bass, but I recently came to the disgruntling discovery that fresh salmon might not be the best choice either. According to the Seafood Watch website run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium, while the canned white tuna and Alaskan salmon we buy are generally "Best Choices" (meaning "well managed and caught or farmed in ways that cause little harm to habitats or other wildlife"), fresh salmon is a mixed bag. There are many different varieties of salmon that comes from many different areas, and only some of them can reasonably be considered sustainable. You can look for the label of the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) or the Aquaculture Stewardship Council (ASC) to find the best choices, but since the sushi salmon we buy at H-Mart never has any sort of label on it, there's no way to know if it's up to par.

At this point, I could have just shrugged my shoulders and said, "Oh well, we don't eat it all that often anyway." But instead, I started wondering if there might be an acceptable plant-based substitute for raw salmon that would work in sushi. So I started hunting around, and I discovered a recipe for "vegan carrot salmon" on a site called ProVeg. It looked simple enough to make: just cut a big carrot into really thin strips, then marinate it for at least eight hours in a mixture of water, vinegar, salt, Liquid Smoke, and nori seaweed, which presumably would serve to infuse it with a marine flavor. (Actually, we kind of inferred the part about the water; the recipe calls for 300 mL of water, about a cup and a quarter, but the instructions don't actually say where to use it. We assumed it had to go in the marinade because it didn't seem like there would be enough of it to cover the carrots otherwise.) Once it's fully soaked, you're supposed to coat it with oil and a bit more liquid smoke before serving it. It wasn't clear how much like salmon this would actually be, but since we already had all the ingredients on hand, it wouldn't really cost us anything to find out.

So, last week, Brian shaved some carrots as thin as he could get them and soaked them as instructed. And after marinating for two days, we found, they actually looked not unlike smoked salmon. But would the taste, and the all-important texture, live up to the appearance?

To put the carrot salmon to a thorough test, we tried it three ways: by itself, on bread, and in sushi rolls. The sushi came out looking a little wonky, since these thin strips of carrot aren't really the ideal size, but Brian was able to get enough of them in there to make a reasonable roll.

Unfortunately, it was a little hard to evaluate the flavor in this form. The vinegar-flavored sushi rice had a strong enough flavor on its own that the carrot salmon didn't really stand out against it. It definitely didn't taste like carrots, but it was a bit hard to say whether it tasted like salmon.

Tasted by itself, however the carrot salmon was...not unlike the real thing. Without the sushi rice as a distraction, it was clear that this carrot salmon was actually meant to simulate smoked salmon, and it did that surprisingly well. It had the expected saltiness and smokiness, and the nori did, in fact, seem to impart a hint of fishy flavor. The texture, too was better than I expected. It didn't quite have the buttery softness that makes raw or cold-smoked salmon so appealing, but it was  pretty tender, and munching it on a piece of bread was a not-too-bad approximation to eating an actual slice of lox.

So, as a substitute for raw sushi salmon, this stuff wasn't quite ideal. As a substitute for smoked salmon, it was not too shabby, but there was room for improvement. Although the genuine fishy article is quite salty, this stuff tasted even saltier, and I thought dialing down the salt in the recipe would probably improve it. Cutting the strips a tiny bit thinner or marinating them longer might also help eliminate the remaining hint of crunch that tipped off the tongue that the origin of the product was vegetable rather than animal. However, we both agreed that what this salmon substitute really lacked was the fat that gives the original its smooth, melting texture. Adding the oil to it before serving is presumably supposed to remedy this problem, but having oil on the "fish" just isn't the same as having it in the fish.

Brian suggested that serving this carrot salmon in a sushi roll together with avocado might help compensate for its less-than-perfect texture, since the avocado would supply the melting softness you normally expect from the salmon. I wouldn't pair avocado with real salmon, since the textures are too similar, but with the carrot version it would probably work quite well. I also think this vegan salmon could work in any sort of smoked salmon canape that has another, contrasting texture, such as salmon-wrapped asparagus spears. Or we could follow the advice of BBC Good Food and use it in place of the bacon in our favorite spaghetti carbonara recipe. (It still wouldn't be vegan, since it contains eggs, but it would be a trifle more healthful.) All of those would camouflage the telltale texture of the carrot salmon and highlight its smoky flavor. We'll probably have to try at least one of these ideas, since we still have some of the carrot salmon left that needs to be put to use. 

As things stand now, I don't think this carrot salmon is going to become a regular addition to our vegan repertoire. It's interesting as a curiosity, but it's not the special treat that real smoked salmon is, and it's not like we had a whole lot of recipes to try it in. But if it turns out to be particularly good for some other application that we try, I'll let you know.

Money Crashers: 12 Elder Fraud Scams That Target Senior Citizens

A quick post here to let you know about my latest Money Crashers article. This one focuses on scams that target senior citizens, who make particularly juicy targets because they often have both well-padded bank accounts and less-than-perfect memories. Some popular ones include:

• The call from (allegedly) the Social Security Administration warning you that your Social Security Number has been "suspended" because it's been used improperly and you need to supply lots of personal information pronto to avoid losing your benefits
• The call from your "favorite grandchild," who is in terrible trouble (a car accident, an arrest for marijuana possession, something like that) and needs money immediately, sent by an untraceable method, and also a pledge of secrecy because their parents would kill them if they knew
• The one where you get three issues of a magazine for free, followed by a bill for your new "subscription" (what, you don't remember subscribing? Well, your memory isn't what it used to be.)
• The particularly heinous one where you get a call immediately after a loved one's death to inform you that they owed a lot of money for which you are now on the hook, and threatening you with exposure, lawsuits, or arrest if you don't pay up

Don't let the bastards get away with it! Inform yourself, and your loved ones over 65, about these scams so you know what to be on the lookout for. And learn some tips for protecting yourself if you get a call that sounds suspicious, and for protecting your loved ones if they seem to keep falling for these cons. Get the skinny here:

12 Elder Fraud Scams That Target Senior Citizens – How to Stay Protected

 

Money Crashers: 9 Best Online Will Makers of 2020

For the past several years, I've had "make a will" on my to-do list. I knew it was a good idea to have one, but it never really seemed urgent. It wasn't just that I didn't expect to die any time soon, since I know that's impossible to predict; I also knew if I died without a will, my money would automatically go to Brian as my next of kin, and I was fine with that. Most of our assets are jointly owned anyway, and my IRA already has a named beneficiary, so I didn't foresee any problems there. The only possible wrinkle was that if we both died at the same time — say, in a car crash — our assets would then most likely go to our parents, who really don't need them. So I figured it would be a good thing to have a will specifying how to split up the money in that case, and also naming a guardian for the cats.But since the contingency seemed pretty remote, I dragged my feet about actually making one.

Apparently, I'm not alone in this. According to AARP, 6 out of 10 Americans haven't made a will, and most of them give the same reason I did — they just haven't gotten around to it yet. Unfortunately, for many of them, dying without a will could pose a significant problem for their heirs. Even if the money eventually gets to their kids, their siblings, or whoever is their next of kin, it could be held up for months in probate.

So, when I proposed an article about online will software for Money Crashers, I had a sneaky ulterior motive in mind. I figured in the process of writing it, I'd learn enough about the various software programs that exist to help you create a will to be able to choose one that would meet my needs and finally get this item off my list once and for all. And sure enough, it worked. I researched the various options, settled on one with decent features and a free trial period, and was able to dash off my will and supporting documents (living will and power of attorney) before the trial was up. (Actually getting the documents witnessed in the middle of a pandemic was trickier, but I managed it in the end.)

So if you're in the same position I was, knowing you need a will but putting off making one because the task seems overwhelming, this article can help. I've already done all the research for you, so all you have to do is read it, figure out which service looks best for your needs, buy it, and use it. Once you take the plunge, the process is actually quick and fairly painless.

9 Best Online Will Makers of 2020

Money Crashers: Two holiday articles

As longtime readers will know, I normally dislike all references to Christmas and other winter holidays before Thanksgiving is over. I've boycotted stores during the holiday season because they started their Black Friday sales on Thanksgiving Day; I even do my best to steer clear of stores that display premature holiday decorations before Thanksgiving. Of course, I have to work on holiday-related articles before Thanksgiving, since they have to be started that early if my clients want to get them online before the holidays have actually come and gone. But I still prefer not to promote the published articles until the end of November at the earliest.

However, for these two recently published pieces on Money Crashers, I'll make an exception. Because they both tackle the subject of cutting your holiday spending — and if you want to do that, you need to start planning before the holiday season is officially under way.

For instance, the first piece deals with the topic of making a holiday budget. Now, obviously, a holiday budget does you no good unless you make it before you actually begin any of your holiday shopping and spending. So it makes sense to start working on it now, iron out all the details, and have it all ready to go when Thanksgiving is over and the frenzy of holiday shopping begins. This piece explains how to create one, and offers a few tips on how to keep your spending within it once you actually get started.

How to Create a Holiday Budget & Stick to It – Strategize Your Spending

The second piece tackles the topic of holiday spending in more detail. It helps you strategize for saving on all aspects of the holiday, including gifts, decorating, travel, and entertaining. (Admittedly, those last two will probably look a bit different this year; we'll have to do them extra carefully if we plan to do them at all. But that's all the more reason to start planning ahead early.)

20 Ways to Save Money During the Holiday Season – Tips & Ideas

There are several more holiday articles in the pipeline at the moment, including a new one on ways to celebrate safely during a pandemic. I'll let you know about that one as soon as it pops up, too, so you'll have plenty of time to start planning. And there's one upcoming piece that's Thanksgiving-related, so I'll make sure to notify you about that one even more promptly.

Smaller and larger potatoes

So, remember how we harvested our first bucket of potatoes last month, and the total potato content inside came to roughly one ounce? And how I concluded that if the other three were equally disappointing, our harvest would come to only four ounces total?

Well, they were and they weren't. Brian harvested the other three buckets today and laid out the contents of all four buckets for comparison. The contents appear here in the same relative positions as their buckets in the garden. The two piles at the upper left were from the two buckets at the northeast corner of the garden, the tiny pile at the upper right was in the southeast corner, and the one at the bottom left was in the northwest corner. However, it actually got far more light than all the others, as the other three are all partly shaded by trees. That's presumably why it yielded so much more than the others, and probably also why it was the only one of the four buckets that still had some living greenery in it.

This gives us another useful piece of data: potato plants apparently need significantly more light than ours were getting. So, along with the other changes we plan to make with next year's crop (placing the potatoes directly atop the drainage stones, mixing soil with the compost, sprouting fewer potatoes, raising the buckets for better drainage, and watering more thoroughly after planting), we'll want to find a place for the buckets where they'll get as much light as possible. Brian was concerned that if we moved them outside the fenced garden area, the groundhogs would go for them, but Laid Back Gardener claims they don't, which makes sense if they're a member of the generally toxic nightshade family. So perhaps we'll try putting the buckets along the edge of the patio instead (possibly dressing them up with burlap to make them look a bit nicer).

The two other buckets on the eastern side of the garden barely doubled the harvest from the first one, but the fourth bucket, the one from the western side, increased it considerably. When Brian weighed the contents of all four buckets together on our kitchen scale, he found that we had a total of roughly eight ounces — about twice as much as I expected to get, and exactly the right amount to make a nice batch of roasted Brussels sprouts with potatoes and eggs for tonight's dinner.

So, all in all, our potato-growing experiment was not a total failure. True, the half-pound of potatoes we actually harvested would only have cost us about a buck to buy at the store, as opposed to $3.71 worth of seed potatoes and a whole season of work tending the plants. But we'll get one good meal out of it, and plenty of useful information about what to do differently next year.

Gardeners' Holidays: Last Harvest

Once again, it's that time of year when production in the garden slowly winds down. Or rather, most years it happens slowly. This year, we got a frost warning on Friday, so Brian hastened out into the garden to pick all the tender veggies that weren't likely to survive it. And he came back in with this.

The contents of that overflowing bowl: one Pineapple tomato, one Premio tomato, 39 Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, 10 Carmen peppers (green), 7 Caballero peppers (also green), 16 Takara Shishito peppers (mostly green), about 2 cups of arugula, and about half a cup of basil. And the little pink cup in the background is holding approximately half a cup of raspberries, which just might be the last of our haul for the year.

This isn't quite all that was left in the garden. Brian figured the frost wouldn't be likely to hurt the thick-peeled winter squash, so he didn't bring those in until today. Even now, there are still a few left on the vines that he didn't pick because they were still green, so he's leaving them out in the hope that they'll ripen a little more. (If that doesn't work, we'll have to pick them and try to ripen them up indoors, though we certainly can't provide an environment that's 80 to 85 degrees with 80 to 85 percent humidity.) There are also a few leeks still in the ground, and we still haven't harvested those three other buckets of potatoes. But it pretty much finishes out the year, so I thought it might be a good time to do a little tally and see how much our harvest came to in total.

Now, there are some crops I don't have an accurate tally for. Although we've been harvesting little bits of leafy greens all year, Brian hasn't really been notifying me about them, because he says it's hard to figure out how to count them when you're just collecting a few leaves at a time. So, although I know we got some value out of these crops, I can't say just how much. Generally speaking, Brian says the arugula wasn't very productive this year, because it bolted quite early on (although it did come back to give us a small second helping in the fall). But he has literally no idea how much we got of the basil, Thai basil, or the various lettuces we planted. So, conservatively, I'm estimating we got the equivalent of one bunch of each, for a value of about $18.

With other crops, however, we can calculate a bit more precisely. Since all our produce is organically grown, I'm using approximate prices for organic produce to calculate its value.

• Cucumbers: 1 Marketmore, 1 large Cross-Country, 5 medium, and 11 small. It's not an impressive showing for the Marketmore, but given that it's produced substantially more in the past, we'll probably keep it in next year's garden. The total weight of cucumbers was probably between 5 and 6 pounds, for around $11 worth.
• Green beans: About 33 ounces of the Provider and 10 of the Climbing French variety. That's actually a rather disappointing take for us: in the past, we've harvested 5 to 6 pounds of Provider and 1 or 2 of Climbing French. We'll probably try both again next year, as they've done well in the past, but it definitely wasn't a good year for beans. But even so, it's about $9 worth.
• Leeks: Eight smallish ones harvested to date. For some reason (maybe too short a season?), we've just never been able to grow big fat leeks like you can get at the store. Total weight was probably around a pound, for a value of $3. Not the best use of garden space, maybe.
• Peppers: 26 red and 16 green Takara Shishitos (about a third of an ounce each), 9 red and 11 green Carmens (2 ounces each), and 3 red and 10 green Caballeros (3 ounces each). So that's a total of 2.2 pounds of red peppers, which cost maybe $6 per pound, and 3.6 pounds of green ones, which cost about 2.50. Total value: about $22, which is a little more impressive.
• Tomatoes: We got 5 big tomatoes off our Pineapple plants — not nearly as many as last year, but better than 2018, when we got only one. And they're big, tasty tomatoes, about 12 ounces on average, so that's actually around not too bad a haul. Then we got 37 small Premio tomatoes (maybe 7 pounds), 3 Opalka paste tomatoes (about 1 pound, not at all impressive, but then we've never done well with plum tomatoes), and a whopping 528 Sun Golds (at 6 tiny tomatoes per ounce, roughly 5.5 pounds). So that's a total of 17.25 pounds of tomatoes, or about $69 worth. Now we're talking.
• Potatoes: Based on the harvest we got from the first bucket, we figure we might get about 4 ounces total, for a value of about four bits. Pretty sad. But we think we can do better next year.
  
• Winter squash: So far, we've harvested a dozen, averaging around 2 pounds each. There are eight left on the vines, but we're not counting on them. So I'm putting it down as 24 pounds of butternut squash, a value of $48.
  
• Zucchini: Terrible. We got exactly one squash — not even a big one — off both vines before the borers did them in. (Next year we're going to try applying some Bt to try and stop them, since burying the stems doesn't seem to do the trick.) That might be one measly dollar's worth, at most.
• Plums: Even more terrible. Between the brown rot and the squirrels, we didn't harvest a single one. Next year we're stepping up our control measures.
• Cherries: Equally terrible. The few that we actually produced got picked off before they were ready, because we had so few that we didn't even bother netting the bushes. Not sure what was wrong, but it's probably the same thing that affected so many other crops this year.
• Asparagus: Not great, but not terrible. We got about 39 ounces — enough for a few meals, at least. So that's a little over $12 worth.
• Garlic: We got 3 ounces of garlic scapes and about 25 small heads, of which about 8 will be saved for planting. We don't normally buy organic garlic, so I'm not sure what that would cost exactly, but I figure it's about the equivalent of three $1 packs of fresh garlic, for $3.
• Rhubarb: Whatever was wrong with the weather this year didn't affect these plants. We've harvested about three pounds this year, and there's still more out there for the taking. I figure that's a value of around $10.50.
  
• Raspberries: This is the crop that makes up for everything. Between the summer and fall crops, we harvested a total of 37 cups — 18.5 pints, at an estimated value of $6 per pint. That's $111 worth, in one year. Yee-haw!

So, all told, our garden provided us with about $318 worth of produce this year. However, we also invested a lot in it, what with seeds, seed potatoes, compost, spray for the plum trees, stakes and wire for the one that tipped over, and materials for altering the raspberry trellis (though it really has made harvesting much easier). All told, we've spent around $164, which brings our profit down to only $154.

That doesn't look like a great return for all the work we've put in, but the numbers are somewhat misleading. A lot of our expenses, like the stakes and wire, were only one-time expenses, and a lot of the crops were unusually poor producers this year. In a more typical year, we'd probably get a much better return — maybe not enough to pay us a great hourly wage for all the work we put into it, but oh well, everyone needs a hobby. And after all, the flavor of a homegrown tomato, like true love, is a pleasure money can't buy.