Quick updates

On this blog, I tend to focus on what's new and different in our ecofrugal life. This makes sense, but it has a downside: you hear the beginnings of a lot of stories without hearing the endings. I tell you that I've tried a new homemade conditioner, but I don't think to tell you that it turned out not to work all that well with everyday use. I tell you that we've added a strawberry bed to our garden, but I don't remember to follow up and tell you whether we got any actual strawberries out of it. 

So for this week's blog entry, instead of telling you what's new, I'm going to fill you in on the latest updates to some older stories. I'll start with the most recent stories and work my way backwards, so we're going from the smallest updates to the biggest ones.

Update #1: Potato plants

Last summer, when we got our new rain barrel, I mentioned that Brian was planning to use the old one to grow potatoes. We'd tried before to grow them in five-gallon buckets, but the results were disappointing. Brian thought that a bigger vessel, with plenty of room for the stems and tubers to form, might give us a better crop.

It's too early to say yet what our harvest will look like, but the plants themselves are flourishing in their new home. The stems have already reached the top of the barrel and are loaded with lush green foliage. They just recently flowered, as well. Brian snipped off the flowers because apparently you get more potato production that way, but I got a picture of them first. The trimmed-off blooms are now in the bud vase in our kitchen, so we've already gotten some benefit out of the plants regardless of how the potato crop turns out.

Update #2: Garden paths

Over the years we've had our garden, we've struggled to find a suitable covering for the paths between the beds. I thought I'd hit on the perfect solution with the leftover stone dust from our patio project, but within a year, weeds (and a few stray vegetable plants) were forcing their way through it. So, last winter, I decided to try a new approach: covering the paths with leaves. Using all the leaves we raked up in our own yard, as well as a bag or two of our neighbor's that we scavenged from the curb, we managed to cover all the paths a couple of inches deep.

This approach has been a moderate success. The blanket of leaves hasn't managed to suppress weeds entirely, but we're getting far fewer of them, and the ones that do pop up are easier to remove because they're rooted in loose, leafy soil rather than solid clay. (I'm only bothering to do this with the tall weeds, like crabgrass and dandelions. Ground-hugging weeds like barren strawberries, I figure, can just get walked on. If they pop up in the garden beds themselves, I'll yank them, but otherwise, they can stay where they are.) And since the leaves cost us nothing, we can simply keep replenishing them year after year.

Update #3: Strawberry bed

Last year was our first attempt at growing strawberries. Our new seed supplier offered seeds for the small Alpine variety, and we decided on a whim to add a packet to our order. The plants grew faster than we expected, and we actually managed to get a small handful of fruit off them that first year. But this year, they have really come into their own. The plants are flourishing, and we have already harvested 6 cups of tiny red and white fruits. (They're supposed to be red and yellow, but it's a very pale yellow. Alongside our honeyberries, which ripen around the same time, they make a very patriotic-looking fruit salad.) 

These little berries aren't as plump and juicy as regular strawberries. Their flavor is more concentrated, with a sort of floral undertone to it. They also don't keep nearly as well, which explains why you don't tend to see them in stores. We have to eat them up within a day or two of picking or they turn into mush. This means we can't use really use them in recipes, since we only get a cup or so of berries with each picking, and we can't save them up to get enough for a fruit crisp or a batch of jam. But eating them fresh every day (by themselves or in salads) is certainly no hardship.

So, all in all, I'd consider this experiment a success. The question now is, how long can we keep it going? According to the seed packet, these plants will only remain productive for about two years. But other sources on Alpine strawberries recommend dividing the plants "every four or five years" to keep production high and prevent overcrowding. That suggests that we should be able to expect them to last another couple of years at least. I guess we'll keep an eye on them next spring, and if it looks like they're not coming up, we can pick up a few strawberry plants of the more conventional type to replace them.

Update #4: Homemade deodorant

Over the years, I've tried various alternatives to commercial deodorant in an attempt to avoid both animal testing and excess packaging. Plain baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol, and peroxide didn't work very well; milk of magnesia did but turned out to have an undesirable laxative side effect. The best of the bunch was alcohol-based hand sanitizer; it wasn't strong enough to keep me fresh as a daisy on hot summer days, but it was good enough for light activity in mild weather. 

However, this sanitizer deodorant had a few drawbacks. It still produced some plastic waste; the bottle was recyclable, but the pump top wasn't. Also, annoyingly, the pump was never able to extract all the sanitizer from the bottle, and it also made it impossible to turn the bottle upside down to get the last drops. And it became difficult to obtain during the pandemic, though I was able to get by with a homemade version made from rubbing alcohol and aloe vera gel.

So when I came across a recipe for another homemade deodorant with just three ingredients—one part baking soda, two parts cornstarch, and three parts coconut oil—I thought it was worth a try. True, straight baking soda hadn't worked that well for me, but neither had straight rubbing alcohol, yet the alcohol-based gel worked fine. In any case, it wouldn't cost much to mix up a small batch and test it out.

Well, as it turns out, this baking soda mixture works at least as well as the hand sanitizer. Like the sanitizer, it doesn't always last all day, but it's no big deal to reapply it. It also produces no plastic waste whatsoever, and it's easy to get every last drop of it out of the container. And it's cheap—less than 25 cents for that initial batch (6 tablespoons total), which has already kept me going for a few weeks and is nowhere near running out. Can't get much more ecofrugal than that!

Update #5: Patio furniture

Back in 2013, we furnished our DIY patio with a cheap patio set from IKEA. At $120 for a table and four chairs, it was a much better deal than anything available at Home Depot or Lowe's, where outdoor furniture sets started at around $500. We refinished it once in 2014, but after that we decided to just live with the weathered look.

After 11 years of use, though, the furniture was starting to have problems with more than just its appearance. The pieces had become rickety, wobbling noticeably when we sat down, and tightening the bolts didn't solve the problem. We finally concluded that we were going to need a replacement.

The obvious place to look for one was Craigslist, which we now prefer to IKEA for home furnishings. But there was a snag: unlike IKEA furniture, pieces on Craigslist come fully assembled. How would we fit a whole patio set into our little Honda Fit?

The answer: we didn't. We already knew we'd have to rent a truck at some point to haul home the lumber for our laundry room renovation (which, yes, is still in progress) and for another project that Brian wants to do outdoors (more on that one in a future post). So, once we'd booked the truck for that, we took advantage of the opportunity to haul home a $135 patio set from Craigslist as well. We were still able to get the truck back by the end of the day, so the rental fee was the same; all it cost us was a little extra for gas.

Our new patio set is superior in almost every way to our old one. The glass-topped table is larger and includes a center hole where we can add a patio umbrella, should we ever feel the need for one. The chairs, with their woven plastic seats, are quite comfortable even with no added cushions. And both table and chairs are made of materials that should stand up better to the elements than our old wooden pieces. The previous owner had already kept them outdoors for several summers, and the table during the winters as well, and they're all still in good shape. So, given the same treatment, this new set should serve us for many years to come.