Gardeners' Holidays 2023: First Fruits

For New Jersey gardeners, June marks the real start of the harvest season. In April and May, you can gather a few salad greens, along with whatever you can get from perennial crops like rhubarb and asparagus. (For us, that's "plenty" and "almost nothing," respectively.) But by the June solstice, our garden is really starting to crank it out. Our two new lettuce varieties have proved to be quite impressive producers, particularly the Marvel of Four Seasons. The three squares we planted have already yielded around 17 cups, and it shows no signs of bolting. We've harvested about 14 ounces of snap peas so far—nothing like the 79-ounce bumper crop we got in 2019, but far better than the measly 3 ounces we got last year. And we've gleaned the odd few bits of garlic scapes, parsley, and other herbs.

But the real stars of this summer's garden are the fruits. We've picked between five and six cups of raspberries so far, and there's plenty more where that came from. We've also gathered two to three cups of honeyberries—not enough for the honeyberry fool I envisioned when we first planted the bushes, but more than enough to snack on or sprinkle over salads. And we're currently experiencing an early windfall of plums—literally. 

It's pretty normal for our plum trees to start shedding fruit in June. There's just too much for their branches to hold, so they drop little green plums all over the yard whenever there's a bit of a breeze. (We even bought a special tool to help us pick them up so we don't have to crawl through the grass collecting them before they sprout.) By late June, some of the Opal plums falling off the trees are red, but they're usually too small and sour to eat. But this year, Brian tried sampling some of the fallen plums and found that parts of them, at least, were ripe enough to use. So he's been spending some time today going through the collection, cutting them up and putting the edible bits into a freezer bag. When he has enough, he plans to try making them into plum wine. He's never made any kind of wine before, so it's an experiment, but if it works, it'll make a nice alternative to putting up quarts and quarts of jam.

Which is not to say we won't be making any jam at all this year. Brian has already made one batch from our raspberries and strained half of it to make a seedless jam for the top of our anniversary cake. The remaining extra-seedy jam has gone into the fridge for us to enjoy on toast or possibly even homemade tortillas. And that only used about two cups of berries, leaving us with three and a half (and counting) for scattering on salads, muddling in drinks, or just scarfing down by the handful.

The best thing about all this produce is that it's only the beginning. Out in the garden, there's the promise of so much more to come: a narrow, pale green pepper on one of the new Banana pepper plants; green fruits forming on the tomato vines; tiny little embryos of zucchini and cucumbers; pale purple flowers on the bean plants; and an abundance of little basil seedlings. So there's plenty to look forward to as the gardening season winds on.

Recipe of the Month: Another vegan sausage attempt

Last month's vegan sausage rolls were a success in some ways. They were tasty and satisfying, and they demonstrated that it's possible to make a reasonable puff pastry with our new homemade plant butter. But as an actual sausage substitute—a vegan-friendly alternative for the grill—they didn't work at all. So this month, Brian decided to tackle another of the veggie-based sausage recipes I'd found during my online investigations. This one, from the Minimalist Baker site, seemed to have a reasonable amount of protein—about 5 grams per serving—without using tofu, tempeh, seitan, or any other "meat substitute" ingredients. That was enough of a novelty to make it worth a try.

This recipe features a combination of roasted beans, cooked quinoa, mushrooms, and chopped nuts as the base. We didn't have the pinto beans and pecans the recipe called for, so Brian subbed in the suggested alternatives, black beans and walnuts. The recipe said you could season the mixture with fresh thyme, sage, or rosemary, all of which we had in the garden; he went with sage as having the most traditional sausage flavor. Since I'm a bit of a spice wimp, he omitted the optional red pepper flakes and cut the black pepper down from a half-teaspoon to a generous pinch; he also omitted the fennel seeds, which I don't care for. However, he did include the optional pitted date, since the recipe said this serves "for binding" as well as "offsets the spice."

This turned out to be a wise decision. Even with the date included, the sausage mixture came out rather dry, and the patties formed from it didn't hold together well. If he'd made the eight largish patties the recipe called for, they might have fallen apart entirely, but instead he went for 14 smaller ones that were closer to the size he was used to for breakfast sausage. Eked out by roasted potatoes and broccoli, just two of these smaller patties made a reasonable meal for me.

Taste-wise, these were quite good. The carefully calibrated mix of seasonings—garlic, sage, smoked paprika, coconut aminos, salt, and pepper—produced an overall flavor that was remarkably sausage-like. The texture, however, was anything but. Despite being fried in a considerable amount of oil, the patties were still quite dry and crumbly. Grilling them would obviously be completely impractical, and even serving them as a stand-alone protein dish was a bit challenging. I thought maybe they'd work better topped with some sort of gravy, like the Swedish meatballs he made for me last fall. Brian's idea was that perhaps the mixture shouldn't be cooked on its own at all, but used as a filling for something like stuffed peppers or mushroom caps. It would probably work pretty well in a sausage roll, producing something much more worthy of the name than the so-called sausage rolls we made last month—but since we both liked the non-sausage filling, we'd prefer to make that recipe in its original form.

In short, this is yet another vegan sausage substitute that doesn't quite live up to its intended job. It tastes pretty good, and it might work well as an ingredient in some other recipe that calls for crumbled sausage, such as a pasta dish or an omelet. But if what you're looking for is an herbivore-friendly sausage to toss on the grill, this ain't it. I guess the search continues.

Soy coffee creamer experiment

One of the many plant-based "schmilks" I've tried since I first gave up the moo juice is Silk Protein. Nutritionally speaking, this stuff is very impressive, with a whopping 10 grams of protein per glass—much more than most plant milks, and even more than dairy milk—and only 3 grams of sugar. And its flavor and texture are very close to the real thing, as well. Its biggest drawback is its price: typically around $5 for a half-gallon. That's far more than the $2.39 we pay for half a gallon of Lidl soy milk, our current schmilk of choice. (Soy milk's vaguely grassy flavor isn't my favorite, but I've found that in a cup of cocoa it's not too noticeable.) However, it's still cheaper than most liquid coffee creamers you can buy, either dairy or otherwise, and significantly lower in sugar. So we use the Silk for coffee, as well as for the occasional glass to accompany a cookie, and soy milk for most other applications.

Until recently, Silk Protein was available at our local Stop & Shop, just half a mile down the street. But in March, Stop & Shop closed that store. This was a problem, because this particular variety of Silk is a bit of a specialty item. It's not available at any of the stores where we normally shop (Lidl, Trader Joe's, Costco), nor at any other supermarket that's on our regular route. To buy it now, we have to make a special trip to another Stop & Shop in our area. This is doubly disgruntling for us, because aside from the extra time and gas, we hate to continue giving Stop & Shop our business after what they did to our town. But the only other chain that carries Silk Protein is Acme, and the nearest one of those is even farther off our usual route. So over the past few months, we've swallowed our distaste and made a couple of runs to Stop & Shop just for this item. 

But in the wake of our success with making our own plant butter, I started wondering whether I could also make a homemade coffee creamer that would do as good a job as the Silk Protein—perhaps even at a lower cost. Since one of the perks of the Silk was its protein content, I decided to focus on creamer recipes based on soy milk, a reasonably high-protein plant milk that we always have on hand. I'd already tried coffee with just straight soy milk and found it didn't work well at all; it was too thin and watery, so all it did was dilute the coffee without adding any body to it. What I hoped to find was a recipe that would thicken up the soy milk to something with a consistency closer to cream.

As it turns out, there are three possible ways to do this:

• Just heat the soy milk on the stove until the liquid is reduced.
• Combine the soy milk with a thickener such as tapioca starch and heat it just briefly.
• 
  Skip the heating step and just blend the soy milk with xanthan gum.

Not knowing which of these methods would work best, I decided to try all three. I made a small batch of each one, using between one-quarter and one-third of a cup of soy milk, depending on which scaled best with the recipe. All three recipes called for sweetener as well as thickener, but since I was aiming for a low-sugar creamer, I left it out. I knew that was might affect the texture, but I figured a recipe that couldn't make a thick creamer without added sugar was no use to me anyway.

The first method, relying on heat alone, was a bit of a pain. Five to eight minutes doesn't sound like a long time, but it's a long time to stand by the stove staring into a pot waiting for the contents to thicken. And if after all that time, the liquid doesn't actually thicken and just forms a skin on top instead, that's an even bigger disappointment. The second method seemed to work a little better; as the starch-enhanced soy milk came to a boil, it did indeed appear to grow a little bit thicker. But like the first batch, it also developed a skin, which wasn't particularly appetizing. 

The third method, simply blending the soy milk with xanthan gum, was the easiest, but it wasn't clear how well it worked. The liquid came out of the blender very foamy, so I couldn't easily tell if it had thickened up any. But as soon as I started pouring it into some coffee, it became apparent that the answer was no. I added three spoonfuls without making any discernible impression on either the color of the flavor of the coffee. Eventually I ended up dumping in the entire batch, equivalent to one-third of a cup of soy milk, and the coffee was still too bitter for my taste.

The other two creamers were a bit thicker, but they didn't perform much better. The second batch, the one with the tapioca starch in it, made the coffee lighter, but not much creamier in flavor. As with the blended creamer, I had to use the whole batch to make the coffee drinkable—and that was for only half a cup of coffee, since I decided to split one cup up between two mugs for the test. 

The first batch, treated with heat only, was the best of the lot. Chilled overnight in the fridge, it thickened up to a consistency that could reasonably be described as creamy, and I was actually able to get a decent-tasting half-cup of coffee out of it. But once again, I had to use almost the entire batch to do so. I started out with a third of a cup of soy milk, and I used all of it for just half a cup of coffee. That means a full cup of coffee would require the equivalent of two-thirds of a cup of soy milk, which is...let's see here...about 20 cents' worth. My Silk Protein can do the same job with about three tablespoons, or 12 cents' worth. And it's a lot less work. 

In short, it looks like my best option for now is to stick with the commercial product. It's kind of a pain to get hold of, but it's a better value than anything I can make at home. And since it uses less liquid for each cup of coffee, it produces less packaging waste as well. But I'll continue to experiment with other recipes for vegan coffee creamer—possibly starting with one of these coconut-milk based recipes from PETA—in hopes of finding a more ecofrugal alternative.

Why I don't buy everything used

After receiving a Washington Post subscription as a birthday present last January, I also signed up for the paper's Climate Coach column. In it, columnist Michael J. Coren offers climate-focused consumers advice on everything from green funerals to bidets. His most recent column is about an interesting challenge he undertook: "For one month, I set out to buy everything used and online."

Now, I'm already a big believer in shopping secondhand when possible. But trying to buy absolutely everything this way seems like an awfully high bar. As I read the article, I mentally went through the list of items we'd bought recently trying to figure out whether buying them secondhand would even have been feasible. What about the water supply lines we had to replace in our bathroom sink? What about the new lids I bought for our Pyrex food storage containers? Are there really people online selling these things used? And even if there are, would ordering from them necessarily have been greener?

To answer this question properly, I pulled out out my spending list for the past month and identified all the non-consumable items we'd bought. This proved to be a surprisingly short list, as the bulk of our spending goes toward consumables (such as food and medicine), services, and donations. For each item, I noted where I'd bought it and what I paid. Then I did a little digging to figure out whether it would have been possible to buy it used from an online retailer instead and, if so, what it would have cost. Here's the list:

• A secondhand copy of Moll Flanders, bought for $1 at the Princeton Library bookstore. There are, naturally, loads of places to buy secondhand books online; a quick search online turned up multiple copies starting at $1, the same price I paid for it in the store. But that doesn't include shipping, which would add another $4 minimum. And besides adding to the price, shipping it to New Jersey from an out-of-state seller would have added to its carbon footprint. The copy at the library store cost one-fifth as much, supported a good cause, and required no transportation at all, since I was in Princeton already. Buying it online would clearly have been worse in every way.
• A game that I bought directly from its creator, who had a booth at the town street fair, for $26.75. Since this game is brand new, there are no secondhand copies available online or anywhere else.
• A new pair of shoes from Skechers. These sell for $75 normally, but I got them on sale for $54 including shipping. A quick search of "Used Items" on Google Shopping turned up no secondhand pairs of this exact shoe. I found one pair in a similar style on eBay for $34.37 with shipping, but with my weird feet, similar isn't good enough. If I can't try them on in a store, I need the next best thing: free shipping and free returns so I can send them back if they don't fit. So while it's theoretically possible I could have bought a serviceable pair of used shoes online for less than I actually spent, it's equally likely that I'd have paid $16 in shipping costs and still been shoeless.
• Lids for our Pyrex containers. The containers themselves are great, plastic-free and very durable, but the plastic lids they come with wear out over time and need to be replaced. I bought seven new ones directly from the manufacturer: one for our 2.5-quart mixing bowl, three plastic ones for our 2-cup storage containers, two for our 1-cup containers, and one glass-and silicone lid in the 2-cup size. (This was more expensive than the equivalent plastic lids, but I'm hoping it will hold up better. If it does, we'll gradually replace all our lids with this type.) They cost me a total of $37.31, including shipping. To my surprise, a "Used Items" search on Google revealed that there were, in fact, sellers online offering these secondhand. However, no single seller had all the sizes I needed. To buy all of them, I'd have had to make two separate orders: $13.74 (including shipping from Michigan) for the 2.5-quart lid and $17.99 (including shipping from Arizona) for an open-box assortment including the 1- and 2-cup lids. That would have cost $31.73 total, less than I actually paid—but it wouldn't have included the glass lid, and it would have included lids in several other sizes that we didn't need.
• A long-sought-after replacement for my beloved Maggie Bag tote, which was stolen five years ago. I'd tried several different replacements for it before finally settling on a similar bag from Harvey's,  but I was never quite as happy with it. It was a little smaller, so I had trouble cramming all my everyday carry items into it, and I kept losing my pen because the purse didn't have a pocket for it. From time to time I'd search eBay and Poshmark to see if they had another tote like my old one, but I never found one until this week. This bag isn't quite identical; it's black instead of grey and large instead of medium. But after my years of fruitless searching, I was happy to snatch it up for $83.14. Although the purse was technically "new with tags," I think it counts as a secondhand purchase since it came from a reseller. So this is one item I did buy used and online, exactly as the Climate Coach suggests.
• A pair of plumbing supply lines from Lowe's for $14.88. (When we replaced our sink last month, we reused the old lines, but one of them started leaking not long after, and Brian decided to replace them both just to be safe.) Once again, I was surprised to see that you actually can buy these secondhand, or at least "open box." So, in theory, I could have ordered two lines from an eBay seller for $17.14, including shipping. But aside from the higher price, doing this would have meant letting the plumbing continue to leak for another 4 to 11 days while waiting for the new lines to be delivered from California. And what if, when they arrived, we found they didn't fit (as we did with the first pair we purchased from Lowe's)? Between the ongoing water leak, the cross-country shipping, and the risk of having to send them back, I can't believe that buying these online would have been a greener choice than running out to the store for a new pair.
• Lastly, from HomeDepot.com, a new spigot for our rain barrel for $21.53. We tried to pick this up in the store at the same time we bought the plumbing supply lines, but we couldn't find the right part. This item seems like it should have been reasonable to buy from a reseller since we had to order it online anyway. But when I did a search just now, I couldn't find anyone selling it secondhand. I found one listing on eBay for an open-box item, but it wasn't the same one we bought, and it's not clear it would have fit our rain barrel. So, apparently, buying this used wouldn't have worked either.

Of all the new items we bought in May, there's only one (the Pyrex lids) that it might have made sense to buy used and online. However, it's not clear this would actually have been a greener choice. In the first place, the "used" lids weren't a secondhand item that we'd have rescued from the landfill, only an open-box item selling at a discount. Ordering secondhand would also have required two shipments instead of one. We'd have ended up with several lids we didn't need, which we would then have had to Freecycle or throw away. And finally, we wouldn't have been able to buy the more durable glass-and-silicone lid, which could potentially eliminate the need to keep buying new plastic lids in future. Add up all those costs, and I'm inclined to think that buying new from the manufacturer was still the right move.

None of this means that the online secondhand marketplaces are useless. Without Poshmark and ThredUP, I wouldn't have my new, roomier purse or the wool cardigan I wear all winter long. The one thing I appreciated most about this column was that it introduced me to several new online marketplaces, such as Mercari and Goodwill Finds, expanding my options for secondhand shopping. Better still, it tipped me off to the existence of the "Used Items" button in Google Shopping, which makes it easy to search secondhand listings from many sellers at once.

But useful as these online markets are, I don't think they should be the automatic first choice for all my shopping. As my list shows, even when it's possible to find things used, it doesn't always make sense to buy them online. In my experience, this is particularly true for clothing. When I shop at a store, most of the clothes I try on don't fit and end up back on the racks. If I did all my shopping online, I'd most likely have to return most of the garments I bought, paying for shipping both ways—assuming returns were allowed at all. I can't see how shipping all those packages back and forth could possibly be better for the environment than driving to a thrift shop, trying on a bunch of garments, and buying only the ones that fit. (In fact, I currently have a credit at ThredUP that's been languishing in my account for over a year because I hesitate to spend it on something that probably won't fit. The site has measurements for some garments, but they aren't always accurate, which is how I ended up with the credit in the first place.)

Indeed, despite the bold headline "Why you should buy everything used," Coren admits that he came to much the same conclusion himself. He noted that with online resellers, "Quality varied. My preferred styles weren’t always available. Returns and shipping weren’t as seamless as Amazon. For low-cost items, it was sometimes cheaper to buy new than pay to ship even discounted used items." And there was one item—a replacement for a torn wet-suit glove—that he hadn't been able to find at all. 

Still, Coren found that for many categories, buying used was the right choice. In the wake of this experiment, his shopping habits have shifted: "Instead of buying new as the default, I’m searching first for used. If I do buy new, I often buy a higher-quality item since I know I’ll either keep it for as long as possible or sell it when I’m done." 

All of this is perfectly logical. In fact, it's exactly what I'd already been doing before reading his column. And that's why this piece, despite its intriguing title, didn't prove to be a game-changer for me. It was an interesting read, and it gave me some useful info about new places to look for secondhand goods. But it didn't convince me that I should be buying everything from online resellers. Instead, it reinforced my view that my current shopping habits—try shopping secondhand first, and go for higher quality if you have to buy new—are about as ecofrugal as you can get.