Recipe of the Month: Spiced Healthy Broccoli Soup

We're in the middle of another busy weekend. Between the library book sale this morning, my Citizen's Climate Lobby meeting and a series of errands this afternoon, and a dance performance tomorrow, this evening is just about the only time I have free to dash off a blog entry. So this post is just going to be a quickie to tell you about our Recipe of the Month for September.

Like so many of these Recipe of the Month selections, this one came about because Brian had a bunch of things he needed to use up—a head of broccoli, a few mushrooms, a tomato—and went hunting for a recipe to do that. The one he found on this occasion was the Spiced Healthy Broccoli Soup from Beauty Bites, which billed itself as "not your regular, average, broccoli soup" (sic). Instead of blending the broccoli with milk or cream and topping it with cheese, it leaves it in chunks and surrounds it with lots of other chunky ingredients (onion, mushroom, chick peas, tomato) in a well-spiced broth loaded with garlic, cumin, mint, paprika, and red pepper.

As usual, Brian made a few minor modifications to this recipe. To accommodate my wussy palate, he cut the red pepper flakes from a full teaspoon to a mere eighth-teaspoon. He didn't have a bell pepper, so he used a couple of our Carmen frying peppers, which he diced finely rather than grating them as the recipe instructed. He didn't have any dried mint, so he substituted roughly triple the amount of fresh mint from our herb bed. And finally, after tasting the finished soup, he decided to throw in a tablespoon of nutritional yeast and some extra salt to punch up the flavor. He served it with extra mint on the side and a batch of half-white, half-whole-wheat biscuits.

The end product didn't look much like a typical broccoli soup. It was visibly chunky and predominantly orange in color, speckled with red from the bell pepper and green from the mint. Yet the odd-sounding combination of ingredients proved surprisingly harmonious. After a few mouthfuls, we both figured out why: it tasted more or less like a bowl of chili. Take Brian's usual vegan chili recipe and swap in chick peas for kidney beans, broccoli for eggplant, and mint for oregano, and you'd end up with a rough approximation of this dish. 

While these aren't major changes, they made this soup feel different enough to be a nice change of pace from our usual chili. And it was certainly handy for its intended purpose, using up the extra veggies left over in the bin. So, all in all, we think it'll make a useful addition to our soup repertoire as the chilly weather sets in.

Why buy when you can rent, borrow, and share?

The sharing economy appears to be having a bit of a moment. Within the past few weeks, my inbox has presented me with two articles on ways to get things without buying them. The first was part of the NEw York Times' 50 States, 50 Fixes series, which highlights small-scale projects to benefit the environment from all across the U.S. The August 20 story focused on the town of Brunswick, Maine, where the second floor of the local library hosts a 1,500-plus-item "library of things" for residents to borrow. The collection includes kitchen and garden tools, toys, musical instruments, sporting goods, electronics, and an actual loom. In the past year, residents borrowed from it more than 3,700 times.

Although Brunswick's library of things is only seven years old, it's been such a hit that the idea has already spread to other towns in Maine: South Portland, Cumberland, Windham. It's easy to see the appeal, because there are loads of things that are really handy to have just once in a while. The most popular items in Brunswick's library of things include a grain mill, a blueberry rake, and a tool for gathering nuts—all things you're only likely to need a couple of times a year. Even more frequently needed tools, like an electric lawn mower, only see an hour or so of use each week, so it makes all kinds of sense to share just one with your neighbors instead of shelling out cash and devoting space in your shed to one of your own. Other items, like the musical instruments, are things you might want to own, but you can't be sure until you've tried them. By checking out a mandolin or a ukulele (both available from the collection) and playing with it for a couple of weeks, you can figure out if it's the instrument for you before investing a minimum of $50 in a new one. 

Ever since I read this article to Brian, we've been speculating about whether it would be feasible to start a library of things here in Highland Park. We personally have several seldom-used tools we'd be happy to contribute to such a collection. The tamping tool we bought for our patio project, the tile cutter we used for our downstairs bathroom renovation, the frozen dessert maker I took a flier on at our neighbor's yard sale: we wouldn't really need to own any of these if we could borrow them whenever we happened to have a use for them. There are all kinds of tools and resources available online for starting a library of things from scratch; the problem is where to put it. Our local library is far to small to host it, and we couldn't think of any other public building that would have the space. And while there are plenty of unused storefronts in town, they'd cost far too much to rent.

Fortunately, this isn't the only way to get stuff without buying it. A second article, from One5C (currently available only to folks who shell out at least $54 a year for membership), lists several other alternatives:

• Social sharing apps. The article recommends two of these, though neither one is for sharing per se. Olio, which started out as a tool for curbing food waste, is similar to Freecycle: you list your unwanted stuff for others to request. Yoodlize is more like Airbnb, but for renting out all the stuff in your house rather than the house itself. (The app supports itself by taking a small cut of all rental fees.)
• Freebie marketplaces. The article names Freecycle, Buy Nothing, Facebook Marketplace, and Nextdoor as places to give away or get secondhand items for free. One site it doesn't mention is Craigslist groups, which often have a "free" section.
• Rental services. The bulk of the article is devoted to these. It recommends FunFlicks and Guitar Center for AV gear; Rent a Bike Now for bicycles; Boatsetter and GetMyBoat for watercraft; Lens Rentals for camera gear and electronics; Rent the Runway, Armoire, Nuuly, Tulerie, and Nova Octo for clothing; CORT and AFR Furniture Rental for furniture; Lindrs, Lowe's, and Home Depot for tools; and REI, Kit Lender, XScape Pod, Lower Gear Outdoors, and Outdoors Geek for camping and outdoor sports equipment.

All this is potentially useful, but not what we were really hoping for: a platform to actually share stuff with our neighbors, not just rent it. Something kind of like the magical Share Spray in this old video from Center for a New American Dream. Is there an app for that?

As far as I can tell, there isn't—but there's about to be. An app called LendLo, supposedly launching "soon," promises to help you borrow and lend stuff within your community. The website says the app will let you list items, browse and request things you need, arrange for pickup, and keep track of who has what. If we got enough people in town signed up on this app, we could create something like a library of things, only the collection would be distributed across all our homes instead of in one central location. So we wouldn't just be sharing the items, we'd also be sharing the storage space for the items.

I've put my name on the mailing list, so I guess that means I'll be one of the first to hear whenever the app becomes available. Then we can download it, check it out, and if it looks useful, start touting it to everyone we know in Highland Park. Who knows—we might just end up building our own library of things the easy way.

Shedding deadweight

Over the past year, Brian has been slowly collecting shipping pallets and odd bits of lumber from various spots around town. He didn't have any particular use in mind for them, but he knew they could come in handy for projects like our DIY compost bin, so whenever he happened to spot a piece in good condition, he'd just grab it and stow it away in our shed. All these new acquisitions sat snuggled up against the top from our old patio table, which Brian had also squirreled away "just in case" after we replaced the patio set last summer. Since the shed isn't very big and already contained quite a lot of stuff, useful and otherwise, it gradually became harder and harder to get around in there.

So, Saturday morning, he decided it was time to haul out all that wood and "do something" with it. He hadn't actually figured out what he wanted to do with it, but he thought he'd retrieve it first and take it from there. But in order to haul out the wood, he had to first haul out all the other stuff in the shed that was blocking his path to it. And once he'd started doing that, he realized that some of the stuff in question was in pretty bad condition and really should be disposed of. So when I came down to join him, about 20 minutes after he'd gone out (saying vaguely that he'd "be outside"), I found the yard looking more or less like this and Brian in the process of breaking apart an old plastic trash barrel—which we'd somehow managed to get stuck inside another trash barrel—with his bare hands.  

Well, once I saw this project in progress, naturally I had to jump in. What started out as just a general notion of dealing with the wood pile turned into a full-scale clear-out and reorganization of the shed contents. Over the next few hours, we dragged out pretty much everything that was sitting on every horizontal surface in that shed—floor, table, shelves—and decided what was worth putting back and where it should go. (Since I'd come late to the party, I didn't manage to get a "before" picture of the shed in its cluttered state, but I took several of the "during" and "after.")

We kept the big pile of old birdseed bags that we use to haul bulk compost and mulch home from the Co-Op, but we discarded most of the smaller cat-food bags that were too small for this purpose. (We brought a few indoors to use as trash bags, and we kept a couple as material for tree bands to foil pests like squirrels and lanternflies.) We sorted out our tangled piles of rope and deer netting, removed the damaged ones, bundled the rest up neatly, and tucked them into one large bin together. We went through our huge collection of plant pots, removing any that were damaged and culling some of the ones in less useful sizes. (The remaining collection is still huge, but at least it's now been neatly sorted into stacks that won't fall over.) We tossed several items that had clearly ceased to be useful, such as torn gardening gloves and the aforementioned big trash barrel, which Brian divided into two large pieces so it could fit inside our even larger trash bin. And we swept off all the exposed surfaces, clearing away years' worth of accumulated dust, straw, and desiccated rat droppings (though, fortunately, no fresh ones).

Among the trash, we also found several items that were possibly useful to someone, just not to us. These included:

• A set of very nice garden tools (a fork and two trowels) that were still sitting unused in their original box. We'd received them as a gift and never used them because we were so used to our old ones. Fortunately, these quickly found a new home on Freecycle. 
• A grill basket too large to fit on our grill and a couple of other grilling tools (a long spatula and fork) that we'd picked up somewhere and never used. These will go on Freecycle as soon as we've cleaned some of the rust off them.
• The pan and funnel we used for changing the oil in our old Honda, which we haven't used in over 14 years. (The oil pan on our "new" car, bought in 2011, proved much harder to access, and we decided it wasn't worth the hassle.) These will also go on Freecycle.
• An old trowel that's not as nice as our three other trowels. This went out by the curb with our discarded plant pots, where it was quickly snapped up.
• An  unidentified electrical device that plugs into a car charger. Brian thought it was meant for defrosting a cold engine block, but when I searched "engine block heater" online I couldn't find anything that looks like it, and I hesitate to list it on Freecycle if I can't even put a name to it.
• An old rolling cart that had been sitting in the corner of the shed ever since we bought the place. When we dragged it out, we discovered that it was apparently meant to hold electrical appliances, because it had a crude power strip built into one side: a couple of small outlets connected to an ancient electrical cord with no grounding plug. That feature probably isn't useful anymore, but the cart itself could be, so we set it out on the curb as well. If that doesn't work, we'll try Freecycle.

Once all the junk was gone and the surfaces were clear, we could find better spots for the things we wanted to keep. Our Hudson SQ-X Squirrel Excluders, two useful but unwieldy chicken-wire constructions, found a new home on a high shelf with a couple of tarps and a spare garden hose. The PVC pipes we use to make cages for our honeyberry bushes got tucked away on a lower shelf behind some smaller pots and tools. A couple of tools that had previously sat on the floor got hung up on the wall, now that we had access to the wall to hang them.

The reorganized shed is much cleaner and airier than the cluttered space we started out with. We didn't actually get rid of that much stuff, but it all fits in much better, giving us much better access to the things we use regularly. And there's enough room left over to put away the charcoal grill and the patio chairs once winter comes.

Ironically, one thing that ended up going back into the shed was that big stack of pallets. We spent so long on the cleanup that, in the end, Brian didn't have the time or the energy to break them down. But at least they're out of the way now, tucked into the corner where that rolling cart used to be, so they're no longer impeding our movement.

Individual action vs. collective action

Yesterday I spent most of the afternoon at an event with my Citizens' Climate Lobby (CCL) chapter. When I got home, I found that in my absence Brian had:

• Washed all the dishes from lunch.
• Made a batch of coffee ice cream base with our new vegan cream.
• Ridden his bike to three different local stores and brought home four pounds of tofu, one pound of broccoli, a bottle of ibuprofen, a bottle of digestive enzymes, and a bottle of gin.
• Uprooted a large tree of heaven sapling behind the shed.
• Weeded the strawberry bed and the asparagus patch, which was so heavily overgrown that it probably contained more weeds than asparagus ferns.

In the same amount of time, I had:

• Driven to a town about half an hour away, filled out about 40 postcards for the Environmental Voter Project (EVP), and driven home. 

But when I commented to him about how much more productive his day had been than mine, his response was along the lines of, "Yeah, but the one thing you did was more important than all the stuff I did."

That brought me up short. Was it? 

Obviously I thought sending the postcards was important, since I was willing to devote a whole afternoon to it. And I had some basis for that belief, since the EVP has plenty of data to show how effective its efforts are in getting environmentalists to the polls. In some elections, the number of additional voters they calculate they've turned out has actually exceeded the winner's margin of victory. If the 300 postcards our chapter mailed out to voters in Virginia convince 300 environmentalists, or even half that number, to vote in the upcoming gubernatorial election, that could potentially tip the election in favor of a pro-environment governor who will enact pro-climate policies in that state. And if that happens, obviously it will make more difference to the planet than all of Brian's smaller eco-friendly actions.

But that seems like an awful lot of ifs. Brian's actions, by contrast, are guaranteed to have an impact. No matter what happens in Virginia this fall, it won't change the fact that Brian has removed one invasive plant from our yard, kept around 10 vehicle-miles off our car, and (literally) churned out one vegan dessert for the two of us. Each of those things may only make a tiny difference to the world as a whole, but they make a big difference to our household—and these effects, big and small, don't depend on anyone or anything else to bring them to fruition.

And that's why I think both kinds of action are important. It's true that nothing I do for the environment as an individual, from darning a sock to replacing our heating system, can possibly have as big an impact as government policies like a carbon fee or subsidies for clean energy. But it's also true that all the effort I've put in over the past 5 years with CCL, and indeed all the effort CCL as a whole has put in over the past 18 years, has so far failed to get a carbon fee enacted. And the clean energy subsidies we did manage to get just a few years ago have now evaporated and certainly won't be restored under this administration, if they're ever restored at all. So right now, if we want to make things better, those tiny, individual-level changes—in what we drive, what we eat, what we buy—may be the best we can do. 

Of course, we still need to keep pushing for the big policy changes. Even if it seems like we're getting nowhere right now, enough drops of water will eventually wear away a stone, and who can say which drop—which letter to a Congress member, which postcard to an environmental voter, which conversation at a street fair—will be the one that finally breaks through? But while we're working toward those few big, distant, difficult goals, it's also good to have a few smaller, closer goals that we can actually achieve, like biking to the store and picking up some groceries for a healthy vegan meal. That way, we at least have some small gain to point to at the end of the day. And those little wins can give us renewed strength for the bigger battles that we're still fighting. 

Recipe of the Month: Coconut Cauliflower Curry (with bonus bread and dessert)

As I've noted before, my husband has a bit of a cauliflower problem. When he spots a cheap cauliflower at the store, he just can't resist buying it, even if he has no idea what he wants to do with it. Last week, he found himself in this position once again, and rather than fall back on an old standby like aloo gobi, he decided to look for something new. On a site called Rebel Recipes, he found a cauliflower and chick pea curry recipe with coconut milk, which he adores, so he decided to give that one a try. He didn't modify it much, aside from scaling dialing back the chili flakes to just a pinch and adding a teaspoon of salt, which the original recipe lacked entirely.

Visually speaking, this curry wasn't very appealing. It was a sort of orange, gooey mass, without much contrast in color or texture. The flavor, on the other hand, had a lot going on—a bit too much for my taste. Against the tang of tomato and the sort of musty coolness of the coconut milk, there was a huge array of spices—onion, garlic, ginger cumin, coriander, turmeric, garam masala, cinnamon, cardamom, fennel, chili—all fighting for attention. I found it a bit overwhelming, and I felt no urge to go back for more when I'd finished my bowlful. Brian, on the other hand, absolutely loved it. He's promised not to "subject me to it too often," and I've agreed to put up with it once in a while for his sake. Perhaps it'll grow on me after a while. And if it doesn't, he can have all the leftovers to himself.

But this was not the only new recipe we tried in August. We're only halfway through the month, and we've already tried two others: a simple bread that wasn't a stunning success, and a dessert that was.

The flatbread recipe was something I discovered while browsing Reddit. On the r/Frugal forum, a Redditor posted with great enthusiasm about a two-ingredient flatbread that he swore was a "gateway drug" for baking. To hear him tell it, this recipe could work for just about anything: pizza crust, burger buns, wraps, even crackers. It sounded interesting, but the original recipe called for Greek yogurt, which wouldn't fit our mostly dairy-free diet. So I hunted around and unearthed a vegan version that also called for only two ingredients: soy milk, which we had, and self-rising flour, which is easy to make by adding three teaspoons of baking powder to two cups of regular flour. (A third ingredient, salt, was listed as optional.) 

I showed the recipe to Brian and he agreed to give it a try with the next night's dinner, falafel. Making the flatbreads was pretty similar to the process he uses for the homemade tortillas he usually serves with this meal: mix the dough, knead it briefly, form balls, roll them out, and pan-fry them. However, since the dough got to rise a bit before cooking, the flatbreads came out larger, puffier, and more substantial than the tortillas. And at first, that seemed to be a good thing. The sturdier flatbreads could hold a larger volume of falafel and veggies without letting any spill out, and they felt more secure in the hand. And I found their chewy texture quite enjoyable.

But after a couple of days, the weakness of this recipe became apparent. The flatbreads that had been so firm and flexible when fresh out of the pan grew drier and more brittle with each day they stayed in the fridge. By the time I tried to use the last one four days later, it was so crumbly that it couldn't wrap around the falafel at all; it simply fell to pieces, leaving me to finish up the meal with a fork. Since the tortillas are about as easy to make and stay good much longer, it makes more sense to stick with those for all our sandwich-wrapping needs.

But on the dessert front, there is good news. For background, a couple of months ago, we discovered a vegan whipping cream at Trader Joe's that worked beautifully for plain whipped cream, in a fruit fool, in ice cream, and even in our anniversary cake. So we were devastated to discover on our next trip to the store that it had been discontinued. (This is an ever-present danger with Trader Joe's products we get too attached to, like their toothpaste and shampoo bar.) I thought maybe we could make our own plant-based cream using the TJ's product as a model, and I came up with what seemed like a promising recipe combining soy milk, coconut oil, and canola oil, with guar gum as an emulsifer. But apparently there was some key element of the alchemy missing, because the stuff stubbornly refused to whip.

But then the story took a happier turn. Last weekend, Brian stopped by Shop-Rite to use up a gift card, and while there, he noticed a plant-based cream from Country Crock in the refrigerated section. Both the package and the ingredient list looked pretty similar to the Trader Joe's product, suggesting that the taste and texture might be also. And when we tried whipping some, we found that was indeed the case. It needed more sugar, since it wasn't as sweet as either the TJ's cream or real cream, but the texture and mouthfeel were just fine.

After that, of course, we had to test it in an ice cream. Brian asked me to pick a flavor, and I suggested a fruity ice cream made from some of our frozen or preserved fruit. That reminded him that last year, he'd tried making a batch of raspberry jam that hadn't set up very well, so it was more of a raspberry sauce. And, recalling a particularly tasty black raspberry chocolate chip ice cream he'd had once at a place in New Hope, he decided to add chocolate to it as well. Solid chocolate chips aren't ideal for this purpose since they don't melt that quickly in the mouth, so he decided to use a technique he'd seen in another recipe: melt the chocolate with a little oil, then drizzle it into the ice cream base as it mixes.

The result: a truly delicious vegan ice cream. The flavor had the perfect balance of sweetness and tartness, and the mouthfeel was just as smooth and creamy as you'd expect from real dairy cream. It's good enough that, unlike the other two vegan recipes we tried in August, I think it's worth sharing in full. (This is a small batch sized for our baby ice cream maker, so adjust the proportions as needed).

Vegan Raspberry Chocolate Chip Ice Cream 

Combine ½ cup Country Crock vegan heavy whipping cream, 3 Tbsp. soy milk, 5 Tbsp. seedless raspberry jam, and ¼ tsp. vanilla. Refrigerate the mixture (if most of the ingredients are already cold, a couple hours should be fine). Place in ice cream maker and run for 10-15 minutes. Melt 1.33 oz. chocolate chips and 1 tsp. canola oil in a double boiler until liquid. When the ice cream is soft-serve consistency, slowly pour in the chocolate either while the maker is still running or while stirring. Run the ice cream maker for a little while longer, then freeze the mixture for a couple hours before eating.

Darn, not so tough

See this picture? What you are looking at is something that, in theory, you should never see: a darned Darn Tough sock. To understand how this came about, I'll have to start at the beginning and explain how Brian and I became aficionados of Darn Tough in the first place, and why we aren't any longer. 

For several years, Brian and I were big fans of Smartwool socks. We both relied on them throughout the winter because they were warm, non-itchy, and machine washable. True, after a couple of winters they would start to grow threadbare and eventually develop holes that required darning, but we assumed the same would be true of any brand.

Then, a few years ago, we learned about Darn Tough. This brand also offers washable, itch-free wool socks, and folks in the Reddit Buy It for Life forum consistently claimed theirs were far superior. Some Redditors said they'd been wearing the same pair of Darn Tough socks for five, six, even ten years with no sign of the thinning and holes that had plagued our Smartwool ones. The company even backs up all its socks with a lifetime guarantee: if they don't live up to your expectations, it will replace them, no questions asked.

So, rather than buying Brian more Smartwool socks for Christmas in 2022, I decided to spend a few extra dollars per pair on Darn Tough socks. And for the first couple of years, they seemed to live up entirely to the hype. They were warm, comfortable, and as far as we could tell, super sturdy. We were both so impressed with them that I invested another $30 in a third pair for him last year and was planning to spring for a couple of pairs for myself as soon as my old socks wore out.

And then, last week, while hanging up a load of laundry, I discovered a tiny hole in the foot of one of Brian's two-and-a-half-year-old Darn Tough socks. If it had been any other sock, I'd just have whipped out the old sewing kit and darned it in a minute or two. But in a sock that I'd paid $13.50 for (half of a $27 pair) less than three years ago, and that I'd been assured would last at least five, it seemed like an insult.

Small as the hole was, it shook my confidence in the brand. I began to wonder if it was worth buying any more of them in future, or even keeping them on my list of holiday gift ideas for Brian. Going back to Reddit to look into the matter, I discovered numerous posts suggesting that Darn Tough's quality had been slipping in recent years. One thread from six months ago argued that, while they're good socks, they're not really $30 socks, and the lifetime warranty is simply a "marketing strategy" to get away with selling them at that price. The author linked to a YouTube video testing Darn Tough's wool hiking socks against several less expensive brands, and the reviewer found that their overall performance was "pretty average." Darn Tough was in the top half of the pack, but four less expensive brands did better—and one of the absolute top performers was Costco's Kirkland Signature, which costs only one-eighth as much. Many Redditors responded by defending the brand, but others agreed that it's overrated, and a few piped up to say they prefer the Costco socks.

This answered one question. If we could get socks of equal or better quality for $3.75 a pair, clearly there was no point in spending $30 on Darn Tough anymore. But it left the question of what to do with the old pair. Should we attempt to take advantage of the unconditional warranty and see how good the brand really was about honoring it? Or should we just darn them and be done with it?

After some consideration, Brian suggested we should give the warranty a go. It would be more work and it would mean being without the socks for a few weeks, but he felt like the company ought to be held to account for its lapse in quality. So I went online and filled out the paperwork to do an exchange. The process was quite easy, but the last step pulled me up short: The site informed me that to get a new pair, we'd have to return the old ones at our own expense. So the "free" replacement wouldn't truly be free; it would cost at least $3 for shipping, almost as much as a whole new pair from Costco. Given that we could simply darn them and carry on using them for the cost of only a few cents' worth of thread, it didn't seem worth it.

So our plan now is to treat these Darn Tough socks the same way as all our other socks. We'll keep them in service until they wear out, darning up the holes as long as it's reasonably possible to do so, and when that stops working, send them off to textile recycling. But we see no reason ever to invest $30 in another pair. Instead, we've shelled out $15 for four pairs of the Kirkland socks. We hope they'll prove at least as durable as their predecessors, but even if they start to develop holes after just one year instead of two and a half, they'll still be a better value.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Summer Harvest

Although the summer solstice is sometimes referred to as Midsummer, this term only makes sense if you think of summer as the six months between the spring and fall equinoxes. The real midpoint of summer falls right around now, at the beginning of August. It's a time when the garden is normally at its peak, cranking out a huge variety of veggies. But sadly, this year's weird weather (including a week of blistering heat followed by pounding rain) doesn't seem to have agreed with our plants. In the past week, we've harvested only:

• 5 cucumbers (one of our old Boston Pickling cukes and four South Winds, our new variety)
• 4 Premio tomatoes, 4 San Marzano tomatoes, and 14 Sun Gold cherry tomatoes
• 7 ounces of bush cherries 
• 1 zucchini 

That's not bad, but it's a lot less than we got last year or the year before. The cucumbers are doing all right, but the tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini have all been a bit sluggish. Worst of all, the plums, which according to their normal two-year cycle should be producing a bumper crop right now, have yielded hardly anything. The Golden Gage plums haven't ripened yet, so there's still a chance of a decent harvest there, but Brian has already picked the Opal tree clean and collected only 9.5 pounds in total—less than one-third of our 2023 harvest and one-fifth of what we got in 2021. And the Mount Royal has done even worse, producing not a single plum that survived to full ripeness. 

More worrying still, the tree itself is looking rather peaky. Its branches, even after two years of diligent pruning, are still heavily infected with black knot, and its leaves have come in small, thin, and riddled with tiny holes. The most likely culprit, apparently, is a fungal infection called shot hole disease. To deal with it, sources recommend removing and destroying every bit of infected foliage, then giving it a dose of fungicide in late fall. Unfortunately, there's pretty much no part of the tree that isn't affected, and the other two trees seem to have it to some extent as well. So to follow this advice properly, we'd have to strip all three trees bare, which is hardly practical. Probably the best we can do is rake up and burn all the leaves in the fall, spray all the trees with our usual copper fungicide, and cross our fingers.

However, there are some plants in our yard that are absolutely loving this weather: the weeds. Between personal travel, business travel, and hazardous weather conditions, Brian and I haven't been able to spend much time in the garden over the past few weeks, and the crabgrass and mugwort took advantage of the lull to invade every planting bed in the yard—flowers, herbs, asparagus—while growing to nearly waist height in the open areas. Brian spent most of yesterday out there with the mower and the string trimmer just beating them back, then we both spent some time on the ground carefully hand-weeding the areas that couldn't be mowed. Brian even put up a new barrier around the flowerbed, using some big pieces of 4-by-four lumber he had sitting out back, to make it harder for the weeds to retake the territory in future. (The phone line insulators that previously marked out the boundaries of the bed went on top.)

So, on the one hand, we don't have much of a harvest to celebrate for this particular Gardeners' Holiday. But we can at least celebrate a temporary victory over the weeds. We can't claim to have defeated them, but at least they're not at risk of eating the house, and that's more than we could say two days ago.

Recyclable =/= sustainable

Late last year, I subscribed to the One5C newsletter, which drops tidbits of climate news and tips for lowering my carbon footprint in my email inbox twice a week. Some of this info is useful, but occasionally the editors make silly mistakes about things that would have been easy to check. One recent newsletter called "natural gas" a misleading term invented by fossil fuel companies "to confuse consumers" when it's actually been used since the 1820s to refer to methane gas that's naturally occurring, as opposed to synthetic. (Consumers may indeed be confused because they mistakenly assume "natural" means "wholesome," but that doesn't mean the term itself is inaccurate.) Another touted a proposed law it said would require schools to provide nondairy milk "for any child that wants it—no note required," when the bill in question actually would require students to provide a note identifying the "disability" that prevents them from drinking cow's milk. And a third recommended bidets on the grounds that they save water, a claim I debunked last year.

Having run across problems like these before, I was a bit wary of One5C's recommendation for Ball's new aluminum party cups. I didn't doubt the editors were technically right in claiming that these aluminum cups are "infinitely recyclable," while "Classic red Solo cups...are #6 plastic, which few facilities recycle." But I wasn't prepared to assume this automatically made the aluminum ones the more ecofrugal choice. After all, the widely demonized single-use plastic bag actually does a lot less damage to the environment than a single-use paper bag or even an organic cotton tote bag. How could I be sure these new aluminum cups were really the most sustainable choice—both economically and environmentally?

To tackle these questions, I started out by shopping around in the "disposable tableware" section on Target.com. There I found several alternatives, some marketed as green and some not. First, as a baseline, I looked at the 18-ounce red Solo cups the One5C editors alluded to. These cost $8.99 for 72, or 12.5 cents each. Target also has its own brand of plastic cups that cost only $5.89 for 72, or 8.2 cents each. Both brands are made of polystyrene (#6 plastic), which isn't typically recyclable, just as One5C claims.

One product marketed as a greener alternative is Repurpose compostable cups. These clear plastic cups hold 12.2 ounces and cost $7.99 for 20 (40 cents each). That's more than three times the cost of the Solo cup and nearly five times the cost of the store brand in exchange for a questionable environmental benefit. The bioplastic these cups are made from has a lower carbon footprint than petroleum-based plastic, but it also uses more land, produces more pollution, and depletes the ozone layer more. Even the cups' claim to be "compostable" is dubious; bioplastics will break down in a commercial composting facility, but not in a home compost bin.

Compared to the Repurpose cups, the new Ball aluminum cups seem at first glance like a more legitimately sustainable alternative. Unlike most plastics, aluminum really can be recycled indefinitely, and aluminum recycling really does save significant resources and energy. Unfortunately, the cups themselves are not recycled; they're made from virgin aluminum, which has a significantly higher environmental footprint. In fact, a life-cycle analysis by Upstream found that these single-use aluminum cups are much worse for the environment than plastic ones, using 47% more energy and producing 86% more emissions. They also have by far the largest footprint in terms of cost. At $5.29 for 10, each cup costs 52.9 cents, more than four times as much as that "classic red Solo cup" and more than six times as much as the store brand.

Clearly, there's no good reason to recommend the Ball aluminum cups over traditional plastic ones. It only took me a few minutes of research to figure that out, and I'm a bit annoyed at the editors of One5C for not doing even that minimal amount of due diligence before recommending them. But what annoys me much more is that they're recommending a single-use product at all. Surely we all know by now that the slogan "reduce, reuse, recycle" puts recycle last for a reason, and that there's almost always more environmental benefit to reducing and reusing when you can.

And in this particular case, there's a very obvious reusable alternative that doesn't cost a cent. If you're having a gathering at your home, using your own cups and glasses costs nothing and creates no waste, aside from a little bit of water and energy for washing. In fact, I went to a potluck this weekend, and the host did exactly that. She served the meal with reusable glasses, reusable plates, and metal utensils, all of which worked much better than flimsy disposable equivalents.

And if you don't have enough glasses for that many guests? Well, if you plan on throwing parties often, it could be worth investing in a dozen 16-ounce mason jars, sold elsewhere on the Target website for $13.49, or $1.12 each. They'd be a better deal than the Ball aluminum cups after just three uses. Even compared to the cheapest plastic ones, they'd pay for themselves after 14 uses. They can accommodate both hot drinks and cold ones. And while the Upstream life-cycle analysis didn't look specifically at glass cups, a separate one by the UN's Life Cycle Initiative found that they're one of the greenest alternatives in just about every situation.

The moral of the story? It's not simply that reuse trumps recycling, although that is the case more often than not. It's that it's worth doing your homework rather than just assuming a product is ecofrugal, or even eco-conscious, just because it's recyclable. If there's an existing life cycle analysis out there, it will only take you a few minutes to find it, and it could save you from a costly mistake—for you and for the earth.

Ecofrugal episodes, July 2025

Time for another exciting installment of ecofrugal episodes, in which I fill you in on all the little things that have been going well and not so well in our ecofrugal life. This past week or two has had a mix of both, so I'm doing the post in "hits and misses" style.

Hit: Our first trip to Savers

Last weekend, Brian and I went to visit my sister and her family in Boston. One of the things we did there was visit Savers, a for-profit thrift store chain we don't have in our area. (There's a store in the same family, called Thrift Superstore, in Union, but that's a good 40 minutes away.) The store has a good selection and decent prices, but no dressing rooms, so we had to either try things on as best we could in the aisles or take our best guess about the size. Brian got one pair of jeans and a new pair of Ren Faire shoes, since his current set (also thrifted) has proven insufficiently supportive for a long day of walking. I got one fairly cute top and a pair of warm tights for winter. (It's not clear how big a hit that purchase is, since I still don't know if they fit. I couldn't try them on in the store, and after we got them home it was too hot. But for only a couple of bucks, they seemed worth the risk.) 

Since my sister's family also brought along four bags' worth of used clothes to donate, they got four coupons good for 40% off on up to $100 worth of purchases and gave one to us. With that discount, our total cost was $26.87 for the four items. That's not breathtakingly cheap, but it's clearly cheaper than buying new, which isn't always the case at thrift shops nowadays.

Miss: A sustainable-living guide that doesn't

On our way back from Savers, we stopped by a farmers' market. One of the booths there was a used-book stall run by the local public library. I can't pass by a table full of books (especially cheap ones) without at least taking a look, and I always like to support libraries when I can, so I spent $2 on a paperback copy of The Self-Sufficiency Bible, by a Brit named Simon Dawson. The cover promised "100s of Ways to Live More Sustainably - Wherever You Are," so I was hoping there might be at least a handful I didn't already know about.

Unfortunately, like many books on this topic, this one proved to be a mix of things I already do and things that aren't relevant to me. The three chapters on "The Home Dairy," "Livestock," and "Meat Preparation and Basic Butchery" were of no use to us at all. The chapter "Curing and Preserving" wasn't completely irrelevant, because the instructions for preserving meat were interspersed with pointers on pickles, chutneys, sauces, jam, and dried mushrooms and herbs. But most of this was already familiar to us, as was everything in the chapter "The Home Baker." And parts of the chapter "The Kitchen Garden" were clearly aimed at a British audience and didn't apply to us, like the advice that tomatoes and peppers are "likely to disappoint you" if you try to grow them outdoors. 

There were also a few tips that didn't seem to fit the "self-sufficiency" brief. The chapter on "Natural Solutions: Health, Beauty, and the Home" contained numerous recipes for natural cleaners and beauty products made from ingredients that you clearly can't produce yourself and aren't cheap to buy, such as cocoa butter, sandalwood oil, and avocado. His homemade hair conditioner recipe ("beat an egg either with an avocado or a banana") would cost a minimum of $1.16 per application, while my Suave conditioner costs around 9 cents. 

Also, the few chapters that looked like they'd be most useful, like "Arty Crafty Bits," largely glossed over the details of the things I was keenest to learn about. The section on knitting lists all kinds of things you can make this way, but never actually talks about how to do it; the section on making your own clothes advises you to "buy a good, lightweight machine...and get sewing," as if setting the machine up and threading it and using it required no explanation. And on top of this, the book is peppered with errors, both mechanical ("it's" for "its," "forraging") and factual (saying that rhubarb leaves are unsafe to compost, describing wood as a green energy source).

Despite these drawbacks, I did manage to glean a few useful tidbits from this book. I learned (and confirmed from reliable sources) that it's best to water seedlings before transplanting them so you lose less soil; that you can make an alcoholic "turbo cider" from store-bought juice in a couple of weeks; that you can knit with strips of fabric rather than yarn; that the comfrey plant growing next to our recycling bin can be eaten (in moderation); and that you can preserve mushrooms at home by air-drying or freezing. But having filed away those facts, I don't see any need to keep the book on my shelf for future reference. I'll either donate it to our library book sale or drop it into one of our town's many Little Free Libraries so it can go to someone who may get more use out of it.

Hit: DIY shower indicator buttons

When Brian and I bought new shower control knobs nine years back, they came with little plastic "indicator buttons" to identify the hot, cold, and direction knobs. These weren't truly necessary, since most people know which is which, but they served to cover up the mounting screws. Unfortunately, within a year, these buttons started to fall apart. They wouldn't stay in place because the little teeth that held them in the knobs had come loose and begun to fall out. This looked like an easy fix; we just bought a new set of indicator buttons for about $5 and swapped them out. But within another year or so, these buttons also began to fall apart in exactly the same way. I looked for metal indicator buttons that I thought might be more sturdy than the plastic ones, but I couldn't find any to fit our faucets.

So, with two of our faucet knobs now sitting there naked and the third button hanging on by a thread, I started brainstorming ways to rig up a DIY version of these buttons. I considered metal bottle caps, but we don't tend to buy drinks in glass bottles, and I wasn't sure how I'd get them to fit into the faucets. I also thought about gluing some decorative beads in place, but that would make it impossible to get at the screws. Finally, I concluded that the best fix would be a couple of large metal washers tucked under the screws. This would leave the heads exposed, but it would hide the dingy, mineral-stained surface underneath. And if the washers themselves got dirty, I could easily remove, clean, and replace them.

I found two washers in our collection that were just the right size and painted them with nail polish: red, which I already had, for the hot-water tap and blue, which cost me $4 at the local discount store, for the cold. It was the work of a couple of minutes to remove the screws, thread the washers on, and screw them back in. With these in place, the damaged knobs look much more presentable. And whenever that last button gives up the ghost, I can give the middle knob the same treatment.

Miss: Shaky sunglasses repair 

On sunny days, I wear special sunglasses designed to fit over my regular glasses. They're much cheaper than a pair of prescription shades, and they're easier to put on and take off because I don't need to stash my other glasses. Their weak point, it turns out, is durability. This month, the frames cracked right across the top. Brian thought maybe he could mend them with epoxy, but the difficulty would be figuring out how to clamp them while the glue dried. I decided instead to shell out $2 for some fast-drying superglue from the discount store and try to fix them that way. I laid them out on a sheet of newspaper, put on gloves so I wouldn't glue my fingers together, dabbed on a little glue, and held the joined area in place for about a minute to let it set.

At first, this simple repair seemed to be holding. Then the crack opened back up, but only partway. I glued it again, but after a week, it popped open completely. I got out my tools and glued it one more time, but this time there was a slight mishap; I got a bit of glue on my glove, which then got stuck to the inside of the nose piece. I was able to pull most of the nitrile off, but there's still a little scrap of blue there that will have to be scraped off with a utility knife. And it remains unclear whether this second repair will hold any better than the first. If it doesn't, I'll have to move on to more complicated methods: either adding a splint along with the glue, as suggested at Eyeglass Repair USA, or plastic welding.

Miss: High quotes for heat pumps 

Last month, in the wake of a brutal heat wave and the passage of a bill that will kill home electrification credits at the end of this year, Brian and I took another stab at getting quotes for a home heat pump. Three weeks ago, after talking to two contractors and getting one quote back, I was feeling doubtful. Now, after five consultations and four quotes (the fifth one never got back to me, even after a follow-up call), I'm even more pessimistic. 

The bottom line seems to be that a system that can completely replace our gas boiler will cost well over 30 grand. That doesn't include the $10,000 decarbonization credit that the first contractor mentioned, but that's because none of the other contractors I spoke to believed that this credit actually exists. More than one of them said that PSE&G has been talking about such a program for years, but nothing has ever happened, and there's no evidence that this year will be any different.

Now, if we were willing to settle for a hybrid system—one that would supplement rather than replace the boiler, reducing our gas usage—we could probably do that for between 20 and 25 grand, including the upgrades to our electrical panel. But that's still a lot of money, and the new system would probably cost as much to run as our current one, if not more. So the costs would continue to pile up every year.

What I'm starting to wonder is, if we're only going to reduce, not eliminate, our use of fossil fuel for heating, do we even need to install a whole-house system? Maybe we could just replace our old through-the-wall air conditioning unit with a heat pump that could provide supplemental heating as well as cooling. It looks like we could buy one for around $1,000, and since it would be replacing an existing unit, the installation cost shouldn't be more than another grand; we might even be able to install it ourselves. We'd still need to use the gas boiler, but the heat pump could probably cut our gas use by half, and for less than one-tenth the price of a complete system. It would be like the heating equivalent of our little induction burner: not a full replacement for a gas appliance, but one that can take over most of its duties for a fraction of the price. Am I crazy, or is this the ecofrugal way?

Recipe of the Month: Green Bean and Mushroom Curry

First, a quick apology for the late post this week. We were away for the weekend and didn't get home until Sunday evening, by which time we had no energy left for anything productive.

Now, on to the meat—or rather meatless—of the post. Brian found July's Recipe of the Month the way he often does: by searching online for a dish he can make with whatever we happen to have in the fridge. In this case, that was a half-pound of mushrooms and a roughly equal amount of green beans from the garden (our first of the season). Running a search based on those two ingredients, he hit on this Green Bean and Mushroom Curry from a site called Cooking with Mum, which bills itself as "a collection of authentic recipes from Fiji." So we can now add Fijian to the list of world cuisines we've sampled.

Well, sort of, anyway. As usual, Brian had to make a few modifications to the recipe based on our dietary needs and what we had available. He left out the optional curry leaves, the Thai chili, and cilantro, none of which we had on hand. He used only half the volume of green beans the recipe called for, since that was all we had, and he didn't bother blanching them. He reduced the amount of oil from half a cup, which seemed a bit excessive, to a quarter-cup, and substituted cheaper canola oil for olive oil.  He added half a teaspoon of salt, since the original recipe called for none at all. And lastly, he gave the dish a boost of protein by cubing up 8 ounces of firm (or at least firm-ish) tofu, sauteing it with a quarter-teaspoon of salt, and tossing that in at the end before serving the whole thing up over brown rice. After all these changes, what he finally put on the table was more like an adaptation of the original Fijian dish than a faithful translation.

In its edited form, this dish was not particularly inspiring. Despite the large variety of spices included in the recipe, it wasn't all that flavorful. Even though Brian had added salt to it, we both ended up adding more and couldn't imagine how flat it would have been with none at all. Perhaps if he'd been able to include the missing chili and curry leaves, or if he'd sprung for the half-cup of olive oil instead of a quarter-cup of canola, that would have made all the difference. But I have a little trouble believing that. 

But though this curry wasn't remarkable, it wasn't bad either. The flavor didn't knock our socks off, but the dish was still reasonably enjoyable, and, with the addition of the tofu,  substantial enough to fill us both up. And even with the reduced volume of green beans, it made enough for two dinners and two lunches. It isn't necessarily worthy of a place in our recipe collection, but it served its purpose: turning the odds and ends into our fridge into a reasonably satisfying meal.

Taming the hell strip

Ever since we bought this house, Brian and I have been trying to reduce the amount of grass on the property—particularly in the little boxed-in front yard. We added the three plum trees, each with its own little island of mulch. We created a bed of day lilies along the cinder block wall. We made several attempts to get a ground cover established in the other portions of the yard, with varying degrees of success. And last month, Brian announced that he'd like to remove the grass from an area I'd never really thought about before: the narrow slice of turf between the sidewalk and street, which is apparently even more of a nuisance to keep mowed than the rest of the yard.

He wasn't quite sure what he wanted on this little sliver of land, aside from "not grass," so I offered to do a little research. I learned, first of all, that this narrow plot is commonly known as the "hell strip," and second, that it's a tricky area to landscape. Plants need to be narrow enough that they won't impinge on the sidewalk and tough enough to survive with very little soil underfoot. And in our yard, they face the additional challenges of heavy clay soil, full afternoon sun, and hungry deer and groundhogs. After consulting several sources online to see what could stand up to this environment, I proposed a mixture of salvia and rudbeckia (Black-Eyed Susans), with maybe a few little thyme plants to fill in the gaps. We already had salvia seeds from our planter project, so we bought a packet of rudbeckia seeds (as well as one of English lavender, which happened to catch Brian's eye), and I figured we'd plant them in the spring.

But this weekend, Brian decided he didn't want to wait that long. With an extra free day from the holiday weekend, he wanted to tackle a project he could see through from start to finish. He started sketching out some plans on Friday, and on Saturday morning he was out there turfing out the sod from the hell strip. He didn't do the whole thing, just a 12-foot section starting at the edge of the driveway. Then he disappeared into the shop and emerged with a small, odd-shaped bracket he'd built out of some pressure-treated 2-by-4 lumber he had leftover from the planter project. This little lopsided trapezoid was just the right size to fill in the angle formed by the driveway apron, turning the rest of the hellstrip into an even rectangle.

Next to that, he began laying out a small paved area that would serve as a landing pad for our trash and recycling bins. We didn't have any groundcloth to keep weeds out, but we had some heavy paper leaf bags that had proved equally effective at weed suppression in our garden paths. Laid flat, the bag was exactly wide enough to fill in the strip. Brian then began covering it with the last of the pavers leftover from our patio project, which had spent the last several years stashed in the shed. After filling in the cracks with fine sand (from a bag we acquired so long ago we've forgotten what it was originally for, he boxed in the remainder of the strip with more lengths of 2-by-4 and filled it up with topsoil. (He didn't nail these pieces together, so whenever he wants to expand the hellstrip planting, he can simply remove the end piece and add more boards to extend the frame.)

By the end of Saturday, he had the entire strip neatly laid out and already looking much better than it had before. However, we knew that if we simply left it like this, it wouldn't stay nice-looking for long. The "grass" (which in our yard really means a mixture of crabgrass and other lawn weeds) would re-colonize the nicely-laid-out bed in short order if we didn't get something else in there. We didn't have time to start a bunch of salvia, lavender, and Black-Eyed Susans indoors, and if we sowed the seeds directly in the midsummer heat, they might not survive. So we decided to stop by the same nursery where we'd bought the plants for our large planters last spring and grab a few deer-tolerant plants to serve as place holders for the rest of the season.

Unfortunately, the nursery was closed, presumably on account of the holiday weekend. We tried the nearby Home Depot, but the only suitable plants we found there were a few salvias, which we already had at home. So we switched to Plan B: digging up and transplanting some of the salvia from our planters, along with any other plants we could scavenge from our flowerbeds. We found one large echinacea that had somehow seeded itself in our herb bed, as well as several smaller ones scattered closer to their parent plants. We also divided off several sections from our largest yarrow plant, since multiple sources had recommended yarrow as a suitable plant for hellstrips. However, the plant was so huge and floppy that we quickly realized the pieces extracted from it would never manage to stand upright on their own. Brian planted a couple of them next to the street sign at one end of the strip with a wire cage around them for support, hoping that once they're in full sun they'll eventually take on a more upright posture. The rest of the bed got filled in with a mixture of salvia and echnicacea and covered with a layer of wood-chip mulch. (We got this free from a neighbor of ours who got a large delivery of wood chips from a tree service and generously offered up the leftovers on Freecycle.)

This newly planted area doesn't exactly look polished, but between the paved area and the layer of mulch, it's fairly neat. Come next spring, we'll start a bunch of echnicea, salvia, and maybe lavender and plant the area more fully. But for now, it's a decided improvement on the "grass" we had there before.

Heat pumps revisited

In the middle of last week's heat wave, I decided maybe it was time to take another crack at getting quotes on a home heat pump. We were getting along okay, using every trick we knew to stay cool—keeping the blinds lowered and the oven off, using fans everywhere, drinking lots of water, and retreating to the basement at night—and running our window air conditioner for just an hour or so in the hottest part of the day. But the longer we stuck to this routine, the more I realized it wouldn't be sustainable on a long-term basis. We weren't getting nearly as much sleep as usual, partly because of the cats prowling over us all night and partly because of the early morning sun shining through the thin curtains. During the day, we were sitting with desk fans pointing directly in our faces and still sweating through the bare minimum of clothing we had on. 

We bore up under this pretty well because we knew that the heat wave was only going to last a few days. However, we also knew that this heat wave wouldn't be the last. On the contrary, as the planet continues to warm faster and faster, heat waves will only become more frequent and more punishing. Sooner or later—most likely sooner—we'll reach a point where it's no longer sustainable to live through a New Jersey summer without central air conditioning. And if we know we're going to have to put ourselves to all the trouble and expense of adding central AC, it seems silly not to spend a little more on a heat pump that works in both directions, so we'll no longer need to rely on fossil fuels to heat our home.

When we looked into this last year, we had a rather frustrating experience. Most of the contractors we spoke to refused to give us a quote at all, and the one quote we managed to get was for $23,400—significantly higher than the top of the range most sources provide for a heat pump installation in New Jersey. We decided at the time that we should just repair our gas boiler and put off a decision on a heat pump for a few years, figuring that by that time there might be better options available. But now, with Congress about to vote on a budget bill that will almost certainly kill the tax credit for installing a new heat pump, it was looking like a better idea to act right away.

This time around, I searched specifically for heat pump installers in Middlesex County, rather than just HVAC companies. At first, it looked like I was having better luck with this approach: I was able to schedule three appointments with three different companies within a week. But very quickly, things started to go downhill. First, one of the three contractors called me back and said he was completely booked up for this week and had "no idea" why his secretary had scheduled him to give me a quote. I then got an appointment with a different company for that same day, only to get a call back from them saying that actually, the kind of installation we'd need was too big a job for them to do during the summer rush. I said I didn't need the work done right away, just the quote, but they said no, they couldn't even give me that until August. So I called up yet another company (number five, if you're counting) and managed to get an appointment with them for Monday.

The first contractor came on Tuesday, and right away, he started giving me the same line I'd heard from the previous HVAC contractors: listen, heat pumps are great in warmer climates, but here in New Jersey, they're just not a reasonable way to heat your home in the winter. Yes, yes, you might see sources online that say they can do it, but he knew from personal experience that in the real world, they weren't up to the job. In vain did I point out that I'd personally talked to people who use cold-climate heat pumps in New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and even Canada—all of which, last time I checked, were all in the real world—who were all heating their homes this way; he swore that he'd tested them for himself and they simply weren't practical. He even claimed it wasn't just a matter of electricity being more expensive than gas; at low temperatures, he insisted, a heat pump would actually use more energy, measured in Btus, than my gas boiler to produce the same degree of warming. He didn't explain how a heat pump that's over 200% efficient is supposed to use more energy than a gas boiler that's just under 90% efficient; he just knew for a fact that it would, and that was that.

For all his negative talk about heat pumps, however, he declared himself willing to give us a quote on one if that was what we really wanted. He recommended that we add ductwork to the upper level for heating and cooling, then leave the gas boiler in place to heat the basement when necessary. Bringing the ductwork down to the lower level, he claimed, wouldn't be worth the expense, since we seldom used the space and it would cool itself naturally in the summertime anyway. When I asked about ductless mini-splits, which most sources suggested would be cheaper for a house without existing ductwork, he said, "Not these days," citing price hikes (due largely to Trump's tariffs) that had significantly jacked up the price of each unit. And, after examining our electrical panel, he added that we'd definitely need to upgrade from 100 amps to 200 amps, which would be an additional expense.

The visit from the second contractor started off much better. When I told him what the first contractor had said about heat pumps falling short on winter heating, he said, "That guy must have been a real old-timer," because he'd been installing cold-climate heat pumps that did a great job in this climate for over ten years. He also mentioned something the first contractor hadn't: PSE&G's new "building decarbonization" program, which would give us a rebate of a whopping $10,000 on an electric heating system provided we got rid of the old gas boiler. (The gas water heater, dryer, and stove could stay, for the time being, as long as the heating system was disabled.) After examining our space, he said he'd recommend a cold-climate heat pump with six air handlers: one for each room in the house, not counting the bathrooms and the currently unheated laundry room. He also said that we could, in fact, do this with our existing 100-amp service, since we would no longer need the circuits devoted to the boiler pump and the upstairs air conditioner. However, he said he could give us a separate quote that would include a panel upgrade as well, in case we wanted to do it now in preparation for further electrification later.

After this visit, I was feeling much more optimistic. If his quote was in line with the $23,400 one we got last year, the $10,000 decarbonization credit would drop it to a much more manageable $13,400, and the $2,000 clean energy tax credit—still available up through the end of this year—would knock it down to $11,400. Even if his quote was closer to the $28,700 price the earlier contractor gave us for a ductless system, our all-in price would only be $18,700.

But my optimism evaporated when we saw the actual quote. The price for a six-zone ductless heat pump system, plus the deactivation of the old boiler, plus the upgrades to the electrical panel, would come to $38,720 before rebates, or $24,470 after. Even if we chose to skip the panel upgrade, it would be $19,630 after rebates. Moreover, hat price included only deactivating the old boiler, not actually removing it or the baseboard radiators, which would add another several thou. Oh, and it also didn't include any fees for permits. 

As if to soften the blow, a line at the bottom added that we wouldn't have to pay this all up front. Instead, we could use "utility interest-free financing," which would cost us a mere $291 per month, conveniently tacked on to our monthly utility bill, for 84 months. I know this would technically be a better deal, since we could keep the money in our account earning interest until each month's payment came due, and we'd also get to make the later payments with inflation-depreciated dollars. But to me, having that extra $300 monthly payment hanging over our head for the next seven years felt even worse than paying the 24 grand up front and being done with it.

This quote left me feeling seriously dejected and doubtful about whether a heat pump would ever make sense for us. I know we're in a better position to do it than many people, because we have the money; we can choose to take that $24K hit for the sake of the environment. But we'd only be doing it for the environment. A heat pump almost certainly wouldn't save us any money on our utility bills; most likely, it would end up costing us more every winter, perhaps significantly more. There's no chance at all that it would ever pay for itself. So we'd be paying $24,000 now (or $291 per month), plus an extra $100 or more on our heating bills every year, just to save the roughly 295 therms we'd otherwise burn to heat our home. According to the EPA, that would keep approximately 1.56 metric tons of CO2 equivalent out of the atmosphere each year at a cost of roughly $3,600—about $2,300 per ton. That's five to ten times the price per ton of most carbon dioxide removal (CDR) projects. We could do the planet a lot more good by investing $600 a year in CDR and leaving our gas boiler untouched.

I suppose I shouldn't give up hope yet. We still have one more quote scheduled for tomorrow, and it's possible we'll get better news from that one (or possibly from the first contractor's quote, which we still haven't received). But if we don't, we have to ask ourselves: how much is it really worth to us to say that we, personally, are not burning fossil fuels in our home? From a purely utilitarian standpoint, isn't it better to stick with our crummy, but cheap, heating (and occasional, expensive cooling) and pay to remove a larger volume of climate pollution somewhere else?