Gardeners' Holidays 2022: The Changing of the Garden

I really should have posted this last weekend, but I forgot all about it in the excitement of talking about our holiday gift exchanges. So here, just a little late, is my annual post on how we did with this year's garden, and what we plan to keep or change for next year. Spoiler alert: Most of the news isn't good.

Our most productive crops this year were our lettuce and our trusty Sun Gold tomatoes. Between the spring crop of Bronze Mignonette and the summer lettuce mix, we got a total of 52 cups. Our fall planting of winter lettuce, on the other hand, didn't really give us anything before winter hit, though we might still get something off it in the spring from plants that have overwintered. (This seems to be a widespread problem, as lettuce has become ludicrously expensive at the store right now.) The Sun Golds were far and away the most productive of our tomato plants, giving us 525 tiny tomatoes from just two plants—not our best yield ever, but much better than an average year. And the Carmen peppers put in a decent showing, giving us an average-ish yield of 15 small and 6 medium peppers.

But all other crops and varieties were lackluster at best. Our new Banana pepper gave us only four fruits, and the Caballero chili pepper never produced any. Our Pineapple tomato, which produces such magnificent fruits when in good form, yielded only one small tomato, and the Premio and the new Grandma Mary's were both complete busts. The Provider green beans barely lived up to their name, yielding about a pound and a half of beans, and the Climbing French beans gave us a measly 2 ounces. We got just 8 cups of arugula, 14 ounces of snap peas, six smallish butternut squash, and a handful of cucumbers. And even though both our zucchini plants successfully fended off the borers with the help of some Bt spray, they provided only nine small, three medium, and five large squash between them.

We're assuming that that these disappointing results were mostly down to the weather conditions we had this year—a late spring, a lot of really hot days, and not much rain—rather than some sudden failure on the part of our seeds. So, for next year at least, we're planning to stick with the vegetable varieties that have performed well for us in the past. But since our former supplier, Fedco Seeds, has become increasingly unreliable, we need a new one that sells as many as possible of our trusted varieties.

To choose our new seed supplier, I started by searching for recommendations online. I found six companies with positive reviews: Botanical Interests, Harris Seeds, High Mowing Seeds, Johnny Seeds, Seed Savers, and True Leaf Market. Then I visited each of their websites looking for one that carried all the crops we wanted and all the specific varieties we were most attached to (Marketmore and Cross Country cucumbers, Provider green beans, Carmen peppers, Cascadia snap peas, and Pineapple, Premio, and Sun Gold tomatoes). Sadly, no company had all of them, but Botanical Interests and True Leaf had most of them at prices that weren't too outrageous. However, of those two, only Botanical Interests offered a printed catalog, so that's the one that ended up accompanying us on our trip out to Indiana.

From that catalog, we picked out the following varieties to try next year:

• Basil. We have a sufficient supply of sweet basil seeds that aren't too old, so for now all we need is Thai basil. There was exactly one variety of that available (Sweet Thai), so this was an easy choice.
• Leeks. Once again, Botanical Interests offered only one variety: King Richard. It's described as frost-tolerant and early-producing, with a "subtle onion flavor" and "extra-long stems." We'll see if it does better than the Lancelot variety we planted this year, which gave us six fairly scrawny leeks.
• Lettuce. This past year, we planted three kinds: Bronze Mignonette, a butterhead variety, in the spring; summer lettuce, a heat-tolerant mix; and winter lettuce, a cold-hardy variety. When I perused Botanical Interests seeking replacements for these, I discovered a single variety called Marvel of Four Seasons that might actually be able to take the place of all three. According to the catalog, it is both heat- and cold-tolerant and has a "delicate, buttery flavor." It says the harvest window is "21-55 days," which I assume means it will mature 21 days after planting and will bolt after 55 days, so to make it last through three seasons we'd need to do several plantings a few weeks apart. However, Botanical Interests also sells a heat-tolerant leaf lettuce called Salad Bowl, so we're thinking about doing a summer planting of that flanked by spring and fall plantings of the Marvel of Four Seasons. That won't put the Marvel to as thorough a test, but it will allow us to hedge our bets and give us more variety.
• Parsley. Botanical Interests has just two varieties to choose from, one flat-leaf and one curled, so we picked the flat one.
• Peppers. The one vegetable variety we particularly like that Botanical Interests doesn't have is our trusty Carmen frying pepper. However, we still have five seeds of it left from this year's packet, and Brian thinks that should be enough to get us through the next growing season. So for next year, we are going to plant those and also give this year's Banana pepper a second try. The only new variety we've picked out is a chili called Biquinho, which is described as "mild, tangy, and sweet, followed by a touch of heat." Just about my speed, in other words.
• Winter squash. For the past several years, we've planted two varieties. Waltham is fairly reliable and produces large squash, but not always very many of them, so we like to include a smaller variety like Ponca Baby or Little Dipper as a hedge. Botanical Interest doesn't offer any butternut varieties other than Waltham, but they do have a "cousin" of butternut that they call Honeynut. It's described as a compact vine that produces smaller, smoother squash with a "richer, sweeter flavor," which sounds worth a try.
  
• Zucchini. Botanical Interests doesn't sell the Green Machine variety we've grown for the past two years. They have the Black Beauty variety we've grown in the past, but we were more intrigued by a hybrid called Emerald Delight, which is described as compact and "extremely productive" with "great disease resistance." All that sounds pretty hard to argue with, so we're giving it a go.

The only other crop we need to replenish our stock of is snap peas. Botanical Interests carries the Cascadia variety that performed so well for us in 2020 (not so well last year or this year, but that was the fault of deer invaders), so we're sticking with that. We're already trying eight new vegetable varieties as it is, which is quite enough experimentation for one growing season.

There's one more type of seed I'm tempted to throw into our cart: strawberries. I've been thinking for some time about adding a strawberry bed to our yard, but I've always assumed this would require us to terrace the slope in the backyard to create a flat growing surface. Then we'd have to put in the plants, mulch them, and cover them up with netting in the summer to keep the birds from getting all our fruit. And they'd have to be either thinned to remove excess runners or chopped down entirely at the end of each season so they didn't grow into a big tangle. All in all, it seemed like a pretty big project, so I've kept putting it off.

But Botanical Interests has seeds of the Alpine or woodland strawberry, which is a rather different creature. It's not nearly as productive as a traditional strawberry, which is why the landscaper we consulted ten years ago didn't recommend them; the fruits are tiny and, according to her, difficult to harvest. But on the other hand, they're pretty easy to grow. They tolerate shade better than big strawberries, they don't require thinning, and they don't really need mulch. They don't even need a dedicated bed; you can just let them run wild as a ground cover, which is something we could use in our yard anyway. And since the similar barren strawberry is the one ground cover that has really thrived in our yard, they would probably handle the conditions pretty well.

A packet of Red and Yellow Wonder Blend, described as "wildly delicious—packed with flavor and fragrance," costs only $1.99 for 130 seeds. According to Epic Gardening, growing them from seed is "not always successful," but even if we don't end up with many plants, we haven't lost much by trying. So I'm inclined to pick up a packet, take a crack at starting them indoors, set down whatever plants we manage to grow, and see if we can get any "wildly delicious" fruit off them.

And that, in a nutshell, is our garden plan for next year. Watch this space to see how the new varieties work out and whether we end up sticking with Botanical Interests for the long haul. Happy New Year to all, and here's to good harvests in 2023!

Ecofrugal gifting games

Happy holidays, everyone! This year, in place of my usual Green Gift Roundup, I'm going to talk about two specific ways our family exchanged secondhand gifts this year. Both of these were gift swaps of a sort, but each involved a different type of gift and was run according to different rules.

The first gift exchange was Brian's solution to the always tricky question of what to give the seven niblings (the delightful gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews) on his side of the family. They range in age from 13 to 19, and we only really see them at Christmastime. Thus, all we really know about their current activities and interests is what Brian hears secondhand from his parents throughout the year. This makes it difficult to select gifts tailored to their tastes. The one thing we know they're all into is reading, but we have no way of knowing which specific books would appeal to each of them and which ones they've already read.

So this year, Brian came up with a clever workaround. He went through the collection of secondhand books we had stashed in our "possible gifts" box and selected five he thought would appeal to a broad range of tastes. (All of these were books we had read ourselves and deemed enjoyable.) The authors represented included Neil Gaiman, Jane Austen, Jasper Fforde, P.G. Wodehouse, and Alexander McCall Smith. Since all of the works were fiction, he also ordered two nonfiction books we had read and liked—How Not to Be Wrong by Jordan Ellenberg and Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein—from Better World Books to add more variety to the mix.  His idea was to wrap these seven books and have all the kids take turns choosing books according to the rules of the classic Yankee swap.

However, he decided that one book per nibling, especially with most of them being yard-sale and library-sale finds we'd acquired for under $5, wasn't quite enough of a present. His original plan was to enclose a gift certificate to Half Price Books with each one so they could add a second book (or two) of their own choice. But when he discovered that the smallest available denomination was $25 and multiplied that by seven kids, he decided that was a little too big a present. Instead, we went to the bank and got a bunch of $5 bills and he stashed three of them inside each book. And to make things more interesting, he decided to choose the pages where the bills were hidden so that the first letters of the verso pages—read in alphabetical order based on the author's names—would spell out the hidden message, "Read a book for Christmas." Then he would offer an additional prize (the three books we had left in our box) to whichever kid managed to crack the code first.

This plan underwent a slight change at the last minute when we learned that one of the niblings was bringing their girlfriend along for Christmas. Since we didn't want her to feel left out, we decided to wrap up one of our three extra books and add it to the mix. We didn't have three more $5 bills between us, so instead we enclosed a $5 and a $10 and changed the secret message to "Read a book for Christmas, eh?" (He gave them the additional hint that the addition of the eighth book had made the message Canadian.) To randomize the order in which kids would choose books, he gave each of them a state quarter and had them go in alphabetical order by state.

By nearly all measures, this exchange was a great success. All eight kids ended up with books they liked, and they had great fun choosing books, stealing each other's selections, and solving the riddle. Since they all worked together to find the solution, Brian just offered the two extra books to the group as a whole, along with the additional cash prize of a $2 bill he had in his wallet that he knew he'd never be able to bring himself to spend. And with all seven books being secondhand (and five of the seven wrapped in reused wrapping paper), they were eco-friendly gift choices as well.

The one area in which this gift idea fell down slightly was on the frugality front. When you add together the $15 cash hidden in each book, the $53.52 we spent on the books themselves, the $2 additional prize, and the $2 worth of state quarters he doled out as tokens, the total cost of the book exchange was $177.52, or $22.19 per kid. That may not sound like much, but it's more than the average amount we typically spend on gifts, many of which are usually secondhand or homemade. Adding the books plus cash to our gift list made this our most expensive holiday season yet by a significant margin. And based on the kids' reactions, I don't think the hidden cash made the books that much more exciting as a present than they would have been on their own. So I'm hoping we haven't set a standard with these gifts that we'll now be expected to live up to in future years.

The other gift exchange was the brainchild of my mother-in-law. She had done a Yankee swap with us last year, using a variety of small but useful gifts (the most coveted present was a set of earbuds, but we were equally happy with the giant box of brownie mix we ended up with), and it was such a hit that the kids specially requested some version of the same thing this year. So she obliged, but with a twist: She called this year's gift exchange "the heritage edition." She wrapped up one box for each family member, each containing some heirloom item that had been part of the family for some time. Some of these items dated back to my husband's childhood, some to his parents' childhood, and some went back several generations. Some of them—such as a big milk can that used to store all the family's gloves, hats, and scarves next to the door—were too big to fit in boxes, so she instead wrapped up a small trinket to represent the actual gift. And each box also contained a card outlining the provenance of that particular item and its place in the family history.

Rather than randomize the order, she had us choose boxes in reverse order by age, starting with our 13-year-old nephew and working our way up the line to Brian, her firstborn. Once we'd each opened one box, we had the opportunity to trade with each other to get each item to the person who had most interest in it. The family heirlooms included old quilts, whimsical pieces of porcelain, one grandfather's old slide rule, and another grandfather's truly hardcore kite-flying kit, complete with two large kites, a massive reel, and thousands of feet of string. I drew a vintage set of stainless-steel drafting tools that had once belonged to Brian's engineer grandfather (still in mint condition, though the case was damaged), but swapped it for an antique hat rack that's sitting beside the desk where I'm typing this now. And the youngest nibling ended up with his great-great-grandmother's old "potato bug" mandolin—an instrument he had never played before, but on which he was doing a creditable rendition of "Rocky Road to Dublin" within ten minutes of picking it up.

This gift exchange was even more ecofrugal than ours. The gifts themselves didn't cost a cent, yet they were all more meaningful to the recipients than something from a store could ever be. And as one niece slyly pointed out, the exchange also helped our in-laws clear some unused stuff out of their home—a nice little bonus gift for them.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all an ecofrugal new year!

Why green Americans should want permitting reform

Way back in 2016, I posted about how I was hunting for a magazine with an ecofrugal spin. Unfortunately, I never really found one I was happy with. But over the years since then, I've searched again from time to time, and last January I thought I might have found a solution. By becoming a member of Green America, I'd automatically get a subscription to its Green American magazine, which covers a range of topics related to climate, social justice, and green living. Even if it wasn't exactly what I wanted, at least my subscription fee would go to support a worthy environmental organization.

So, the year went by, and I was reasonably satisfied with the magazine—not utterly delighted, but I thought it was good enough to be worth the membership fee. Being a member also meant that I would periodically receive emails urging me to take action on various environmental issues, but I didn't really mind that. I'd occasionally click through if I thought the issue was worthy of attention, and if I didn't, I'd just hit delete. Until this week, when this message from Green America brought me up short:

Tell Your Senator to Block Manchin's Dirty Deal

Senator Joe Manchin’s “Dirty Deal” is back and, if passed, would put front-line communities at greater risk and increase greenhouse gases by “streamlining” the approval process for fossil fuel projects. The senator wants to dismantle the policies in place that are meant to protect communities and mitigate the climate crisis. We need to stop it ASAP.

So, you may ask, what's wrong with that? Shouldn't an environmentalist like me want to stop new fossil fuel infrastructure? I mean, if we want to transition to a clean energy economy, isn't blocking fossil fuel projects a crucial part of that?

No. No it isn't.

The fact is, fossil fuel projects are already on the decline. And it's not because environmentalists have been vigilant about blocking them; they're just too expensive. At this point, the cheapest ways to generate electricity are solar and wind. In 2021, 85% of all new energy capacity came from clean sources, mostly solar. And of the new projects currently in the "queue"—that is, proposed projects waiting to be approved—over 92% are wind and solar. Natural gas accounts for only 7.5% of the total, and coal for none whatsoever.

But here's the catch: Most of these proposed clean energy projects will never be built. And the main reason why is problems with permitting—not just for the plants themselves, but for the power lines they need to carry their energy.

You see, the best places to put new solar and wind farms are out in the country, where there's lots of room for them. But in order to get the energy from these facilities to cities, where it's needed, you need new transmission lines—a lot of new transmission lines. According to Princeton University's Net Zero America project, we need to more than triple the rate at which we're building new transmission lines in order to support a fully renewable power grid by 2050. If we continue to build them at our current, slow rate, we'll miss out on about 80% of all the emissions cuts promised by the Inflation Reduction Act. In fact, fossil fuel use in the U.S. will actually increase, because we'll have to burn more coal and gas to meet the increased demand for electricity from all those electric cars and heat pumps.

But right now, getting those new power lines built is a long, slow, cumbersome process. On average, getting a new long-distance transmission line built takes over ten years. And over four of those years are spent just getting all the necessary permits. If a transmission line runs between states, you have to get separate permits from each state government—and often from municipal governments too—before you can even start building. Each of these governments has its own rules about permitting, usually involving extensive environmental review. And a project can be challenged at any step of the process, tying it up in court for years.

Approval for fossil fuel pipelines tends to go significantly faster. These can be approved at the federal level by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC). The Energy Independence and Security Act would have allowed FERC to approve interstate transmission lines and also to intervene in fights over who should pay for them. But because the same bill also contained some provisions that would have helped fossil fuel suppliers, environmental groups—including Green America—have labeled this a "dirty deal" and lobbied heavily against it, blocking it not once but twice. Even though the bill's benefits would have gone overwhelmingly to clean power projects, and even though failure to improve the grid will actually make emissions worse, they decided that it was the principle of the thing that mattered.

Consequently, I will not be renewing my membership in Green America after all. Even if I really liked the quarterly magazine—and frankly, it was just okay—I'm not giving one penny of my money to any group that is actually working to stop the reforms we desperately need to achieve a carbon-free economy.

Recipe of the Month: Homemade Cauliflower Rice

My Recipe of the Month posts started out as a 2013 New Year's resolution. In the interest of getting more fruits and veggies in my diet, I resolved to try a new fruit or vegetable each month. Over the years, that goal morphed into a more general one of trying new veggie-focused recipes on a monthly basis. And in recent years, that's often meant recipes that used plants as a substitute for animal products — like Soy Curls for sausage, oyster mushrooms for steak, or tofu for mozzarella cheese.

But in the past month, we've found ourselves having to eat quite differently. Vegetables are still essential, but now we're using them more often to take the place of starchy foods rather than protein-rich meat or dairy. In place of pasta, we've tried kelp noodles and heart of palm lasagna (both of which sort of worked, but are much too pricey to use on a regular basis). Brian also attempted a cauliflower crust pizza, which was another limited success; there was nothing wrong with the taste, but the crust lacked crispness and fell apart if you tried to pick up a slice in your hands. And this week, he decided to tackle one of the trendiest of all starch substitutes, cauliflower rice.

With all the folks out there these days on low-carb diets (most of them by choice, not dragged kicking and screaming like me), low-carb versions of everything are in high demand. Consequently, cauliflower rice — which is simply cauliflower cut up into small enough pieces that it resembles rice — has become easy to find ready-made in stores. You can go into Walmart right now and pull a 7-ounce bag of it out of the freezer case for about $2.50. But between the plastic packaging and the $5.60-per-pound price tag, it's not exactly an ecofrugal option. Instead, Brian picked up a whole head of cauliflower (about a pound) for $3.27 at Lidl, grated it coarsely, and lightly pan-fried it with a touch of salt. (The instructions he found online actually called for it to be cooked in a covered pan, so that the cauliflower rice would be more steamed than fried, but he didn't bother with that.)

He served this homemade cauliflower rice as an accompaniment to a Moroccan chicken stew. We normally dish this up over regular rice, quinoa, or couscous, but since the stew contains chick peas, eating more than a third of a cup of any of these as an accompaniment to it would put me over my carb allotment. Spooning the stew over cauliflower rice instead worked on one level: the mild flavor of the cauliflower blended into the background and didn't clash with the flavors of chicken, onions, chick peas, parsley, and cinnamon. But it didn't really add anything, either. Unlike real rice, the cauliflower substitute didn't soak up the gravy, stretching the stew across a bigger volume of food. The added vegetable matter was effectively just another ingredient in the stew, one that increased its bulk a little but added nothing to either its flavor or its substance. (Fortunately, Brian had also made a pot of quinoa, so I was able to add my allotted third of a cup of that to my bowl of stew as well.)

Although the homemade cauliflower rice wasn't ideal as an accompaniment to this stew, I still think it could be useful for other applications. It might work well with stir-fry or fried rice, either on its own or as a way to eke out regular rice and make a single portion go further. It wouldn't add any real substance to an all-vegetable meal, but these days we always include bulk up our stir-fries with tofu or Soy Curls anyway. So the cauliflower rice would simply make the meal feel heartier, even if it didn't actually make it any more filling. Or at least, that's the theory. At any rate, it can't hurt to try.

Ten climate tidbits

This weekend marks the December conference of Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL), an organization I've now been part of for close to three years. For most of that time — in fact, for most of the time it's existed — CCL has been focused on one specific policy goal: putting a price on carbon in some form or other. But since our pet policy didn't make it into the landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the organization has decided to expand its approach to climate legislation. Thus, the main purpose of this conference was to unveil our new multi-pronged approach. We're planning to continue the fight for carbon pricing (perhaps at the state and local level for a while), but we're also going to be working toward three additional goals:

• Permitting reform. Remember how I said last summer that the IRA would get our carbon emissions down to about 40% below their 2005 level? Well, it turns out that number was a little fuzzy. The bill's provisions will allow us to build enough green energy infrastructure to get to that level — but whether we actually build them will depend largely on whether the projects can get the necessary permits. Right now, there's a lot of red tape holding them up. So cutting through that tape is one of our new policy priorities.
• Building electrification and efficiency. It's not enough just to make the power grid greener. There's a lot of other stuff out there that currently runs on fossil fuels, such as vehicles and home heating systems. To eliminate those emissions, we need to convert all that stuff so that it runs on electricity, while at the same time making sure the electricity it runs on is green. (Efficiency is part of this because the more energy-efficient we can make homes and other buildings, the less green electricity we'll need to power them all.)
• Nature-based solutions. Trees are an ecological two-fer: They suck up carbon, and their shade helps make it easier to survive on a hotter planet. To make the most of these benefits, we need to manage existing forests better so we don't lose so many trees to development and/or wildfires. And we need to add more trees everywhere we can: whole new forests, trees on cropland (silvopasture), and trees in cities.

This, then, is the broad overview of our agenda. But as always, God and the devil both are in the details, and it was these details that most caught my attention at the conference sessions I attended. Here, in order of appearance, is a quick rundown of the ten most interesting tidbits that I learned:

1. Most climate bills are bipartisan. Anyone who was paying attention knows that the IRA passed without a single vote from Republicans. But this actually made it an exception to the general rule. Up until now, every major environmental bill— the ratification of the Kigali Amendment, the 2021 infrastructure bill, the Murkowski-Manchin energy and water bill — has had significant Republican support. Which means there's good reason to hope that we can continue to pass climate legislation in the upcoming, closely divided Congress.
2. Permitting reform, though boring, is absolutely vital. To achieve our climate goals, we need to triple our capacity to transmit clean energy within the next 30 years. But right now, we're only expanding electric transmission at about 1% per year. If we continue at that slow rate, we will only realize about 20 percent of the emissions reductions from the IRA. In fact, U.S. emissions will actually increase, because if we can't connect cities to the wind farms and solar farms being built in rural areas, we'll need to burn more coal to make up for increased demand for electricity.
3. Fossil fuels are already on the way out. In the U.S., we've pretty much stopped building new fossil fuel plants already. About 90% of all proposed electricity capacity in the queue is wind or solar. Global demand for fossil fuels is projected to peak by 2025.
4. Weatherization is a huge money-saver — especially for low-income households, which spend a bigger share of their income on fuel. It can cut their energy bills by as much as 35%.
5. Forests sequester up to 12% of all carbon emissions in the U.S, and we could potentially boost that number as high as 22%. (The linked article says 21%, but it's from 2018, and our total emissions have fallen since then.)
6. Urban trees literally save lives. They improve air quality and help cool urban "heat islands." Neighborhoods with trees have measurably lower mortality rates than neighborhoods without them, even when you control for the fact that these neighborhoods tend to be richer and whiter.
   
7. Building with wood is a win-win. Replacing materials like steel with "durable wood" can cut the emissions from construction by 25% to 33%, while also sequestering carbon within the wood.
8. Electrifying buildings automatically makes them greener — even if the electricity comes from fossil fuels. That's because modern electric appliances are a lot more energy-efficient. Heat pumps are two to three times as efficient as a traditional heating system.
   
9. It also saves a ton of money. Replacing an old-school heating system with a heat pump can save a family anywhere from $100 to $1,300 per year. (Households with oil heat or electric resistance heaters see the biggest savings.) Electrifying everything — space heating, water heating, cooking, transportation — could cut the cost of powering our economy in half.
10. If you're not ready to go electric, you can still get your home "electric ready." This means putting in the necessary circuits so that when you are ready to replace your heating system, your water heater, your gas-burning car with a plug-in electric, you can just do it. There's information about what this entails on the Rewiring America website, which also offers a detailed guide to how the IRA can help pay for it. The Carbon Switch site also has lots of useful info on how to go electric. 

I'm sure I'll be diving deeper into these new topics (reforestation, building electrification, urban forests, permitting reform) over the coming weeks and months. But for now, these ten fun (and useful) facts are my top takeaways.