Gardeners' Holidays 2022: Squashmas

We're a few weeks into zucchini season now, and our crop so far isn't as crazy as it was last year. We seem to have managed to strike a happy medium between having too few zucchini because we've lost one or both plants to squash vine borers and being absolutely inundated with them. So we have enough zucchini to enjoy, and not so many that they cease to be enjoyable.

Last night, Brian threw a few of them on the grill, along with some fresh corn on the cob from the farmers' market, a sliced potato, and some free-range turkey franks. These were an impulse purchase that came about in kind of a random way: a few days ago, I started seeing rumors on Facebook and Reddit to the effect that our local Stop & Shop, the one real supermarket here in town, was closing down. Troubled by this news, I went out to the store on my walk to see if I could find any sign as to whether it was true or false. I didn't, but while poking around, I found these hot dogs on sale for $4.49 — cheaper than the plant-based alternatives — and grabbed a package.

Having the dogs, we then had the question of what to serve them on. My doctor recently advised me to start watching my blood sugar, which means cutting back on low-fiber carbohydrates like the classic fluffy hot dog bun. No doubt we could have found a store selling whole-wheat ones, but Brian decided it would be more fun to try making them instead. He'd already had some success making hamburger buns with half whole-wheat and half white flour; for these, he decided to go full whole-wheat. He also added some soy flour added into the mix, since he'd found this helped his whole-wheat bread hold together a bit better.

Well, the buns did indeed hold their shape well — perhaps a bit too well. The problem was, they didn't puff up at all when baked, so they ended up looking less like buns and more like narrow, flat little loaves. I was able to make a sandwich on one by carefully slicing it open, cutting my hot dog and zucchini into small pieces, and piling them on, but it was a bit awkward.

So, clearly, the bun recipe needs a bit more work. Maybe it would work better to ditch the whole "bun" concept and use whole-wheat pitas or tortillas, in which we could wrap the dogs and zucchini strips up pig-in-a-blanket style.

The hot dogs themselves, however, were quite satisfying — much better than any meat-free alternative I've tried so far. The fake-meat manufacturers are doing a good job coming up with burger alternatives, but so far as I can tell, they've really fallen down on the hot dog front. Unfortunately, we can't seem to do better ourselves, so I guess this will continue to be one of the few areas in which we either indulge in real meat or do without.

Oh, and the news about the Stop & Shop, sadly, turns out to be true. The mayor has announced that she's in negotiations with Stop & Shop's parent company to "ascertain all the facts and options," presumably with an eye to keeping the store open. Failing that, she says it's "one of her highest priorities" to find another store to take its place. Folks on Reddit have suggested that our smallish store would be ideal for a limited-assortment grocery chain like Aldi, Lidl, or Trader Joe's, all of which we have patronized regularly over the years. But since all three chains already have stores within a few miles of our town, I fear that's unlikely to work out.

Household hacks: How we're keeping cool(er)

I've lived in New Jersey pretty much all my life, and so I'm used to hot, humid summers. Daytime temperatures over 90 degrees F are so common that they're not even worthy of comment, and there have always been summer heat waves when it gets into the upper 90s for a few days at a time. But nothing in all my years of New Jersey summers prepared me for the kind of heat we've been having this past week. 

Most of the state has been under a heat advisory for the last seven days, with the daytime heat index reaching 100 to 105 degrees. It's not too bad in the evening and early morning, but between 10am and 8pm, the outdoors is pretty much unbearable. Brian has been unable to ride his bike to work all week for fear that he'd just keel over from the heat on his ride home. And it's going to get worse before it gets better; tonight, it's unlikely to drop below 80 degrees all night long.

Most New Jerseyans, I imagine, are dealing with this by staying in their air-conditioned homes, cars, and workplaces for most of the day. But our house only has A/C in two rooms: a built-in wall unit in the living room and a window unit in the office. They can't do a thing to help us with cooking or eating in the kitchen or sleeping in the bedroom. And even in the rooms where we have A/C available, we prefer not to deploy it unless it's a true emergency, which I define as over 90 degrees indoors during the day or 85 at night. As we've learned from past experience, running the A/C all day is hugely expensive; one summer when we had guests staying with us for just one week and put an air conditioner in their room to keep them comfortable, our electric bill for the month more than doubled. And of course, for those who aren't getting their electricity from clean energy sources like we do, using more power also contributes to climate change, which means heat waves like this will only get more frequent and more severe in the future.

So, just as we do to stay warm in the winter, we're relying on a variety of household hacks to keep us at least tolerably cool until the heat wave breaks. Here's a roundup of our best cooling tips:

Summer Strategy #1: Use windows selectively

As soon as it cools down in the evening, we open windows throughout the house to to let in the cooler air. In the morning, as soon as the outdoor temperature gets higher than the indoor temperature, we close them all down to a crack. (We leave just a little gap for ventilation, because otherwise the house gets too stuffy.) We also lower the shades to block out solar radiation. During this latest heat wave, we've taken it a step further and started keeping the door to our guest room closed, since that room has south- and east-facing windows with blinds that don't fully block out the sun.

Summer Strategy #2: Use fans everywhere

We have an Eco Breeze fan in our office that I received as part of my payment for writing some ad copy for the company. It has a built-in thermostat that automatically switches it on as soon as the outdoor air gets cooler than the indoor air, and back off when the indoor air gets down to a preset temperature (or when the outdoor air heats up again). It also has the advantage that, unlike other window fans, it can run even in rainy weather. It's basically like a window A/C unit with all the cooling parts taken out. I probably would never have bought one if it hadn't been given to me, but now I consider it indispensable. The only reason I haven't bought more of them is that, like a window A/C, it permanently occupies a window all summer long.

For the rest of the house, we rely on lower-tech cooling. At night, we keep a window fan running in our bedroom's one window. When Brian gets up in the early morning, he usually shuts off the fan and closes the curtains to keep the room dark, but during this heat wave he's been compromising by turning off only one of its twin fans and closing just one curtain. He also sets up our huge exhaust fan in a kitchen window to vent hot air out of the house, replacing it with cooler air that flows in through the windows.

Once the outdoor air gets warmer than the indoors (which has been happening pretty early this week), we stow all the window fans and spend the rest of the day relying on stationary fans. We keep the ceiling fan in the kitchen running whenever we're in there, and in every other room, we have desk fans pointed at us wherever we happen to be. There's a little one that sits on my desk, one in the living room next to the couch (which Brian moves to his desk if he's working from home), and one in our bedroom that we keep pointed at the bed to keep air moving directly over us as we sleep.

Summer Strategy #3: Sip cold drinks

In weather like this, it's important to stay hydrated, so we both chug plenty of cold water all day long. You may have heard that hot drinks are actually more cooling, but that's only because they stimulate sweating; in New Jersey's humid climate, where the sweat never evaporates properly, they're counterproductive.

Summer Strategy #4: Minimize stove and oven use

In the wintertime, we use the oven as much as possible to keep the kitchen warm. In summer, quite the other way, we try to keep oven use and even stove use to a minimum. We rely on a combination of cooking on the grill (if it's not too broiling hot to be outdoors), using the pressure cooker to minimize stovetop time, quick-cooking dishes such as pasta, and cold salads that require no cooking at all. And if we absolutely have to bake something (such as our traditional anniversary cake), we do it either at night or early in the morning, with the exhaust fan running continuously to vent out the heat.

Summer Strategy #5: Chill out in the basement

Even with a fan pointed directly at us, there have been nights this week when our living room futon felt uncomfortably warm. The soft surface traps body heat, so it feels a bit like sitting in a hot bath. So, a few times this week, we have abandoned the living room and retreated to the basement, where it's as much as 10 degrees cooler, to play games or watch TV on Brian's laptop.

Summer Strategy #6: Apply ice

Another way I try to mitigate the heat when lying in bed or sitting on the couch is to grab a gel ice pack (the kind used for icing an injury) out of the freezer. I apply it directly to my pulse points (neck, wrists, thighs) for a quick burst of cold. I've tried other strategies for cooling the pulse points, such as a cooling neck band and wristbands that you soak in cold water, but I haven't found them all that helpful. With the humidity this high, the moisture can't evaporate, and the coolness of the water is offset by the damp material clinging to my skin and impeding airflow. And before long, they warm up to body temperature and provide no benefit at all.

By combining these six strategies, we manage to stay reasonably comfortable for most of the day, but things get challenging at bedtime. We've stripped down the bed to the minimum, with just the sheets and the duvet cover minus duvet, and stripped down ourselves to the minimum of clothing as well, but the mattress itself still traps body heat, so every part that's in contact with it feels overheated. In weather like this, I would happily run an air conditioner in the bedroom if we had had one, but we don't, and we've had trouble figuring out how to add without blocking off the room's only window for the whole summer.

On the very hottest nights, we sometimes sleep on the futon in the office, which has A/C, or in the basement, where it's naturally cooler. But this doesn't necessarily lead to a better night's sleep, because if we shut the cats into the room with us, they pounce on our feet, and if we shut them out, they scratch and meow at the door all night. So throughout this heat wave, I've been trying to tough it out in the bedroom with fans and ice packs, but with limited success.

I recently saw a suggestion in Consumer Reports that a cooling mattress topper can help. However, they're not talking about the "passive" kind of cooling with heat-absorbing gel, which they say doesn't work very well; they're recommending "active" systems with a little water cooler under the bed and a pump to circulate cool water through a network of tubes in the pad. These devices cost over $700 for a full-sized mattress, they include a bulky unit that needs to be stored under the bed, they use electricity (though not as much as an air conditioner), and they require regular maintenance to fill, drain, and clean the water tank. I've looked into some less expensive bed-cooling devices from the Cooling Store , such as the water-filled "Chillow" and a gel cooling pad, but I just don't know how well they would work.

One thing that definitely won't work is this alleged "portable AC" that I've been seeing ads for all over the Internet. From the description, it's pretty obvious that this is not an air conditioner at all, but an evaporative cooler, also known as a swamp cooler, which is supposed to cool you down simply by blowing air over water to evaporate it. In the first place, there's no reason to pay $90 for one of these when you can get something similar for less than half the price at Target or Walmart (and those models are honest about what they are, rather than misleading customers by claiming to be air conditioners). You can even make your own with less than $20 worth of parts. But we have no reason to do any of these things, because swamp coolers are pretty much useless in high humidity.

So, having weighed all the options, we've decided it's time to bite the bullet and add an actual air conditioner to the bedroom. I managed to find a small over-the-sill model that can fit in our bedroom window without obstructing it too much, so it can still admit light. At $430, it's significantly cheaper than the mattress cooler, and a lot more likely to be effective. It also has a fan-only mode, so it can also take the place of our old window fan (which would probably have needed replacing soon anyway) on summer nights when it isn't overpoweringly hot. And since it's Energy Star-certified, it won't completely destroy our ecofrugal cred to run it on the few nights a year when it is.

Besides, according to Hallmark, appliances are the traditional 18th-anniversary gift, so it's only fitting.

Money Crashers: Lending Circle – What It Is and How to Borrow From a Group Fund

In my latest piece for Money Crashers, I talk about an interesting way to borrow money: lending circles. These are informal groups in which members take turns pooling funds and giving all the cash to one person. For instance, ten people each put in $100 every month, and one person gets $1,000. Each person gets a turn to borrow, so everyone comes out even. And, since everyone is both a borrower and a lender, no one has to pay interest.

Now, if you're paying attention, you may have spotted a weakness in this plan. If you put in $100 every month, and once every ten months you collect $1,000, then you haven't really gained anything. You're no better off than if you had put that same $100 in the bank and withdrawn $1,000 after ten months. In fact, you're a little worse off, since banks pay at least a tiny amount of interest on your savings.

But the thing is, many people would have trouble saving up that $1,000 if it were just sitting there in the bank. They'd always be tempted to dip into it for emergencies, or to skip the $100 savings deposit some month when money was tight. But if they know the group is counting on them for that $100 payment, they'll do what it takes to make sure they have the money. It's the social pressure that forces them to save. And, since every payment is also an occasion for a social gathering, it's more fun.

Since I don't have trouble keeping my hands off my bank balance, a lending circle wouldn't be much good to me. But for those who do, it can make saving a little easier and more enjoyable.

Lending Circle – What It Is and How to Borrow From a Group Fund

Household hacks: More ecofrugal bath hacks

Five years back, I shared a series of ecofrugal household hacks for the bathroom. These included cleaning techniques and simple repairs for various items in the house's smallest room, such as the toilet flapper and toothbrush holder. All of them cost little or no money and required no nasty toxic chemicals, and many of them made use of materials that would normally go to waste.

In the years since, I've come up with several new tips and tricks for the loo along the same lines. I've already shared some of these, but I figured I might as well gather them all in one place for convenience. Thus, I proudly present Household Hacks for the Bathroom, Volume 2.

Hack #1: Reduce toothbrush waste

For years, Brian and I were loyal users of the Fuchs Ecotek toothbrush, with its a snap-out replaceable head. Using these allowed us to reuse the same toothbrush handles (which don't really wear out) for years on end, replacing and discarding only the smaller heads. When I discovered in 2020 that the Ecotek was no longer available, I went on a deep dive to figure out what would be the most ecofrugal replacement for it. 

A year later, with the help of a scientific paper from the British Dental Association, I settled on the Snap toothbrush from Greener Step: a replaceable-head model similar to my old Ecotek. Its only real downside is that, unlike the Ecotek, it has a wide, curvy handle that's no doubt meant to be ergonomic, but that doesn't fit into our built-in toothbrush holder, which can only hold old-fashioned flat handles. So, to accommodate it, we made a second wire add-on for the toothbrush holder.

Hack #2: Store your razor in a cup of oil

On the subject of reducing waste, one item in the bathroom that had always frustrated me was my cartridge razor. It wasn't so much the amount of waste it produced, since I could make one cartridge last quite a while; it was the cost of the replacement cartridges and the fact that the handles themselves inevitably broke after a while. So, last year, I bit the bullet and got a safety razor. This was much cheaper to use, but I still didn't get as close a shave as I wanted with it, and I kept nicking myself. So I eventually invested in a pricier Twig razor, which takes single-edged blades.

One problem with this new razor was how to store it. Its wider handle wouldn't fit through the gaps in my shower basket, and while the edge of the basket has hooks for hanging a razor, I was afraid of getting cut if it fell off. So I decided to kill three birds with one stone by storing my new razor head-downwards in a little cup of oil. This keeps the blade out of harm's way, prevents it from rusting, and keeps it well lubricated. The cup itself is just a repurposed moisturizer jar, and the oil is plain old canola oil out of the pantry. (I imagine it will eventually go rancid, but since I'm not planning to consume it, who cares?) 

Hack #3: Replace your plastic shower poof with a washable one

Another piece of waste in the bathroom I'd always wanted to eliminate was my plastic shower poof. I like the nice lather I'm able to work up with one of these, but I don't like the fact that it frays with use and eventually has to be thrown out. (I don't care so much about the bacteria it supposedly harbors, because let's face it, your skin is exposed to bacteria all the time; in fact, keeping them out of your body is more or less what skin is for.)

I've tried various more eco-friendly alternatives, but none of them was quite satisfactory. A washcloth didn't produce a good lather and didn't extend my reach enough for me to reach all parts of my back with it. A natural loofah was too abrasive. And a sea sponge from Bed Bath & Beyond cost 15 bucks and disintegrated after a few months of use.

My latest plastic alternative, and the one I suspect I'm going to stick with, is a washable bath puff made from cotton. (The exact one I bought on Etsy is no longer available, but here's a similar one.) It doesn't lather up quite as well as my old plastic one, but it looks sturdier, exfoliates nicely, and can be washed if it starts to mildew.

Hack #4: Make a bath compost pail from a coffee can

This is actually two hacks in one. The first is the idea of keeping a small compost pail in the bathroom to hold biodegradable waste: cat and human hair, spilled cat litter, cotton swabs (the kind with a cardboard core), and the scraps of newspaper used for cleaning the bathroom mirror. This makes it easy to compost all that stuff without having to carry it out to the bin while still dripping wet from the shower.

My first bath compost bin was an empty Blue Bunny ice cream container, which I spray-painted silver to blend in better with its surroundings. This held up for a few years, but the paint started to flake off, and eventually the plastic top cracked from repeated use. And by the time I discarded it, I couldn't simply replace it with another ice cream tub because Brian and I were no longer buying ice cream.

However, I had started buying coffee in cans at the supermarket, so my new bin is a small coffee can with a scrap of old wrapping paper taped around it. One problem with this design is that the metal rim on the bottom leaves rust stains on the vanity, but I circumvented that by saving the plastic top from a second coffee can and adding that to the bottom. 

The first can I used for this purpose was all metal, but it eventually succumbed to rust. So I switched to a coffee can from Lidl, which is made mostly of cardboard with only a small rim of metal at the top and bottom. These cardboard cans gradually break down from exposure to moisture, but that's no problem: when one gets too worn out to use, there's always another can to replace it with.

Hack #5: Make a soap dish insert from garlic sleeves

Along with its built-in toothbrush holder, our bathroom has a built-in soap dish. This is handy, except that any bar of soap that gets used frequently throughout the day will never get a chance to dry out between uses. As a result, it gets all slimy and gross, and it disintegrates quickly.

You can buy various sorts of inserts to fit inside the soap dish so the soap can drain, but we discovered that you can easily make one from those plastic mesh sleeves that garlic cloves come in at the store. Our original design had three of these rolled up into little doughnut shapes and stitched together with dental floss, but they tended to come apart over time. So we modified it to squeeze four of the little tori together in a sort of rhombus shape, each one attached to its two neighbors. Having two attachment points for each helps it hold together better.

This DIY soap dish insert keeps the soap dry for essentially no cost. It does accumulate soap scum and dirt
over time, but it's easy to clean up with a quick rinse under the faucet.

Hack #6: Store surplus meds in a drawer

Our upstairs bathroom is pretty tiny, and it doesn't have a lot of storage space. We have enough room for our towels and cleaning supplies, but one thing we had trouble finding space for was extra bottles of various medicines. (We end up with these for a variety of reasons. Some are from refilling prescriptions online, which requires us to order a three-month supply at once; some are from buy-one-get-one sales at the drugstore; and some are products that we buy online, stocking up to save on shipping.) We tried piling these in a bin in the linen closet, but it was always overflowing, and it was a hassle to go digging through it when we needed anything.

Eventually, it occurred to me that there was one bit of storage space in the bathroom we weren't using fully: a small drawer under the sink on the left-hand side. There was nothing in it but a flashlight, and there was enough room for that to squeeze in with the other items in the right-hand drawer, such as Brian's beard trimmer.

So now this drawer is given over entirely to surplus meds, and we can see all of them at a glance. We still occasionally run out of room in there, but we can usually stick an extra bottle in the medicine chest if we have to.

Hack #7: Use clips to squeeze the air out of a tube dispenser

This is the hack I've come up with most recently, and consequently the one I'm most pleased about. I've recently started using a couple of products that come in a particularly annoying kind of package: a flexible plastic tube. This isn't like a toothpaste tube that you can squeeze the air out of; it automatically reinflates as soon as you let go of it. And you can't just roll up the tube to push the product forward like you can with a toothpaste tube, because it automatically unrolls as it reinflates. Consequently, it gets harder and harder over time to get any product out of the tube. When you squeeze it, you generally get nothing but air. To get anything else, you have to press hard with both hands, whereupon you squeeze out a huge glob of the product that goes all over the place and not where you want it. So most of it just ends up going to waste.

There are various products on the market designed to fix this problem, ranging in price from around $3 to as much as $40. But to buy one of these, I'd probably have to order it online, and the shipping cost would raise the price to at least $8. I figured there had to be a cheaper DIY solution.

I tried various tools, including large paper clips and binder clips, and eventually found two that are fairly effective and easy to use. For the smaller of the two tubes, I just clipped a small barrette across the tube. This prevents it from reinflating, allowing me to squeeze the product out by sliding the barrette down along the length of the tube.

I had two of these barrettes, but the other one was too small to accommodate the larger tube. So instead, I rolled it up, pressing the air out as I went, and then clipped it in place with a clothespin.

Thanks to these simple tools — neither of which cost me a cent — I should be able to get all the contents out of both these pesky tubes. And in future, I'll try to avoid buying any product in this kind of idiotic packaging.

Money Crashers: 15 Ways to Save Money on Medical Expenses & Health Care Costs

The U.S. health care system is a mess. It's a chaotic hodgepodge of competing private insurers that all cover different things at different facilities. As a result, even with insurance, medical bills can often add up to thousands of dollars.

In my latest Money Crashers piece, I explore strategies can help you keep your health care costs under control. They range from choosing the right insurance plan to saving on prescription drugs to practicing preventive care. They're not a solution to our horrendous health care system, but they can help you survive in it.

 
15 Ways to Save Money on Medical Expenses & Health Care Costs

 

Recipe of the Month: Soykebabs

One of the toughest things about being vegetarian in the summertime is grilling. There are, of course, lots of veggies that are delicious cooked on the grill, including zucchini, onions, mushrooms, eggplant, peppers, tomatoes, corn on the cob, and even potatoes. (Cut into slices, they cook quickly and are quite tasty.) But even if you cook several of these together, it's not really a complete meal. To be satisfying, it needs some kind of protein.

Brian has experimented with grilling different meat substitutes, with varying degrees of success. Some veggie burgers more or less fell apart when he attempted it. Lightlife Smart Dogs were okay, but kind of dry and bland; Morningstar Farms Grillers were, despite their name, a bit tough when cooked this way. The new high-tech plant burgers, Impossible Burger and Beyond Burger, are supposed to be the most meat-like, but we haven't tried them due to their high cost — currently around $12 per pound at our local supermarket. That's not actually Impossible, but for us, it's Highly Unlikely.

A week or two ago, we tried grilling some plain old tofu. We used the extra-firm variety, and Brian cut it into slices about half an inch thick and marinated it in a mixture of water, canola oil, garlic, soy sauce, brown sugar, and black pepper. This turned out reasonably well. Neither the taste nor the texture was much like meat, but then, it doesn't really need to be. Brian wasn't quite satisfied with the marinade, but it was still better than most of the plant proteins we've tried on the grill to date.

The success of this recipe got Brian wondering whether it would be possible to grill Soy Curls. The biggest practical difficulty with it is that they're too small to lay directly on the grill; they'd just slip through. But Brian thought he could get around that by making them into kebabs, alternating the soaked curls with chunks of veggies on bamboo skewers.

So, last night, he attempted this experiment. He soaked the Soy Curls in a marinade based on the one he used for his vegan sausage and threaded them on skewers with zucchini, mushrooms, and Vidalia onion. Then he grilled all that over a wood fire, along with a sliced potato and a couple of ears of corn from the farmer's market. (Side note: Brian has learned over the years that wood isn't really any harder to cook with than charcoal; it just takes a bit longer. Once you've built your fire, wait for the flames to die down, and at that point it's essentially the same as cooking over lump charcoal.)

I worked my way along the skewer, trying chunks of zucchini, mushroom, and onion before finally getting to one of the Soy Curls. Gingerly, I bit into it, and my teeth sank in just as if were a chunk of real meat. The flavor was meat-like, too, though I would have been hard put to it to say exactly what kind of meat it most resembled. Brian thought a meat-eater trying it without being told what it was would guess it was chicken, but I thought it was closer to pork. In any case, it had plenty of salty, smoky, umami flavor. I don't think even a die-hard carnivore would have any complaints about either the taste or the chew.

The one respect in which they didn't resemble meat? The cost. I just recently ordered another bulk shipment of Soy Curls, and the price has gone up a bit: 12 pounds, including shipping, came to $72.69. So that's about $6.05 per pound for the dry curls. But when soaked, they absorb about twice their weight in water, so the price of the rehydrated curls is only a little over $2 per pound. That's cheaper than either the sale-priced ground beef ($2.99 per pound) or the sale-priced pork chops ($2.49 per pound) at our local supermarket, and roughly on a par with the free-range chicken legs we used to buy from Trader Joe's. Even the fuel we used to cook them was free, since the wood was partly trimmed off our own plum trees and partly salvaged from some broken sticks discarded by our Morris dance team.

In short, these Soykebabs were an unqualified success. If you want to try them yourself, here's the full recipe:

    Brian's Soykebabs

1. Soak 4 bamboo skewers in water. This is an essential step if you don't want them to catch fire.
2. Mix together 1/3 cup water, 2 Tbsp. soy sauce, a grind of pepper, 1 crushed clove of garlic, 1 Tbsp. brown sugar, and 1/4 tsp. salt. Microwave the mixture for 30 seconds on high, then add 1/4 tsp. Liquid Smoke.
   
3. Pour this marinade into a shallow dish. Then add roughly 12 long, intact Soy Curls to the dish, or however many it takes to more or less fill it while keeping the curls mostly submerged. Soak for about 20 minutes.
4. Mix up a separate marinade for the vegetables from 1 Tbsp. balsamic vinegar, 1 Tbsp. soy sauce, 1 Tbsp. brown sugar, and 1 crushed clove of garlic. Microwave this mixture for about 20 seconds. 
5. Slice 1 small zucchini into coins about 1/4" thick. Cut about 1/4 pound of mushrooms in half, or in quarters if they're extra large. Add these to the marinade. Cut up 1/2 a Vidalia onion into bite-sized pieces, but don't marinate this.
   
6. Optional step: if you are grilling over wood or charcoal, go out and build your fire now. Then go bring the various components (skewers, Soy Curls, veggies, onion, and olive oil spray) outside so you can keep an eye on the fire as you prepare the skewers.
   
7. Remove the Soy Curls and veggies from their respective marinades and thread them onto the skewers. You will need to fold the curls in half or even thirds, poking the skewer through each one two or three times. Spritz the skewers lightly with olive oil.
8. Grill the skewers, turning them every two or three minutes, until the Soy Curls are ever-so-slightly blackened on the ends.
   

Farewell to Fedco

For about as long as we've had a garden of our own, we've been buying our seeds from Fedco Seeds. I don't remember exactly why we chose this supplier in the first place, but we've stuck with them because we liked both their selection and their prices. They offered an ever-changing, always-tempting assortment of varieties for all the crops we like to grow, including organic options for most crops, and unlike many providers, they also offered an assortment of sizes, so we didn't have to buy more seeds than we could reasonably use in our small garden. And for many crops, the smallest packet size was less than a dollar.

But over the past couple of years, we've been noticing more and more problems with Fedco's seeds. This year, for instance, most of the snap peas we planted completely failed to germinate. (Granted, the packet we were using was two years old, but the Old Farmers Almanac says pea seeds should be good for three years.) Also, the new pepper variety we tried, Banana, gave us only one spindly little seedling out of the four we started — and that was actually an improvement on the Apple pepper we tried last year, which produced no seedlings at all. And our entire scallion harvest, out of the three whole squares we planted from a brand-new packet, was one scrawny little bunch.

Some of the seeds we got this year weren't even the ones we'd ordered. When Brian tried cooking Thai-style Soy Curls with some of our Thai basil, he discovered that it wasn't Thai basil but cinnamon basil, or some other variety that tastes similar to it. (Cinnamon basil is an interesting flavor, especially good with fruit-based dishes, but not one we can really use on a regular basis.) Also, one of our green bean plants — which were supposed to be Provider, a bush variety — is now climbing its way up the trellis, something a bona fide Provider bean clearly wouldn't do. And that wasn't the only rogue bean in that packet; there was also one in there that we didn't plant because it was dark purple, almost black, while the rest were white. (This has happened before; in 2018, our packet of Provider beans included one Climbing French bean, a variety Fedco supposedly didn't even sell. This turned out to be a happy accident, since we really liked the beans, but it still doesn't speak well of Fedco's quality control.) 

Moreover, there are some crops (leeks, eggplant, Brussels sprouts, all types of bell peppers) that we've never once managed to get a good harvest of. We assumed the problem was our soil, but given the recent failures of Fedco's seeds, we have to wonder if just possibly it was the seeds that were defective all along. In short, it's clear that Fedco has just let us down too many times at this point for us to stick with them any longer. 

The question is, what should replace them? This isn't easy to answer, because although we're not that attached to Fedco itself, we are quite attached to some of the plant varieties we buy from it. Through years of trial and (mostly) error, we've found that these varieties work well in our garden, and we'd hate to give them up. So any new company that can't provide our trusty Carmen and Caballero peppers, our Sun Gold and Pineapple tomatoes, our Green Machine zucchini and our Little Dipper butternut squash, probably isn't a company we want to do business with.

I checked Belle Mead Co-Op to see what kind of seeds they stock and found four different sources: High Mowing Organic Seeds from Vermont, Renee's Garden from California, and Burpee and Agway Seeds from Pennsylvania. Agway doesn't have a website and Renee's Garden probably wouldn't be ideal for our climate, so I checked out the websites of Burpee and High Mowing Seeds to see what they carry.  Burpee does not have a single one of our preferred varieties. High Mowing has the Carmen pepper and Green Machine zucchini, but nothing else. So neither one looks all that promising as a replacement for Fedco. 

So I tried approaching the problem from the other direction. I searched for the names of the varieties I wanted to see what suppliers came up. The first three hits for each one were:

• Carmen: Harris Seeds, JohnnySeeds, True Leaf Market
• Caballero: Fedco, Park Seed, WeSeeds
  
• Sun Gold: Gardens Alive, Park Seed, True Leaf Market
• Pineapple: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Park Seed, Victory Seeds
  
• Green Machine: Jack Seeds, JohnnySeeds, Park Seed
  
• Little Dipper: Park Seed, Urban Farmer, WeSeeds 

As you can see, Park Seed is the most promising of the bunch, carrying five out of the six. However, the one it doesn't have, Carmen, is the one we can least easily do without, since it's practically the only sweet pepper we've been able to grow reliably. (I checked Park Seed for Jimmy Nardello, the variety we used to grow before finding Carmen, and that wasn't available either.) 

Next I checked out the three stores that carry the Carmen peppers. Harris Seeds has Green Machine, but no other varieties on our list; JohnnySeeds carries Green Machine and Sun Gold; and True Leaf has Pineapple. But there's no single store that carries everything we need.

So it looks like we have a couple of options. One, we could replace one or more of our trusted varieties. Two, we could buy our seeds from two or more different sources, which means paying twice as much for shipping. Or three — the most difficult but most satisfactory if we can pull it off — we could try to share our seed order with another gardener in our area. In other words, find someone else who is also able to get most but not all their seeds from a single source and see if we can pick up their missing seeds in our order while they do the same for us.

I don't know which of these methods will turn out to work best for us. But we've got until the end of the year, when we need to place next year's seed order, to figure it out.