Gardeners' Holidays 2024: (Belated) Late Harvest

This week's post is not going to be about the election. All I'm going to say about that right now is that it's not game over for the climate, because the clean energy transition is too far along for any one man to stop. Instead, this post is going to be the one I should have written last week instead of letting myself get distracted by heat pump shenanigans: my late-fall Gardener's Holiday. 

At this point, nearly all of our 2024 crops have been gathered in. We still have a few green tomatoes on the vines that we're hoping will start to blush before the frost hits; any that are still green at that point will go into a box to ripen indoors. (Our success rate with this is only about 50 percent, but it costs nothing to try.) Also, we missed our window for harvesting the Climbing French green beans before the seeds turned starchy, so all the remaining pods are staying on the vine to dry so we can save the seeds. There's a little square of lettuce that will remain in the garden to overwinter. And as always, the rhubarb can be expected to soldier bravely on until the first freeze. But for the most part, whatever we're going to pick this year has been picked already.

The biggest winner in this fall's garden is the butternut squash. After several years of getting disappointing harvests from a mix of Waltham plants and smaller varieties like Little Dipper and Honeynut, this year we decided to plant only the larger Walthams—and that strategy paid off big time. We harvested a total of 13 squash, totaling a whopping 42 pounds. It's probably our best butternut crop of all time—even better than the year a rogue vine took over our side yard and produced 11 totally unplanned squash.

One of the smallest squash went into last month's Recipe of the Month, a medley of roasted stuff that we've dubbed, appropriately enough, Roasted Stuff. And most of a second one went into a curry that will feature as this month's Recipe of the Month, which you'll hear more about next week. But we still have 11 large squash left to see us through the winter, which means we'll have plenty of chances to enjoy old favorites like butternut squash lasagna, butternut pizza with sage, butternut squash souffle, and butternut squash pasta with vegan brown butter. We might even be able to spare one to take the place of pumpkin in our Thanksgiving pie, so that both our pies (pumpkin and rhubarb) will feature home-grown produce.

But the squash is not the only crop from our garden featuring in this week's meals. Last night's dinner was fish tacos with cabbage-and-tomato slaw that included some of the last dregs of our tomato harvest. Tonight's is a mushroom tourtière made from store-bought mushrooms and onions, but enhanced with sage and thyme from our herb bed. And earlier in the week, we partook of a Pad Thai that used up the last of our home-grown green onions. So, even as fall winds down toward winter, we can continue to enjoy what remains of last summer's bounty. (And that's not even counting the dozen jars of jam that Brian put up from last summer's plums and raspberries.)

Testing the heat pump waters

Brian and I have known for a while that we want our next home heating system to be an electric heat pump. Last time we replaced our boiler, this wasn't really an option; the heat pumps available at that time were old-fashioned models that struggled to produce heat as the temperature dropped below freezing. But in the ten years since, the situation has changed dramatically. Modern cold-climate heat pumps can run at full strength in temperatures as low as -5F, a temperature that we seldom see here in New Jersey. And, on top of that, the Inflation Reduction Act now offers a 30% tax credit to help pay for them. So we've been assuming that we'd ditch our fossil-fuel boiler whenever it reached the end of its lifespan. However, since it's only ten years old, we figured it would be at least another ten years before we got to that point.

A couple of weeks ago, we got a hint that might not be the case. We'd hired a heating contractor to do a routine tune-up on our heating system, and he informed me that the boiler had some major problems. He showed me a photo he'd taken that appeared to show a significant amount of rust on the heat exchanger, which he said "means there has to be a leak somewhere." Also, he said, the pressure gauge was reading around 20 psi, even though the system was supposed to be at between 12 and 15. To fix this, he claimed, we'd need to replace not just the pressure valve but the entire "trim kit": basically, all the valves, pipes, and other parts that connect to the boiler itself. And then he quoted me a jaw-dropping price for this repair: $3,500.

Well, given that the boiler itself had only cost us less than twice that price in the first place, I started wondering if it would be a better idea to simply replace it. So I went onto HomeAdvisor and put in a request for several contractors to give us quotes on a heat pump system. Unfortunately, I didn't get them. All four of the contractors I spoke with said that it wasn't practical to heat a home with electricity in this area, at least not without a fossil fuel backup. Some claimed that it just couldn't be done—that a heat pump would never be able to keep a house sufficiently warm. Others said it was possible, but the cost would be unreasonably high—as much as double what we were currently paying with gas.

This was baffling to me. I'd done a lot of reading about this topic in the past couple of years, and tons of reliable sources—Consumer Reports, Wirecutter, Yale Climate Connections—had assured me that modern heat pumps could totally handle climates much colder than ours. I'd also crunched some numbers using the Electrification Planner at Rewiring America, and it had estimated that for a home like ours, the costs for heating with a heat pump would be pretty close to what they are with gas. It said we might pay anywhere from $170 more per year to $350 less, with the median household saving $75.

Seeking more data, I made a post in the heat pumps forum on Reddit to ask if anyone else had successfully used a heat pump in our area. I got tons of responses from people as far north as Canada assuring me that they used heat pumps with no backup, no problem. A few people said that I should expect to pay more heating with electricity as opposed to gas, but only one claimed the cost would be prohibitive.

Eventually, I did manage to get one contractor to give me a quote on a heat pump system. I'd done a little research ahead of time to figure out what a reasonable price would be and gotten back a fairly wide range of estimates, so I was prepared to hear anything from around $5,000 to $18,400. You can imagine my shock when I opened the contractor's estimate and saw that he would want over $23,000 to install a ducted system (including the cost of adding new ductwork). A mini-split system, which most sources had said was the cheapest option for homes that lack existing ductwork, was even worse: close to $29,000.

Fortunately, by the time we got this quote, we knew we wouldn't need it. Because we'd learned one other thing from the various contractors who'd come out to our house: the quote the first company gave us for repairs was way, way too high. (Several of them said the company in questions was notorious for this.) One of them, after taking a look at our system, said the only part we really needed to replace was the expansion tank, and that would cost less than $400. We eventually hired his company to fix it for a mere $355—about one-tenth of the price we were quoted for the initial repair.

So, the bad news is, we're not going to be ditching our old fossil-fuel boiler this year. The good news is, we don't have to make any decisions about replacing it under time pressure. We can afford to wait at least a few more years, and perhaps by the time we're ready, there will be more installers in New Jersey who are actually familiar with modern cold-climate heat pumps and can install one for a decent price. Or, who knows, by then there might actually be air-to-water heat pumps on the market that can work with our existing radiators, so we can simply swap one in for the old boiler with no need to alter the rest of the system.