Gardeners' Holidays 2022: Late Harvest

Autumn is now at its peak. The weather is pleasantly cool, the trees are ablaze with fall colors, and out in the garden, production is starting to wind down. We're still getting some tomatoes (mostly Sun Golds) and the odd handful of raspberries, but nearly everything else is finished. Brian is leaving the few Climbing French beans still growing on the trellis to dry so he can harvest them for seed to plant next year. And a frost warning a week or so ago prompted him to harvest and process most of the basil, zucchini, and peppers, along with all the tomatoes — blushing or not — that were reasonably large enough to harvest. So most of what remains is the stragglers: the cold-hardy parsley, the few tomatoes and peppers that survived that first frost, a few leeks, and a couple of tiny zucchini that may or may not get big enough to pick before the next frost hits.

Most years, our biggest crop in October is butternut squash. But this year, our squash crop is in an odd half-harvested state. The vines out in the garden itself have all died, but the volunteer plant out in the side yard is bigger and more rambunctious than ever. So, as a compromise, Brian decided to pick all the squash off the garden vines and the two fully ripe ones off the volunteer plant, while leaving the others on the vine in the hope that some of them will ripen before the frost gets heavy. Thus, we presently have a pitiful harvest of six squash — just one small squash off each of the four Little Dipper vines we planted and two larger ones off the volunteer plant, whatever variety it may be. And that's in spite of the fact that the volunteer got a much later start than the ones we grew from seed, only growing large enough to attract our attention around August. This is a truly pathetic performance for Little Dipper, which gave us eight squash from four vines last year and 21 the year before. At this point, I'm starting to feel like I won't particularly regret having to drop this variety next year when we replace Fedco as our seed supplier.

At the same time we harvested one crop, we planted another: the garlic. As I mentioned back in June, our yield of this has not been at all good this year either. We ended up getting just a couple of scapes and seven tiny heads, not even enough to sow for next year's crop. So we had to buy two new heads of hardneck garlic from the farmers' market at an exorbitant $2 each. Brian got a total of 15 cloves from those two heads and about 25 from the home-grown ones, and he planted the lot in the long bed in front of the fenced garden area, next to the rhubarb. This plot currently has asparagus in it, but we didn't get so much as a single spear off it this year, so Brian has decided to write it off and turn that spot into our new garlic patch. We'll hope the plants prosper a little better in their new home, away from the trampling feet of groundhogs and whatever else has been hanging out in our yard.

That's about all that's going on in the garden right now, which means we didn't have much in the way of home-grown produce to celebrate this Gardeners' Holiday with. We used a few of our home-grown tomatoes in the sauce for an Indian shrimp dish on Friday, and last night Brian tossed a couple of our peppers on the grill for some grilled vegetable sandwiches — kind of a last hurrah before the weather gets too cold for outdoor cooking. But today, the only thing I got to celebrate the transition to colder weather was a flu shot. Not as enjoyable as a butternut squash lasagna, perhaps, but probably better for me.

Recipe of the Month: Vegan Swedish Meatballs

Some months, I have to scramble to come up with a Recipe of the Month before I run out of days to post it in. I often have to make do with something that isn't really a brand-new recipe, but a variation on something we've made many times before, such as our favorite pasta a la Caprese. So it came as a pleasant surprise when this month, I actually found myself with numerous new recipes to choose from. 

Some of these were simply variants on older dishes. For instance, one night Brian tried tinkering with his usual recipe for corn bread, throwing in some almond flour and a little leftover tofu to make it less carb-heavy.

 Another evening, he altered a pasta recipe we'd made many times before, Cavatelli with Arugula and Dried Cranberries, by replacing the pasta with quinoa. (This worked surprisingly well.)

He also tried a new variant on the no-knead bread recipe he uses for our favorite Roasted Eggplant and Pepper Sandwiches. He'd already made this quite successfully with whole wheat flour in place of white, so he decided to take it a step farther and add all the extra ingredients he uses in my breakfast bread to make it healthier, including rolled oats, wheat bran, and flax meal. This made for a very heavy, chewy loaf that, unfortunately, didn't bake quite all the way through in the middle. But he thinks that was because he made the loaf too big, so it had too high a volume compared to its surface area. He plans to try it again using either a smaller batch of dough or a larger pot to cook it in.

A couple of other recipes we tried were brand-new, but fairly simple. For instance, a "Blue Hawaiian Shake" we discovered in the "mocktails" section of a mixology book had only four ingredients: blueberries, coconut cream, milk (we used soy), and ice. The result was more of a smoothie than a mocktail, but quite satisfying.

And then there were the little date balls Brian whipped up as a healthy snack for me — kind of like a homemade energy bar. These were a little less successful. The mixture of chopped dates, chopped walnuts, oats, and a little cocoa powder was reasonably tasty, but it didn't hold together very well.

But the most elaborate new recipe we tried this month was the Vegan Swedish Meatballs from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. This recipe caught my attention when it was first published at the end of August, so I printed it out and put it on the pile of ideas for future use. And this month, Brian fished it out of the pile and tried it.

This recipe was fairly involved. The author of the blog says she used canned lentils to make it, but we've never seen such a thing, so Brian had to cook the lentils before he could do anything else. And as it turns out, even in the pressure cooker, dry brown lentils take about 20 minutes to cook. Moreover, even though he used about three cups of water to one cup of lentils, it turned out to be not nearly enough, and the volume of cooked lentils he ended up with was much smaller than he expected. But having invested so much time already, he didn't want to backtrack and try making something else for dinner, so he forged ahead with what he had, combining the cooked lentils with wheat gluten and seasonings and pulsing it all in the food processor to form a "crumbly dough" — perhaps a bit more crumbly than intended.

After that, he had to form the dough into balls and steam them. This part of the process was also time-consuming: he had to bring the water to a boil first, then load the meatballs into a steamer basket and cook them for 25 to 30 minutes. (It might be possible to cut the time by starting to heat the water before preparing the dough.) And once that was done, he had to fry them in a pan with oil.

While the balls were steaming, he was working on the side dishes. IKEA always serves its meatballs with mashed potatoes, lingonberries, and a creamy gravy, but Brian decided to substitute oven-roasted potatoes (with skin) as a slightly healthier alternative to mashed. The meatball recipe included a creamy gravy, but it called for "vegan "beefless" broth or mushroom broth," which he didn't have. So he whipped up his own by simmering together about 1/4 pound of chopped mushrooms, a clove of crushed garlic, a teaspoon of nutritional yeast, and half a teaspoon of salt for about 20 minutes. Then he mixed this with the vegan butter and flour called for in the recipe, substituting coconut cream (which we had left over from the blueberry shake) for the "vegan culinary cream." And finally, he cooked up some green beans as a vegetable side.

Considering all the difficulties Brian had with these meatballs, they turned out surprisingly well, with an umami-rich flavor and a satisfyingly chewy texture. In fact, they were remarkably similar to the "plant balls" from IKEA — which is somewhat surprising, since they have almost no ingredients in common. (Their HUVUDROLL plant balls are made with "pea protein, oats, potatoes, onion and apple," so pretty much the only ingredient they share is onion.) They paired quite well with the lingonberries, potatoes, and beans. I found the gravy a little less successful, since the coconut cream gave it a distinct coconut note that didn't seem to me to fit in with the rest of the flavors in the dish. But it kind of grew on me after a while and I not only finished up my portion but even went back for one extra meatball, gravy included. And the hearty dish was satisfying to the tummy as well as the palate; I didn't find myself wandering back to the fridge for a snack later in the evening, the way I usually do a few hours after dinner.

Although we both enjoyed these vegan Swedish meatballs, I wasn't sure if it was worth making them again, considering the effort involved. However, Brian thinks they will go more easily next time. Being familiar with the recipe, he'll have a better idea of how long everything takes, and he'll be able to avoid problems like the too-small volume of lentils. So he plans to try it at least once more. It may be too elaborate a recipe to become part of our everyday rotation, but it will be nice to have in the repertoire for those slow, lazy weekends.

Small victories: Closing the clothing cycle

The ecofrugal life is not without its frustrations. One of them cropped up for me earlier this fall, when I discovered that my trusty lightweight coat — the one I've been wearing every spring and fall since 2009 — had developed a hole near the right shoulder too big for me to repair. (It was probably my purse strap rubbing on it for all those years that did the damage.)

Now, given that I bought this coat for a mere ten bucks at Goodwill and got roughly 25 seasons of use from it, you might say I have no real grounds for frustration here. But there was an additional wrinkle: after using the same coat for roughly ten years, I finally succeeded in finding a tailor to shorten the sleeves for me. This job cost me roughly $40, but it seemed justified given that the coat itself had cost so little to begin with and had served me so long already. I thought I'd probably be wearing it for another ten years at least, so it would be worth the expense to have it fit like it was made for me. And now, within a few years of making the investment, the coat had ceased to be presentable.

Adding to my frustration, I couldn't seem to find a decent replacement for it. True to my ecofrugal principles, I tried shopping secondhand first, but a search of two local thrift shops and several online ones turned up nothing suitable. I searched the sites of clothing retailers that got high marks from The Good Shopping Guide and Better World Shopper, but they either had no coats for sale or had none I liked as well as my old one. Some of them could have done an acceptable job, but they all would have cost me a minimum of $170, and my ecofrugal soul rebelled at paying that much for something that wasn't really what I wanted.

At the very same time I was having so much trouble finding a garment I actually needed, I was also having trouble getting rid of several that I didn't need. Some of these were in decent condition and could probably have been donated to the local thrift shop, but others were so old and worn they were fit only for textile recycling — something that we've discovered isn't that easy to do around here. There are a lot of places to drop off clothes in good condition for resale, but almost none that will take worn-out ones for repurposing.

With the help of the Helpsy website, I'd managed to locate a bona fide textile recycling bin within five miles of our house, but unfortunately it was in a direction we almost never go. We couldn't drop off our clothes there as part of our everyday errands; we'd have to make a special trip just for that purpose. So for a few months, these unwanted garments were just taking up space in a bag on my bedroom floor, and it wasn't until today that we finally got around to dropping them off. 

It was at this point that my frugal fashion luck started to change. Because, as it happened, the route to the textile bin took us right past the Goodwill store in East Brunswick — the very one where I'd bought my fall coat all those years ago. I'd mostly given up on going to this store, since its organizational scheme is such a mess that it's incredibly frustrating trying to find anything that fits. But since we were driving right by it, I figured it would be silly not to at least stop in and have a look.

The store was as disorganized as ever — so much that I nearly walked out empty-handed because I couldn't find the rack with the winter coats on it. But at last I located it and quickly started trying on coats right there in the aisle, not bothering to take them to the dressing room. And, amazingly, the third one I tried seemed pretty close to a perfect fit. The sleeves were a bit too long, but that was a flaw I could easily fix by just rolling them up. The price tag: $20, more than I'd paid for the old one (even accounting for inflation), but considerably less than any of the new ones I'd been considering.

So, after an unpromising start, this trip turned out to be the kind of ecofrugal victory that makes all the little frustrations seem worth it. In just one trip, I managed both to unload a bunch of garments I didn't want and acquire one I truly needed. My new-to-me coat is just as good as my old one, it cost less than one-eighth the price of a new one, and since it's secondhand, its green credentials are impeccable. And my old, unwanted clothes will now go on to new lives of their own. Perhaps some of them (the ones in good condition) will end up on thrift store shelves where they'll be just as great a source of frugal delight to some future buyer as this coat is to me. It's the ciiiiiiiiircle of clothes!

How weird are we?

I originally intended for this week's post to be about some more possible climate solutions that I've heard about in the past few weeks. (No doubt I'll cover these eventually, but just as a teaser, they include artificial trees that absorb carbon, small-scale nuclear reactors, carbon-negative concrete, advances in solar panel and wind turbine blade recycling, new battery technologies, and ultrawhite paint that makes surfaces absorb much less heat.) But yesterday morning, as I was hanging out the laundry, it occurred to me that there was another topic I'd rather discuss: Just how weird are we?

I don't know if ours is the only house on our block that has a clothesline in the back yard, but as far as I've ever been able to tell, we're the only people who actually use one. So for over ten years, our neighbors have been watching me hang our laundry on the line and have, quite possibly, been wondering why these weirdos take the time to hang their clothes when they could, duh, use this amazing modern device called a dryer that can get them dry in a fraction of the time, with much less work. And on top of that, if they're observant, they may have been wondering as well about some of the specific items in our wash that can be observed fluttering from the line. Handkerchiefs? Who in the world still uses cloth handkerchiefs when we have disposable tissues now? And rags? Bits of old socks and T-shirts that are clearly no longer wearable garments, yet these weirdos for some reason not only hang on to them, but apparently take the trouble to keep washing them over and over? What's up with that?

Thoughts like these have run through my mind on laundry day before, but this time they particularly resonated because of an article I'd been reading just before going out to hang the wash. It was a piece in the New York Times about how Uruguay is managing, practically alone among the nations of the world, to combine prosperity with sustainability. (Their population is overwhelmingly urban, and their electricity is 98 percent renewable.) It's an interesting read, but one thing that really stuck with me is the way the author opened the piece. As a contrast to what life is like in Uruguay, he outlines the lifestyle of a "typical American household," which according to him includes:

• A house of around 2,200 square feet
• Yearly energy use of 11,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 37,000 cubic feet of natural gas
• Six or seven plane flights every year
• Two cars, at least one of them an SUV
• At least one child
  
• A total of 25,000 miles of driving each year ("most of which you barely register anymore, as you listen to Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny")
• A couple of trips to Target each month for "six or seven things: double-sided tape, an extra toothbrush, an inflatable mattress"
• A carbon footprint of 25 tons per person
  

As I read those paragraphs, my jaw was, if not literally hanging open, certainly feeling a bit wobbly. I knew our ecofrugal household was a bit atypical, but are we really that far out of the mainstream of American life?

Our house is, in theory, a three-bedroom measuring just 936 square feet, although the finished basement expands the usable living space to more like 1,400 or 1,500 square feet. Our yearly energy use is 2,113 kilowatt-hours of electricity (all from renewable sources) and about 404 therms of natural gas. (That apparently works out to 40,390 cubic feet, so we're actually a little above average there.) The last time I went anywhere on a plane was for my grandmother's funeral 11 years ago. We have one car, which we drive about 11,000 miles per year (and we've never listened to either Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny, ever). We do go to Target occasionally, but more like a few times a year than a couple of times a month. And while estimates of our household carbon footprint vary widely, they're all between 4.5 and 12 tons per person per year — nowhere close to 25.

So, if the Times article is right about what a "typical" American lifestyle looks like, then we are indeed pretty far out of the mainstream. But is it? The author doesn't cite any sources for any of the statistics in his opening paragraphs, so can we be sure they're right?

Digging around on my own, I found that the true picture is a little more complicated than the author's figures suggest. Take housing, for instance. The article says says a typical American family has a 2,200-square-foot house in a "middle-class suburb." And Census data confirms that the average new, single-family house built in 2021 measured 2,273 square feet. But there's a problem with this statistic — two problems, in fact. First of all, not all homes are single-family houses, and second, not all homes are newly built. And anyone who lives in an apartment, or a townhome, or an older house like ours, almost certainly has less than 2,273 square feet of space.

For more accurate figures, I went to the 2021 American Housing Survey and ran a search based on square footage. And after a few minutes with a calculator, I worked out that the average reported home size (at least among households that did report it) was around 1,440 square feet. Pretty close, in fact, to the size of ours with the basement included. So as far as housing goes, we're not actually out of the mainstream at all.

Now, not all the statistics were this far off base. For instance, the Energy Information Administration says average household electricity consumption in 2020 was 10,715 kWh, close enough to 11,000 for government work. The average number of cars per U.S. household, according to Statista, is 1.88, which rounds off to two. And SUVs and other trucks do indeed account for most new car sales.

But some of the other figures were pretty farfetched. Gallup says that in 2021, 62% of Americans did not travel by air at all, and 23% made only one or two trips. (These numbers were a little lower than they had been before the pandemic, but even when Gallup asked the same question in 2015, only 10% of Americans said they had flown five or more times in the past year.) A majority of US households have no children living at home. And the average U.S. driver put 12,724 miles on their car in 2020 (down from 14,263 in 2019, but that's still far less than 25,000). So on balance, it seems like our ecofrugal lifestyle is actually closer to the norm than the "typical" American lifestyle described in the Times article.

As for line-drying laundry, it was hard to find statistics on that. The best bit of data I could find was from a 2009 Pew poll, which found that roughly two-thirds of Americans consider a clothes dryer a necessity. That puts us line-dryers in the minority, certainly, but not such a small minority as all that. Using handkerchiefs appears to be a bit farther out of the mainstream; based on this Reddit thread, the general consensus seems to be that they're gross and unhygienic (though based on my prior research, paper tissues aren't really any better). But hankies do still have their staunch defenders. And as for the use of cloth rags in place of paper towels, an informal survey by Family Handyman found that respondents actually prefer cloth dish towels by nearly two to one.

The bottom line? Being ecofrugal may be a little bit weird in 21st-century USA, but it's not that weird. And if Forbes and the Good News Network are to be believed, it's getting more normal all the time.

Now, if you'll excuse me, a bunch of those socks I just washed yesterday need darning.

The ecofrugal way to make a bed (without fitted sheets)

Yesterday, I decided that the weather had become chilly enough to make it worth putting our warm comforter on the bed. (In the summer, we leave it off and use only the empty duvet cover.) Before doing this, I decided to wash the duvet cover and then, since I already had the bed stripped down partway, to change the sheets. I stripped off the plain cotton ones we'd been using for summer and prepared to replace them with the middle-weight flannel ones we use for fall before upgrading to extra-warm fleece in the winter. And then I remembered: we no longer have a complete set of flannel sheets. We still have the flat sheet and the pillowcases, but we had to discard the fitted sheet because the elastic wore out and it wouldn't stay on the bed anymore.

Thinking about it, I realized we've run into this problem with a lot of our sheet sets. One way or another, the fitted sheet goes kaput while the flat sheet and pillowcases are still good. Usually it's the elastic that fails, but sometimes the fabric just wears through. And even when the fitted sheet is still in good condition, it's sometimes unusable because it doesn't fit our mattress. Either it's too loose (because it's designed for one of those huge "pillow top" mattresses) and it shifts around, or it's too tight and can barely stretch over the mattress in the first place. Either way, it ends up popping off one corner—often in the middle of the night, leaving us lying on top of the bare mattress. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having a bottom sheet in the first place.

All this kind of makes you wonder why it's worth having fitted sheets at all. They didn't always exist; my dad recalls from back in his Army days that a standard "set" of sheets was three flat sheets, plus the pillowcase or cases. One flat sheet went on the bottom, one on the top, and the third was a spare. When it was time to change the sheets, you moved the top sheet to the bottom, put the clean sheet on top, and sent the dirty bottom sheet to the laundry. This is an eminently sensible system, since all three sheets get an equal amount of wear and you never have to wash more than one at a time. But with modern sheet sets—fitted sheet, flat sheet, and pillowcases—it's no longer possible.

I could accept this drawback as an acceptable trade-off if fitted bottom sheets were obviously superior to flat ones. But as I've already observed, they're just the reverse. They don't always fit, they wear out faster, and they're harder to repair. As Vice points out, sheets are most prone to wear out in the middle, a problem you can fix with a flat sheet by cutting it down the middle and sewing the two good edges together. The worn-out middle section becomes the edge and can be tucked under the mattress, letting you get a few more years of use out of the sheet. I admit most people nowadays probably wouldn't bother to do this, but with a fitted sheet, they don't even have the option.

In short, fitted bottom sheets are the exact opposite of ecofrugal (and hard to fold, to boot). And yet somehow, these clearly inferior sheets have become so ubiquitous that hardly anyone remembers it's possible to make a bed without one. And even those who know it's possible, like me, don't necessarily know how to do it. My mom taught me how to make a bed years ago, but the lesson started with putting on the fitted sheet, and I've never learned any other way of doing it.

Even the Internet provides little guidance on this matter. I've tried repeatedly to search for "How to make a bed with two flat sheets," but I all I could find was explanations of how to make a bed with two flat sheets on top of a fitted sheet. Even searches for "How to make a bed without a fitted sheet" kept giving me hits on how to make a bed with a fitted sheet, or even how to turn a flat sheet into a fitted one—exactly the opposite of what I asked for.

But yesterday, driven by my growing frustration with the failures of fitted sheets, I dug deeper into the results, knowing there must be a solution somewhere. And when I finally found one, it turned out to be something I already knew perfectly well: use hospital corners. 

My mom showed me how to do this as part of that long-ago lesson, but she did it with the top sheet, over top of the fitted sheet. She lined up the top edge of the sheet with the top of the mattress, tucked in the bottom edge, and then used hospital corners to hold it in place. And apparently, this is how most people even today use hospital corners, since most explanations of how to make them show them being placed over top of a fitted sheet. So it simply never occurred to me that if you put hospital corners on all four corners, top and bottom, it would hold a flat sheet down just as if it were a fitted one. 

Armed with this new knowledge, I decided to try making up our bed this time using two flat sheets: our orphaned flannel one and another orphaned one from one of our percale sheet sets. This proved to be a bit tricky, as apparently modern full-size sheets aren't really sized to cover an entire full-sized mattress from top to bottom. By centering the sheet very, very precisely on the mattress, I was able to give myself just enough material to tuck in the top and bottom edges, but there wasn't an inch to spare.

I then went around my precariously tucked sheet and made hospital corners on all four corners, top and bottom. I did this using a diagonal fold, the way my mom taught me all those years ago. But if you prefer a vertical pleat, this other YouTube video shows you to do it that way. The ever-so-posh British woman in the video says she makes a vertical pleat because she thinks a diagonal one "looks messy"; it's not clear whether it stays put any better on the mattress.

With the bottom sheet in place, I placed the flannel sheet on top. Since it only had to reach as far as the top of the mattress, I had a lot more fabric to tuck in at the foot of the mattress than I had with the bottom sheet. I did hospital corners on this one too, but at the bottom corners only; I'm hoping this well-tucked top sheet will help hold the bottom one in place.

We've now slept one night with the bed made up this way, and so far, the precariously tucked bottom sheet is staying put. If it can make it through a whole week, it'll be doing better than our fitted ones usually do. But even if it doesn't, I don't think it'll be an indication that this system of making a bed is faulty; the problem will more likely be that the sheet I used just wasn't big enough. I believe I've got a queen-size flat sheet (six inches longer than a double) tucked away in our cedar chest downstairs, so I'll try it again with that one before giving up on the technique.

Sadly, even if it works, I don't think I can switch over to using flat sheets exclusively. It's all right for summer, spring, and fall, but the fleece sheets we love so for wintertime appear to be available only as sets, with one flat sheet, two pillowcases, and a so-called fitted sheet that doesn't. But at least this method will allow us to keep using the orphaned top sheets from our existing sets when the fitted ones inevitably, prematurely give out.