Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Harvest Home

We’re at a turning point in the year. The Jewish calendar has just rolled over from 5786 to 5787 (which is why this entry won’t be posted until tonight, because I’m currently on my annual Internet fast for Yom Kippur). And tomorrow marks the fall equinox, otherwise known as Harvest Home, the official kickoff of the autumn harvest season.

And our garden is certainly rising to the occasion. For the past few weeks, we’ve been up to our elbows in raspberries, green beans, peppers, and especially tomatoes. According to my running total, we have now harvested 12 Vivacious tomatoes, 20 Goldies, 126 San Marzanos, 189 Premios, and a whopping 841 Sun Golds. The only disappointing producer has been the lone Pineapple plant, which has yielded only two big, juicy fruits. Brian and I have come regretfully to the conclusion that, tasty as the Pineapple tomatoes are, we’ll have to drop them from next year’s garden, because they’re just not able to earn their keep. We’ll consult the Fedco catalogue to see if there’s any other variety on offer that purports to be as flavorful as the Pineapple but more productive; if not, we’ll probably just stick with the varieties we have.

Fortunately, the tomato harvest has finally tapered off to just a few fruits per day, so we only need to eat a tomato-centered dish maybe once a week instead of every day. That leaves us free to concentrate on our green beans, which are still going at full blast. We’ve harvested most of the Provider beans at this point (about two and a half pounds’ worth), but the Climbing French beans are still cranking them out fast enough that we need to harvest them pretty much every day. Brian has been handling that job for the most part, so when I offered to help him with it yesterday, he wouldn’t let me get started until he’d acquainted me with “the rules”:

1. Take care not to step on the zucchini plants. These didn’t give us much during the summer, but there are still a few healthy fingerlings on them, and he wants to make sure they get big enough for grilling.
2. Take care not to impale yourself on the stakes on the pepper plants, which are so big and heavy that they’re starting to bend over and drag the stakes down with them. They haven’t been as massively productive as the tomatoes, but they’ve still given us a pretty good haul already: 4 peppers off the new Apple plant, 6 massive Aconcaguas, and 12 of our trusty Carmens.
3. Only harvest beans that are of good eating size. If they’re too small (skinny and less than a couple of inches long), they should stay on the vine to get bigger; if they’re too fat (meaning the beans inside the pod are big enough to form a distinct bulge), they’re not much good for eating and should stay on the vine until frost, at which point we can harvest them for seed.
   

Following this last rule was trickier than it sounds, because the vines are so big and sprawling that it’s sometimes hard to spot the beans. You could go over one plant thoroughly, thinking you’d picked it clean, and then come back in five minutes and find another whole handful of beans that had escaped your notice the first time. It took us several passes to glean about 4 ounces of beans in that one picking, and there were another 4 ounces out there on the vine when Brian went out again today, bringing our total for the year up to about 6.6 pounds. And that’s just from our first planting of French beans. There’s a whole second crop that I put in at the end of July in place of the snap peas, which are only just now starting to flower. If those plants are anywhere near as productive as their older siblings, they should keep us in beans until Thanksgiving.

The final crop that’s been keeping us on our toes is the raspberries. We’re about midway through our second harvest of these, and we’re bringing in close to a cup and a half of berries every day. I’ve been eating berries every day for lunch, and last weekend I brought a big plastic tub of them to a CCL event (sending postcards to CCL members in New Jersey encouraging them to vote). About three minutes after leaving I realized I’d left the container behind with over a cup of berries still in it, and I didn’t even bother going back for them because I knew there would be more than enough ripe berries on the canes for the next day’s lunch. (There were.) 

We’re celebrating Harvest Home tonight with of our new vegan version of Pasta a la Caprese, using our own home-grown tomatoes, peppers, and the tail end of the basil crop. (The plants are still out there, but they’re starting to look a little yellow and brittle, and we probably need to harvest what’s left soon and process it into paste for the freezer.) Fortunately, I’m not fasting in the conventional way, so we’ll be able to eat well before sundown and head off to board game night at Pino’s. That’s the nice thing about Gardeners’ Holidays as opposed to traditional ones: You can celebrate them in any way you like, at whatever time is most convenient. And speaking for myself, I’d much rather welcome in the autumn with a meal of home-grown produce than with a day of fasting and prayer.

More mini updates

Once again, I've got nothing big to share this week, so instead I'm bringing you an assortment of little mini updates from our ecofrugal world. It's along the same line as my quick fixes posts, but these run the gamut from successful projects to unsuccessful ones to ideas that are still at the planning stage.

Update #1: Darn, still not so tough

Remember a year ago, when I was disappointed to discover a hole in one of Brian's Darn Tough socks? And how I decided that it wasn't worth using the alleged lifetime guarantee when I could just darn the hole and be done with it? Well, I now have confirmation that this incident was more than just a fluke. Last time I hung them on the line, I discovered that a second pair of Darn Tough socks had also developed a hole, this time toward the front. Once again, I was able to darn it without difficulty, but it confirmed my decision not to bother buying this brand again, warranty or no warranty.

Update #2: A DIY lipstick case

I don't normally wear a lot of makeup. Most days, it's just a swipe of white nail pencil (or my new favorite substitute, grease pencil) under each fingernail and a spot of concealer as needed to cover any blemishes. I keep both of these in a cosmetic case in my purse, along with such other everyday carry necessities as hand sanitizer, lotion, Band-Aids, and a mini sewing kit. Unfortunately, the cap on the concealer tube isn't very secure. Occasionally, it comes off as it rattles around in there and I end up with concealer smeared all over my other necessaries. And eventually, it ends up getting cracked and won't go back on the tube at all unless I wrap it with clear tape.

To fix this problem, I decided to invest in a little lipstick case. These are easy to find for $10 or less on Amazon, but it's much harder to get one at a reasonable price secondhand. And when I searched for tutorials on how to make one from scratch, they all seemed to require skills I didn't have, like crochet or metalworking. So I decided to make up my own design: a simple envelope made of felt. I just wrapped the felt around the tube to gauge the size, leaving a little overlap to make a closure flap. Then I cut it to size, sewed the ends shut, and added snaps to hole the top flap down. It's not very elegant or very sturdy, but it should be sufficient to protect the tube or, at the very least, keep its lid on.

Update #3: An unsuccessful wallet repair

Remember the new wallet I was so pleased to find for $5 at the thrift store last July? Well, within about a month, the metal discs that support the clasp on the front flap (one on the inside, one on the outside) fell off. Now, technically, the wallet is still usable without it: the clasp on the flap can still be closed even if there's nothing but fabric behind it. But it looked kind of odd, and I feared the fabric would wear out pretty quickly.

In theory, it should have been easy to reattach the metal pieces with a couple of small screws. Unfortunately, they'd have to be very small screws, smaller than anything we have in the shop, and searches at both Home Depot and Michael's turned up nothing of the appropriate size. So I hunted around for something else I could use to secure the discs in place, and I hit on the idea of using some toothpicks. I could fit one end pretty securely into the outer metal piece, then thread it through the holes in the cloth flap and the inner metal disc, and hold it all down with hot glue.

Well, that was the theory, anyway. Unfortunately, it didn't work very well in practice. The glue leaked out around the edges of the metal, and the metal tip of the glue gun heated the discs up so much that I burned my hand while trying to press them into place. Also, I couldn't manage to clip off the ends of the toothpicks neatly, so there was still a small, jagged end poking through. And after all that, the glue only held up for a week or two before the discs started coming loose again.

So, for now, I'm just keeping the metal pieces with the wallet, with only the clasp to hold them into place. I'm hoping that someone at the next Repair Cafe, which is coming up in November, will have the right size screws to fix it properly, or at least a better way to do it improperly.

Update #4: Finally, the right ground cover?

Ever since we bought this house, I've been trying to find a suitable ground cover to replace our front lawn. I didn't want to use anything invasive, like English ivy or Japanese pachysandra, but so far, all the more sedate plants I've tried—from Dutch white clover to creeping thyme to the native barren strawberry—have been unable to compete with the crabgrass. And every time I tried searching lists of native ground covers, I found the same old recommendations I'd already considered and deemed unsuitable. None of them could stand up to all the conditions in our yard: clay soil, afternoon sun, and occasional foot traffic.

Until last month, that is, when I stumbled across a native plant directory called Planoot. I searched for plants native to our area that were perennial, low-growing, and clay-friendly, and I came across an unfamiliar plant that goes by two different colorful names: frog fruit or turkey tangle. It's suitable for clay, likes full or partial sun, and grows to just 6 inches in height, and according to the directory, it "spreads vigorously as a low, trailing groundcover." Native Backyards was even more enthusiastic, calling it "my favorite native ground cover" thanks to its fast growth, low maintenance, and appeal for humans and native pollinators alike.

After a quick consultation with Brian, I searched out and ordered five frog fruit plants from a seller on Etsy. They were supposed to arrive last weekend, but the package appears to be held up in Texas. Once it arrives, we'll put the plants in the ground and see how well they live up to the hype.

Update #5: Middle-hanging fruit, maybe

This month, New Jersey became the ninth state to officially legalize balcony solar. Unlike large-scale solar setups that can power a whole house, these are miniature arrays that plug into a wall outlet and provide a smidgen of energy for internal use. They're easy to install, and crucially, they don't require an interconnection agreement with your electric utility, since little or none of the energy they produce will ever make its way onto the grid.

During a webinar I attended about this new law, I learned about a nonprofit called Bright Saver that's supposedly selling these mini solar arrays at cost in states where they're legal. If you sign up for a $29 yearly membership, you can either get a kit with a single 180-watt panel, an inverter, and a power cord for just $285 or pay $414 for a larger two-panel version. (You can also pay $499 for the smaller kit without signing up for a membership, but it's not clear why anyone would, since you can cancel when the year is up.) 

This was a better deal than I could find anywhere else, and it seemed like a great way to dip our toes into solar panel usage without a big commitment of time or money. It wouldn't reduce our home's carbon footprint, since we already use community solar for all our electricity, but it could still save us a little something on our energy bills each month. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, which I needn't go into here, it looked like it could pay for itself in just a few years, much faster than a full rooftop array (which we can't get right now, anyway, because our electric usage is too small). It seemed like a perfect example of the kind of middle-hanging fruit I've been looking for to make our life more ecofrugal in modest but meaningful ways.

More intriguingly still, Bright Saver says balcony solar is just the first clean-energy project it plans to tackle. There are plans in the works to help members save on home battery systems, insurance, and crucially for us, heat pumps. By joining now, we might eventually be able to get one for much less than the $24,000 after rebates that local installers have been quoting us.

This got me excited enough to plunk down $29 on a membership, but as I was preparing to place my order for the mini solar array, I hesitated. A small, suspicious voice in the back of my head whispered, "How do I know this is for real? If it sounds too good to be true, doesn't that usually mean it is?"

Further research did nothing to ease my mind. I could not find one single review from someone who actually owned Bright Saver's solar panels and could confirm they worked well. I found positive reviews, but they were either from "professional" sources who were simply repeating the info from Bright Saver's website or from folks on Reddit who had pre-ordered them and were expecting to receive them in August, only to have the shipment delayed until September and now October. I found myself wondering if the company might just take my money, promise shipment in a month (and then another month, and then another), and eventually disappear. Or maybe they would send me something that looked to the untrained eye like a solar panel, but when plugged in it would do nothing. I have no actual evidence that Bright Saver is anything but a legitimate company—but I also have no proof that it is one.

So, for now, my policy is to watch and wait. If and when Bright Saver says they are actually ready to start shipping out the solar panels, then I'll place an order. If it arrives and we plug it in and confirm it's working as claimed, great. If it doesn't, then we'll cancel the credit card charge before the bill comes due. And if the panels never become available on the site at all, at least I'm only out $29 instead of $443.

Piecemeal project

When we bought this house back in 2007, one of our first projects was to refinish the kitchen cabinets. They were all natural wood with a beautiful grain, but it was somewhat hard to see under the heavy varnish. So we took off all the doors, laid them out in the (at the time) unfinished basement, and stripped them with a product called "Safest Stripper," which took about 24 hours to work but was safer and less smelly than anything else we could find. Then we gave them a coat of wood conditioner to raise the grain, followed by a couple of coats of a nontoxic water-based finish.

In hindsight, this eco-friendly product may not have been the best choice. Over the 19 years since, the finish has gradually worn away, particularly in the areas along the edges and around the handles that get touched most often. As a result, our lovely wood cabinets now look worse than they did before we first refinished them. 

This month, Brian and I agreed that it was about time we refinished them. However, we no longer have a large unfinished basement in which we can work on all the doors at once. Instead, we're tackling this project in a piecemeal fashion: pulling off just one or two doors at a time and taking them down to the workshop to be stripped, treated with wood conditioner, and refinished (this time with "water-based, oil-modified polyurethane," which we're hoping will hold up better than the old water-based finish).

It took a little trial and error to figure out the best way to get the old finish off. At first, Brian thought he could just sand the doors down as he did with all our interior doors ten years ago. He tested this process on the smallest section of cabinetry, the front panel of the little tilt-out drawer under the sink, and that piece came out okay—a bit lighter than the other doors, but we figured they'd all end up the same once they'd been refinished. But this turned out to be a slight miscalculation. When he tried the same process on two larger doors, he discovered that it took more sanding to get the finish off in the damaged areas around the edges than in the middle. As a result, the wood in those spots looked lighter than the rest, and the grain was less visible. So for the remaining doors, he switched back to chemical stripping. Fortunately, the product we have now, called Lift Off, while still nontoxic, works much faster than Safest Stripper. It only takes about five minutes to bubble off the old finish, so he can completely turn around one pair of doors—removed, stripped, cleaned, refinished, and reinstalled—in just a day or two.

While we had the doors off, Brian thought we should also have a go at cleaning the handles, which had never been really thoroughly scrubbed since we first installed them in 2014. It turns out that nifty basket-weave design that looked so cute when they were new is also really good at trapping particles of dirt and grease from the air. Soaking the handles overnight in a mild solution of dish soap brought all this hidden goo to the surface in a thick, sticky layer. A quick scrub with an old toothbrush removed most of it, but once the handles dried, little mottled patches appeared where some of the schmutz was left behind. (We know it's dirt and not the finish being scrubbed away, because it comes off when scraped with a fingernail.) So it will most likely take multiple rounds of scrubbing to get these fully clean.

This project is kind of a microcosm of all the home renovations we've done in the years since we bought this place. Our approach has always been to take as long as we need to do a good job on a low budget, rather than a quick-and-dirty rush job or a high-priced, high-end whirlwind makeover. We spent literally years after we moved in redoing our big basement room piece by piece, close to a year on the downstairs bath, half a year on the guest room, three months on the office closet doors, and over a year on the laundry room. So redoing these cabinet doors bit by bit, tackling one or two at a time and spending maybe an hour on them each day, is much more our style than setting aside one long weekend and trying to blast through the whole job at once.

Introducing the Green Machine

Since he retired last February, Brian has been spending a lot of time on his bike. Back when he was working, his main form of exercise was riding to work; even after the COVID lockdowns, when he was only required to be in the office one day a week, he'd still ride to the office in the morning (weather permitting), water his plants, and come home for lunch. When he retired, he worried at first about how he'd replace that daily exercise. He could still go out on his bike and just ride around, of course, but he had trouble motivating himself to mount up without a destination in mind. But he quickly figured out that there were lots of other places he could go in the area, either to run small errands or just to explore. Now, on clear days, his usual routine is to suit up after breakfast and head out to do a little grocery shopping, pick up or drop off library books, or maybe just test a new route before lunchtime.

After doing this for a while, he asked me if I'd be interested in having a bike of my own so I could join him once in a while. I was open to this idea, but also a little hesitant, since I hadn't ridden in decades. So he proposed taking his spare bicycle (the one he still had left after last year's basement cleanup) down to the park, along with the the cheap helmet we'd picked up for me at some point, and testing it out. Then we'd know, first of all, how well I could still handle a bike after all these years, and second, whether this spare one fit me well enough to be my personal ride.

This experiment had mixed results. The first thing we figured out was that Brian's spare bike was definitely too big for me. Although he's a foot taller than I am, the difference is entirely above the waist, so we'd been assuming that if it fit him it would also fit me. But we'd forgotten that, while my legs are as long as his, my feet are not. When the seat was at a comfortable height for him, I couldn't reach the ground even on my tippytoes. Just to get me onto the bike, he had to remove the rear reflector so he could lower the seat down to the very bottom of its stem. Once I managed to get saddled up, I found that I still remembered how to balance, pedal, and steer, but stopping, not so much. The brakes on Brian's spare bike were a lot more powerful than what I remembered, and a fairly gentle squeeze brought it thumping to a halt and sent me toppling over sideways onto the pavement. Fortunately, I wasn't scraped up too badly, but it was rather unnerving. So was the gearshift, which was a bit fiddly and liable to knock the chain loose on certain settings. Overall, it was clear that if I was going to get back into cycling, it shouldn't be on that bike.

So, on our way home, we decided to keep our eyes open for a cheap or, better yet, free bike that would be more suitable for me. It needed to be sized for a small adult (or a pretty large kid) and, ideally, have a simple click-style gearshift that would be easy to manipulate. Well, apparently my old bargain-hunting mojo was up and running, because the very next morning, I saw this listing on Freecycle: 

OFFER: Green bike (Highland Park)

Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:09:58 +0000
From: rkfriedman

Green bike that was painted (used to be another color). My son has outgrown. Tired need air and may require other repairs but seems largely intact.

Reply online |  Back to the top 

I emailed immediately and got a response saying it was out at the curb, free for the taking to anyone who wanted it. Not wanting to miss out, Brian and I drove straight there, found the bike, checked to make sure it was an appropriate size for me, loaded it in the car, and got it home, all within the space of about 20 minutes. We felt a bit silly about taking the car to travel less than a mile, especially since we were already planning to walk to the library, just a block away, later that morning to join a work party removing invasive plants. But since the bike wasn't in good shape, there was no other practical way to get it home. As we stowed it in the back, I dubbed it the Green Machine, since it's both green in color and eco-friendly.

In the week since, Brian put in a bit of work on the Green Machine to get it back into roadworthy condition. (While he was doing that, my bargain mojo was apparently still activated just in case the new bike didn't work out, because I spotted no fewer than three additional listings for free bicycles on our local Freecycle and Trash Nothing lists. But it proved unnecessary.) He pumped up the tires, lubed up the chain, adjusted the gears and the brakes, added reflectors to the wheels, and replaced the green seat with a cushier one that would be easier on my out-of-practice backside. The bike is now fully road-ready; the only question is whether I am. 

To answer that, we'll have to head down to the park again and give me another road test, this time on my new, optimally sized bike, and see how well I handle it. If I get the hang of it pretty quickly, I can work my way up to taking it out around the neighborhood and maybe, eventually, to venturing out with Brian into less familiar territory. I don't think I'll feel comfortable riding on major roads with heavy traffic anytime soon, but fortunately, Brian already has a pretty good mental map of bike routes in our area that circumvent these streets as much as possible.

Of course, this also means that we're once again back to stashing three bikes in the basement instead of two. But since the Green Machine is small, it can nestle on the floor below Brian's main bike on its ceiling-mounted rack. That means the path isn't significantly more obstructed than it was already, and I have easy access to my new used bike when I need it.

Recipe of the Month: Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry

In my last Recipe of the Month post, I noted that I'd been building up a stash of vegetarian recipes from the New York Times Cooking section, which were just waiting for the necessary produce to be in season. Last week, we got a chance to try one of them out. Our green beans have finally recovered enough from last June's deer damage to provide the 12 ounces required for Brian to whip up Nisha Vora's Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry with Salt and Pepper Tofu.

As usual, he had to make a few minor modifications to the recipe—some approved by the author, some not. She said right in the ingredients list that it was fine to replace tamari with soy sauce, arrowroot with cornstarch, and black sesame seeds with white, and a note below the recipe suggested substituting dry sherry for Shaoxing wine. The canola oil he used to fry the tofu more or less fits her description of a "neutral high-heat cooking oil," and it's a lot cheaper than the avocado oil she recommended. His homemade five-spice powder was probably a reasonably close approximation for a bottled blend, and since this ingredient was optional anyway, it presumably wasn't crucial to get the proportions exactly right. And while soba noodles weren't one of the types she specifically suggested in the ingredient list, they do qualify as "dried noodles" (and her three choices—ramen, udon, and "egg-free wheat noodles"—were all different enough from each other to suggest that it didn't matter that much).

However, in other cases he had to take more liberties. The tofu we've been buying at H-Mart doesn't come in an extra-firm variety, so he substituted firm tofu, but took the optional step of freezing and then thawing it to improve the texture. He also used table salt in place of kosher salt in the salt and pepper tofu, while dialing down the white pepper from 1/2 teaspoon to 1/4 teaspoon to accommodate my sensitive palate. For the same reason, he cut the ginger by an even bigger margin, using just a half-inch chunk instead of 2 inches, and cut the cilantro out altogether. But his most dramatic change was attempting to whip up a homemade substitute for "chili-garlic sauce or sambal oelek," neither of which we had available. He replaced this ingredient with two crushed garlic cloves and one dried red chili, leaving out the vinegar, salt, and sugar these sauces usually contain.

After all these changes, it's safe to say Brian's dish probably tasted quite different from the original version. For one thing, these "spicy" noodles were actually quite mild, even for me. The substitution of finer-ground table salt meant the tofu was probably saltier, while the makeshift chili garlic sauce made the whole dish less acidic. But none of these changes stood out that much, because the flavors that really caught our attention came from the five-spice powder. 

This isn't an ingredient we've used in anything else, and the blend of cinnamon, pepper, fennel, anise, and cloves gave the noodles a unique, striking flavor. The only word I could come up with to describe it was "musty," but it wasn't necessarily unpleasant, just unusual. I couldn't quite decide if I liked it or not and kept trying to figure it out with another bite, and then another, until I'd polished off my bowlful and gone back for a bit more (so the answer was probably yes). Brian was less ambivalent; he considered it a definite success and would happily make it again. I told him next time he could be a little more ambitious with the spice, since I found the pepper level more than manageable and the ginger barely detectable. And if we can get our hands on some real chili-garlic paste, that would probably improve the dish too.

But even if we don't repeat this recipe, Brian feels like he's learned a few useful things from it. He now knows how freezing and thawing affects tofu, making it firmer and extra porous, so it absorbs flavors better. He's also now familiar with Chinese five-spice powder, and it's safe to say he's a fan. So if not this exact dish, other recipes containing it will probably be in our future.

So *that's* why I hang my laundry

This week, I responded to a post in the r/Frugal forum on Reddit asking, "What's your lowest payoff frugal tip?" That "lowest" is not a typo; the questioner was interested not in learning tricks to save a bundle of money, but in hearing about frugal habits that are "more about principle than the actual savings." Comments included things like reusing plastic bags, cutting dryer sheets in half, and saving packaging items like twist ties and rubber bands—a habit one commenter said has saved them "tens of cents."

I chimed in to talk about how I always hang my laundry, weather permitting, even though the savings are minimal. Each load I hang instead of running it through the dryer saves about a quarter-therm of gas, which is currently worth about 40 cents—more than the 24 cents it cost when I first wrote about it in 2012, but still far from impressive. Since it takes at least 15 minutes to hang the laundry in the morning and take it down in the evening, that works out to $1.60 an hour. That's barely 10 percent of New Jersey's current minimum wage of $15.92 an hour, making line-drying an even worse financial deal than it was in 2012. And it reduces my carbon footprint by a mere three pounds.

In my 2012 post, I concluded that the real reason I hang laundry is because it makes me feel good, even if the practical benefits are small. But when I commented about it on Reddit, another Redditor replied to point out that there is another practical benefit as well: "you’re extending the life of your clothes by hang drying them instead of blasting them in the dryer." Now, in theory, I knew this already, but I'd never been sure just how significant a perk it really was. After all, how could I tell how much longer my clothes were lasting as a result of being hang-dried? Short of buying two identical garments and line-drying one while tumble-drying the other, how would I even test it?

But just one day after seeing that Reddit post, I hit on what economists call a natural experiment. I was darning up some holes in my blue knit shorts, the pair I'd bought at Sears back in 2015 when there still was a Sears, and it occurred to me that at the time I bought them, I hadn't expected them to last very long. In college, I'd owned a few pairs of sport knit pants from the same company, and I'd quit buying them because they always developed holes within a matter of months. But now, here were these shorts just getting their first little holes after 11 years. So either Lands' End had started using much sturdier fabric some time between 1995 and 2015—not a very likely scenario—or line-drying had made the difference. 

However, it isn't quite fair to say these shorts lasted 11 years when their predecessors lasted less than 1. Being shorts, they were only worn during the summertime, or about 3 months out of every 12. Still, that means they remained intact over 33 months of use, while the knit pants I owned in college never made it more than 6 months. In other words, line-drying the shorts had prolonged their lifespan more than fivefold.

I wouldn't go so far as to extrapolate from this that all my clothes are lasting five times as long thanks to line-drying. These shorts are a knitted cotton fabric, like a T-shirt, and some of the other comments in the Reddit thread suggest these are particularly vulnerable to dryer damage. However, probably about half the garments in our typical laundry load are knitted items, including T-shirts, socks, and undies. If all these garments are lasting five times as long, we're saving 80 percent of what we'd otherwise spend on them. That's roughly a 40 percent savings on clothing as a whole, even if the other half of our clothes gains no benefit at all from line-drying.

How much is this in dollar terms? Well, according to my budget spreadsheet (yes, of course I have a budget spreadsheet), Brian and I spend an average of $389 per year on clothing and shoes. Let's assume shoes, which don't go in the laundry, account for $89 of that, leaving us a nice round $300 a year for clothing. If this figure has had 40 percent knocked off it by line drying, that means our clothing budget without line-drying would be $500, or $200 higher. We do a little over one load of laundry per week—say 60 loads per year—and we line-dry about three-quarters of them, or 45 loads. So that means each load I hang on the line is saving us not just a measly 40 cents on fuel, but also about $4.44 on clothing costs. Add it all up, and that's a savings of $4.84 per load for roughly 15 minutes of work, or $19.36 per hour—well above our state minimum wage, and more than 2.5 times the paltry federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

Mind you, knowing all this isn't likely to change my behavior in any meaningful way. I'll still line-dry my clothes in nice weather and resort to the dryer only if it's freezing cold or rains for days on end. But now, each time I do it, I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that it actually is saving us money. Spending 15 minutes out in the sun and fresh air will be just the cherry on top.

Cost Plus Drugs is great...until it isn't

Once again, my apologies for being late with the blog. I do have a good excuse this time; my sister's family was visiting from Sunday through Tuesday, and I spent more or less the whole time with them at my parents' house in Hopewell. So I didn't get a chance to finish up this post until Wednesday. Now, on to a few words about health care costs.

When Brian retired last February, I did a lot of number crunching to find the best prices on the health coverage his job would no longer provide. The state's Get Covered NJ website helped me compare basic health plans quite easily, and a little online searching helped me find a separate plan for vision care. (Side note: the dental discount plan I chose turned out to be a complete bust. The dentist we'd been going to for years wasn't in the plan's network, and the local dentist we decided to try instead charges way, WAY more than the estimates Aetna provided for "average costs" under the plan. Unfortunately, we didn't learn this until we showed up for our appointments, so we ended up paying $100 in cancellation fees and going back to our old dentist. Add in the $145 we paid for the discount card itself—counting the extra $20 I decided to pay for prescription drug discounts that turned out to be worthless—and that's $245 wasted instead of saved.) 

Then, since our new plan had a high deductible, I also used its website to help me check out-of-pocket prices for all our prescription drugs. For most of them, I found that it would be significantly cheaper to buy from Cost Plus Drugs, a Mark Cuban venture that offers generic drugs at rock-bottom prices. The way it works is right there in the name: They charge you the wholesale cost of the drugs from the manufacturer, plus a 15% markup to pay for their overhead, plus a $5 dispensing fee for the pharmacy that makes up the prescriptions, plus shipping, which is a flat $5.25 for most orders. 

All that can add up to a substantially lower price than you'd pay at a retail pharmacy. For example, one of my rosacea medications, a 15% azelaic acid gel, would cost $81 a tube if I bought it from the nearest in-network pharmacy. If I bought it through my health plan's mail-order pharmacy, that would drop the price to just $26.14 per tube plus shipping—but that pharmacy is Amazon, which I don't want to use unless it's the only option. If I used a free discount card from GoodRx, I could get the medicine from a local chain pharmacy (which isn't in our plan's network) for around $36 a tube. But at Cost Plus, the total price including shipping is just $24.27.

This sounds great, and it is, but there are a few downsides. One is that Cost Plus only offers a limited selection of medicines. However, all of ours are on this list, so that wasn't a problem for us. The second is that they aren't in the networks of most health insurers, including ours, so we have to pay the full costs out of pocket. But I didn't consider that a deal breaker because, in the first place, our plan's high deductible meant we'd be paying for most of our meds out of pocket anyway. And even if we happened to hit our deductible in a given year, the plan would only cover 60 percent of medication costs after that. At our local, in-network pharmacy, just our 40 percent copay on the azelaic acid would come to $32.40, which is still higher than the total price from Cost Plus.

The third problem is the difficulty of transferring prescriptions to Cost Plus. Most pharmacies will happily transfer a prescription from another pharmacy for you. So, if I'd been using Amazon or another in-network pharmacy, I could have simply transferred over the prescriptions I had at OptumRx, our old plan's mail-order pharmacy, and used the refills I had remaining. But Cost Plus doesn't do this. You have to ask your doctor to send them a new prescription for each medication you use—and if the meds were prescribed by different doctors, you have to do this multiple times. It took several attempts to get in touch with my new doctor, as well as my dermatologist, and get them to send in my prescriptions to Cost Plus, but I managed it in the end for most of my meds. And once Cost Plus had the prescriptions, it was perfectly straightforward to use. They sent me a notice to say the prescriptions were ready to fill, I went on the site and placed the order in a few minutes, and the meds arrived in about a week.

The fourth problem came up with the last remaining medication I hadn't transferred over yet. This was partly my fault; I thought I had an extra tube of the azelaic acid on hand, which would have been enough to get me through to my next appointment with the dermatologist, so I was planning to ask for a new prescription then. But that extra tube in the drawer was actually a different medication, something we were no longer using. So, with just a few weeks' worth left, I reached out to the dermatologist last month and said, "Hey, I don't have enough of my meds, can you send a new prescription to Cost Plus?" and they obligingly did so. Within a day, I received a message from Cost Plus saying they had the new prescription...but unfortunately, the medication was out of stock. They promised to notify me as soon as it was back in stock, but they gave no indication when that would be.

For a couple of weeks, I waited, keeping a wary eye on my supply, to see if the medicine became available. I considered calling the doctor again to ask to have yet another prescription sent to a different pharmacy (since you can't transfer prescriptions away from Cost Plus either), but the high cost deterred me. Finally, I tried getting in touch with Cost Plus customer service to ask if they had any idea when the meds would be back in stock, and here I ran into the fifth problem: You can't. There's a FAQ on the website and a chatbot who doesn't know anything that isn't in the FAQ, and there's a feedback form on the site you can use to email them a question and hope someone answers. (I tried it over the weekend and got a response on Monday, but all it said was, "We don't have an ETA at this time. You will get an email when it's back in stock," which is exactly what they'd told me already.)

I finally settled on a solution I'd used once before when I ran out of this medicine while on vacation: I bought an over-the-counter preparation of azelaic acid instead. It's only 10 percent azelaic acid instead of 15 percent, but it should be good enough to get me through to my appointment next week. If Cost Plus doesn't have the prescription strength back in stock by then, I can ask the dermatologist to send a new prescription to another pharmacy (ideally one where I can use my GoodRx coupon). But the whole situation made me kind of nervous. If they could simply run out of this medication, could it happen with others as well? Could I log on one day to refill my prescription for, say, my thyroid medication, only to see that it's out of stock and there's no indication when it will be available again? 

I went searching online to see if anyone else had experienced this problem, and I found not one but two Reddit threads where people complained that their medications—much more essential ones than mine—had been out of stock for weeks or even months, with no indication when they'd be back. I also found a bunch of negative reviews on both Reddit and Trustpilot accusing Cost Plus of still graver errors. Some people said their doctors had sent their prescriptions to Cost Plus multiple times and they still weren't showing up on the site. Others said they'd been charged for medications they never received or had orders canceled with no notification. Worst of all, some said they'd ordered medications that were supposed to be temperature-controlled, and Cost Plus had shipped them in a regular envelope in the blazing summer heat, making them unusable. And all of these people said that they were unable to get a satisfactory response from customer service, if they got any response at all.

All this makes me feel torn about relying on Cost Plus in future. On one hand, it's much, much cheaper than the alternatives for some of our meds. But that's assuming we can actually get them there, and that seems far from guaranteed. Right now, my inclination is to keep using Cost Plus when possible, but make sure to have a backup available. I plan to refill all my meds as early as possible, and if they aren't available within two weeks of the time I need them, call the doctor and ask to have the prescription sent somewhere else. I'm not worried about the cold-chain problems, since Brian and I don't take any medications that require temperature control, but if we ever do, I'll make sure to get those somewhere else.

In the course of writing this post, I also learned about a couple of other alternatives. There are two other online pharmacies operating on a cost-plus model that can ship to my area: Blueberry Pharmacy and Midtown Express Pharmacy. (Reddit mentioned the first one, and I found the other through a search on CostPlusPharmacies.com.) Unforunately, Blueberry doesn't offer most of the medications we use in the appropriate dosages, and Midtown Express doesn't let you check prices online. So for now, it looks like my Cost-Plus-plus plan is the soundest one.

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Tomatofest

This has been a summer of extremes. So far, we've had two triple-digit heat waves, both followed by powerful storms and flooding, interspersed with a multi-day stretch of nose-stinging wildfire smoke. Right now the temperature isn't too bad (a mere 88 degrees Fahrenheit, according to our little weather station), but the humidity is at a wilting 55 percent. 

All this has been rather unpleasant for us, but it seems to suit our tomato plants just fine, because they've been producing like gangbusters. What you see here is just a small fraction of what we've picked in the past week or so. (The little round ones are our trusty Sun Golds, the larger round ones are Premios, and the knobbly yellow ones are a new variety we're trying called Goldie.) Not shown are all the cherry tomatoes sprinkled on salads and falafel wraps, the bigger ones served sliced on top of veggie burgers, and the couple of pounds of mixed Premio and San Marzano paste tomatoes that went into a batch of the Roasted Tomato Fettuccine from The Clueless Vegetarian. (Brian used only a half-pound of pasta for this, rather than the full pound the recipe calls for, making it extra tomatoey.) We're eating tomatoes at almost every meal, and we still can't keep up.

Fortunately, our other veggies are producing at a more measured rate. So far we've harvested just 14 cucumbers, evenly split between our Boston Pickling and South Wind varieties. A few of these got sliced up for salads and falafel, but most of them have been turned into pickles. Luckily, we were able to use home-grown dill for these as well, as not all of it has flowered yet. We've got one half-full quart jar in the fridge right now and one just-started one, which should be ready just in time for a visit from my pickle-loving sister and her family next week. Our pepper plants, likewise, have produced only two fruits so far. And our zucchini plants, which according to tradition ought to be burying us in produce right around now, have so far yielded only three modest-sized squash—though we're hoping that just means they got off to a slow start.

This certainly seems to be the case for our raspberry canes. Normally, they'd be all done with their first crop by now, and possibly even starting to gear up for the second. This year, it looks like the early crop is barely half over. The canes in the front half of the bed seem to be picked clean, but the ones in the back still have loads of berries on them that aren't even ripe yet. As a result, we were actually able to top this year's anniversary cake with fresh home-grown raspberries for the first time. If the delayed harvest continues, this first crop may last us throughout the month of August, and the second could conceivably keep going until the frost hits.

Alas, we can harbor no such hopes about our plum trees. After getting only a modest harvest from them last year, this year it looks like we'll get nothing at all. There's not a single fruit to be seen on the branches, and even the foliage is looking a bit feeble. I'm starting to fear that the black knot, which we've been fighting so diligently for three years with fungicide and heavy pruning, is taking over, and even if the trees survive, they'll no longer be fruit producers. I hate the idea of replacing these cherished trees after 13 years and starting all over, but the thought of having them just sitting sitting in our yard for decades looking gnarled and barren seems even worse.

In short, our garden is currently serving up a mixture of wins and losses, which I guess is pretty much par for the course. It can be frustrating at times, but at least it's never dull.

You can't make a (good) sponge cake without breaking eggs

Once again, I must apologize for being late with this update. Even after shifting my regular weekly blog update from Sunday to Monday, it seems, I still can't consistently meet the deadline. My excuse this time is that Monday was the CCL National Conference, which I watched on live stream. After spending the whole day, from 8:30 am to 5:30 pm, listening to speakers on Zoom, I just didn't have the energy to put in another hour in front of the screen updating the blog. (Why are Zoom meetings so exhausting, anyway? I walked for hours on both Saturday and Sunday, and being on my feet all that time wasn't nearly so tiring.) 

Speaking of Saturday, Brian and I spent it celebrating our anniversary in our usual unconventional fashion. We strolled around for several hours in Montclair (a shorter and more affordable jaunt than New York), then headed home for dinner and Brian's homemade anniversary cake. This was his seventh time making it, and he was comfortable enough with the recipe to try something a little different: making the mousse with vegan cream. (The Trader Joe's brand that worked so well for us is no longer available, but we've had reasonably good success with Country Crock.) And since he was already doing that, he decided to take a whack at finding an egg-free version of the sponge cake, as well, and making the whole cake vegan. 

Well, as it turns out, this is a pretty tall order. The cake recipe he uses is a traditional Genoise sponge, and eggs are a pretty essential component of that. They're the sole leavening agent, the main source of moisture, and the main ingredient by volume. However, an Internet search on "vegan Genoise sponge" turned up many different recipes that purported to get around these problems, so he decided to pick a fairly simple one and give it a try.

For this first attempt, he chose the "easy and fluffy" vegan sponge from Bianca Zapatka, which claimed to be "fool-proof." This recipe didn't contain any aquafaba or other egg substitutes; instead it relied on the old vinegar-and-baking soda combo for leavening. Unfortunately, this trick, which works so well in the classic wacky cake, was not nearly so successful here. Even the photo on the webpage shows the allegedly fluffy cake as quite flat, and Brian's was not any loftier. It might have been all right if he'd wanted to serve it straight out of the pan, but torting it—slicing it into two even layers—proved impossible. When he tried, he ended up with ragged slivers.

Concluding that the wacky-cake method wouldn't work for this purpose, Brian asked me to search out a vegan sponge recipe that used aquafaba. I found him two: one from Coconut Craze, which had only four ingredients, and a much more elaborate one from World of Vegan, which added corn starch and a "vegan buttermilk" made from plant milk and vinegar. Brian tried the simpler one first, and it produced a cake he described as "tantalizingly close" to the Genoise sponge. Unlike the first cake, it was genuinely light and fluffy—so fluffy that it lacked structural integrity. When Brian attempted to torte the cake, it simply disintegrated. (Also, when we tasted the fragments, we found they were ludicrously sweet. In taste and texture, it was more like a giant marshmallow than a cake.)

Time was running short at this point, but Brian decided to make one more attempt with the other recipe. This one came out almost exactly opposite to the previous cake in every respect. Far from being too light, it was dense and doughy, and despite having just as much sugar, it barely tasted sweet at all. In both flavor and texture, it was more like a cornbread than a cake. It was much easier to torte than either of the previous sponge attempts, but it was clearly unsuitable for use in our anniversary cake.

After these three failures, Brian was tempted to try simply subbing aquafaba for the eggs in our regular Genoise sponge recipe (from The Joy of Cooking) and see if that worked. But by this time it was already Friday night, and our anniversary was Saturday. So, reluctantly, he decided to go with the egg-based sponge that we knew would work. Thus, our anniversary cake ended up being dairy-free but not vegan. And, much as I hate to admit it, even the vegan cream didn't work quite as well in the cake as real cream. It appears to be a bit more temperature-sensitive, so while the mousse made with it was stiffer than a cream-based mousse when freshly made, it lost its structure more quickly when left out at room temperature. Hence, the layers in the cake weren't as well defined, and they had a tendency to slide apart while being eaten. The cake was still delicious, but it wasn't as stable. 

We also have a new problem: what to do with the remains of the three unsuccessful vegan sponge cakes. They're currently chilling out in the freezer, waiting for us to finish up the remainder of the anniversary torte. Once that's gone, Brian will start tinkering with them to figure out what they might be good for. The first two, which had good flavor despite their poor sliceability, might work well in some sort of trifle. And Brian thinks the not-very-sweet third one could take the place of the biscuit layer in a strawberry shortcake. 

Despite these three consecutive failures, Brian hasn't given up entirely on the idea of making next year's anniversary cake fully vegan. He still wants to try the standard Genoise sponge recipe with aquafaba and see how it turns out. But that's an experiment that should probably wait until all the other cakes in our fridge and freezer have been dealt with.

Recipe of the Month: Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta

Recently, I signed up for the New York Times newsletter "The Veggie," which deposits an assortment of vegetarian (though not necessarily vegan) recipes in my inbox each week. I've downloaded several of these that looked like good potential Recipes of the Month, but for most of them, the timing wasn't quite right. It's already too late for the "Vegan Spring Vegetable Frittata" (made with tofu instead of eggs) and "Soba Salad with Grilled Mushrooms and Tofu," which calls for snap peas. At the same time, it's too early for "Basil Tofu." A disappointing start to zucchini season put the kibosh on "Smashed Zucchini with Chickpeas and Peanuts," and the deer damage to our bean plants ruled out "Spicy Noodle Stir-Fry with Salt and Pepper Tofu," which requires 10 ounces of fresh green beans. You may yet see those enticing titles later in the summer, but for now, we're going with something less time-sensitive: "Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta." 

Unfortunately, I can't link to this recipe, as I recently ditched my All-Access New York Times subscription in favor of a cheaper news-only subscription that came as a freebie with my PBS donation. But the gist of it is pretty simple: shred a whole head of cabbage, then saute it in olive oil until it's browning a bit. Add sliced garlic, fresh thyme, and a touch of crushed red pepper (Brian cut the amount from the recommended half-teaspoon to a quarter-teaspoon for just a hint of spice). Whip up a white sauce out of oatmilk or cashew milk, nutritional yeast, olive oil and salt, and toss that with cooked pasta, crushed walnuts, and the sauteed veggies. Season with lemon juice and black pepper, garnish with shredded basil, and serve.

Most of the ingredients in this recipe are things we tend to keep on hand. The only exception was the oatmilk or cashew milk, which the recipe specified should be "full-fat" to make a creamy sauce. Brian was all for substituting a mixture of soymilk and a bit of our favorite plant-based cream, but I argued that for our first time making the dish, we should stick to the recipe as closely as possible. So we grabbed a container of Lidl's organic oat milk, which wasn't too extravagant at $3.99. (As it turns out, "full fat" in the case of oatmilk means it's had fat added in the form of rapeseed oil, a.k.a. canola. But it was certainly rich enough to get the job done.)

This dish looked pretty nice with its garnish of fresh basil, and it tasted pretty good too. There was nothing all that exciting about it, but it was a nice, simple, satisfying meal. Its biggest weakness was that it was a bit short on protein. I remedied this by adding a scrambled egg on the side, but that sort of undermined the spirit of making my Recipe of the Month a vegan dish. If we make it again, we might try topping it with some white beans or tofu, and we'll certainly try our usual soymilk in the sauce. Overall, this Recipe of the Month isn't mind-blowing, but it looks like a useful addition to our repertoire.

I was thinking I might be able to give you a bonus recipe here as well. Having purchased the oatmilk and found that it was as creamy as advertised, I wondered if we should take a crack at trying to use it in a plant-based whipped cream. I did a quick search and found a promising-looking recipe at Green Heart Love, which involved supplementing the already rich oat milk with a nearly equal volume of melted coconut oil and stabilizing it with some cream of tartar. Unfortunately, although Brian followed the recipe's very specific instructions to the letter, this worked no better than any of our previous attempts at making vegan whipped cream from scratch. The chilled mixture almost as soon as he started beating it, forming clumps of fat that steadfastly resisted any attempt to blend them back into the liquid. 

Since we still have plenty of oatmilk left, I might have one more go at trying to whip it using a simpler method, like this one from Chef's Resource. But if that doesn't work, I'm going to throw in the towel and use the rest of the oatmilk for pudding—topped with coconut whipped cream from a can.

Defining frugality

NOTE: This post was originally published in May 2010. I accidentally hit "unpublish" and couldn't figure out how to undo that, so it's now republished as if it were new.

 

I just read what struck me as a fairly pithy definition of frugality. It was in a New York Times article about, of all things, a pharmaceutical company based in Israel. One thing that sets this company, Teva, apart from the giants of the American pharmaceutical industry is the way it uses resources (for example, no corporate jets). The article quotes one of the company's officers as saying, “Frugality doesn’t mean doing less. It means doing as much or more with less.”

The thing I like so much about this line is that it counters one of the most common misconceptions about frugality: that it's the same as deprivation, as going without. That kind of thinking leads people to assume that the only reason to be frugal is that you have no choice—in other words, that frugality is for “poor people.” The point that I've tried often to make, and that the Teva executive made particularly well, is that frugality doesn't mean going without; it means getting the most you can out of what you have. It's about abundance, not scarcity, and it can benefit people on every rung of the income ladder.

The formula that Amy Dacyczyn (all hail the Frugal Zealot!) used to express this idea in her Tightwad Gazette books was, “Frugality without creativity equals deprivation.” If you try to save money without thinking creatively, you'll end up going without. But if you put some thought into using your money effectively, you can spend less without feeling deprived. In fact, your frugal choices may end up enriching your life (as I discussed in my Associated Content piece, “Saving Money Isn't About 'Sacrifice'”). I'm pleased to see that there are at least a few folks in the corporate world who take the same view.

More small solutions

Welcome to the next installment in my quick fixes series, all about the small ways we solve problems in our lives without buying new stuff. This time, I've got not three but five small solutions to talk about (though technically, one of them is still in progress). 

Quick fix #1: Earring storage

This year, Brian's birthday project for me was something I'd been needing for a while: a better way to store all my earrings. I'd been simply hanging them on the edge of a box on my dresser, which had some hair clips and other miscellaneous items stashed inside. This arrangement kept most of my earrings visible and easy to access, but it had some major downsides. For one, it could only hold earrings with shepherd's hook backs, so the few pairs I had with straight posts had to live in boxes. And more seriously, whenever I went to fish something out of the box, I'd dislodge some of the earrings and spend the next five minutes hunting for them.

Brian gave this gift to me in stages. On my birthday itself, he presented me with a sketch of his plan for a freestanding rack that could take the place of the box on my dresser. But when he found out I was actually using the box, he came up with a new design: a wall-mounted rack with several tiers. For the second stage, he built a prototype of this design out of cardboard, hung it up, and let me test it out for a few weeks to make sure it worked for me. Then, during the recent heat wave, he disappeared into the workshop (the coolest room in the house) and emerged with the final version, built out of scrap wood. The three tiers hold all my hook-back earrings, and the small tray at the bottom holds the post-back ones. And there's even a bit of room to spare in case I acquire more.

Quick fix #2: Reinforced sunglasses

About a year ago, my fit-over sunglasses cracked just above the right lens. I made two attempts to repair them with Superglue, but it didn't hold. We then tried reinforcing them with a thin strip of plastic glued across the top to bridge the gap. That repair held for several months, but last month it failed as well. So we decided to get out the big guns: plastic welding. We followed the basic procedure in this video, except we didn't remove the lens because we were afraid we wouldn't be able to get it back in. We just added a dab of glue over the break, dropped on a short length of metal snipped from a paper clip, and melted it into the plastic with the soldering gun. We also didn't go through the lengthy process of concealing the melted patch with multiple layers of glue and powdered graphite; instead, I just added a lick of black nail polish and called it good enough.

With this bit of metal shoring up the weak area, I felt pretty confident that the shades wouldn't break again—at least not in the same spot. So imagine my surprise when, last night, I pulled the sunglasses out of my pocket to find that, once again, they'd cracked right across the top over the lens. My puzzlement was short-lived, however, as I quickly realize that this time it was the left side that had broken in exactly the same way. So Brian has now repeated the entire procedure on the left side of the glasses. They don't look terribly pretty, but they should hold up, at least in this particular area.

Quick fix #3: Car windshield shade

When we bought our Honda Fit 15 years ago, one quirk we discovered was that its windscreen was too large for a standard-size windshield shade. We tried mocking up a shade out of cardboard, but it was unwieldy, so we sent away for a two-piece folding shade specially sized to fit our vehicle. That shade served us well until this spring, when we discovered that the fabric on one corner of one of the pieces had worn clean through, exposing the metal rim. I tried patching it up with duct tape, but after a couple of months in the hot sun, the adhesive melted and the tape started sloughing off.

Looking for a more permanent fix, I went hunting through my scrap bin for something to patch it with. The best candidate I could find was an old cloth face mask left over from the pandemic, which was reasonably sturdy but also flexible. I snipped off the ear loops, wrapped the mask around the corner of the shade, and applied a little hot glue to hold it in place. Then, to make sure it stayed put, I stitched all the way around it: up one side, across the top, down the other side, and across the bottom. 

I realized as I worked that I probably should have skipped the gluing step, as it was a lot of work to force the needle through four layers of fabric plus an extra layer of glue, but I got it to work in the end. The patched shade looks a little quirky, but it's secure now, and it can easily be unfolded to deploy it and folded to stash it away when not in use.

Quick fix #4: Thrift-shop wallet

This is yet another example of duct tape not proving to be a permanent solution. Last winter, after the zipper broke on my wallet, I attempted to cover the torn edges on my spare wallet with electrical tape. Unfortunately, it didn't stick very well, so I switched to black duct tape instead. That held up a little better, but eventually it also started to peel off, leaving the frayed edges not just exposed, but also covered in sticky residue. 

So I decided to give up on this flimsy plastic wallet and invest in a secondhand leather one from eBay. Unfortunately, my new-to-me "The Sak" wallet turned out to be far less sturdy than I thought. Only the outside was made from real leather; all the interior bits were fabric covered with a plastic coating, which began wearing off almost immediately. Within a matter of days, it was in even worse shape than its predecessor.

Luckily, I now have a replacement for it. Yesterday, after my monthly CCL meeting, we stopped by Goodwill, where the accessories bin yielded up this beauty:  a nifty little black quilted number big enough to hold my phone, notebook, bills, coins, and large assortment of cards. With tax, it was only $4.25 (clothes aren't taxed in New Jersey, but apparently accessories are). I was so pleased with my find that I elected to round it up and donate the change, since even at $5 it's a bargain.

Quick fix #5: Pants patching

Last month, I discovered that my pride pants—the blue jeans I'd mended with a little rainbow of embroidery floss—had a threadbare spot on the thigh. Not wanting to detract from my previous visible mending job, I tried to cover this hole as invisibly as possible with a patch on the inside secured by stitches running across both horizontally and vertically. 

Unfortunately, within just a few weeks after this patching job, the jeans developed a new, much larger threadbare area on the same thigh. I'm attempting to patch this one using the same method, but since it's a much bigger area, it's taking quite a bit longer. Because I'm hopeless with a sewing machine and I can't handle more than about half an hour of hand-sewing at a stretch, it's taken me several sessions just to get the horizontal stitches down, and I've still got all the vertical ones to add. 

Even as I'm going to all this trouble, I have to recognize that I probably won't be enough to extend the life of these pants by many months. If one thigh has already worn out, the other one probably won't be far behind, and that one will take another major effort to patch. If it were any other pair of pants, I might just give up and send them to textile recycling, but I'm so attached to my little rainbow repair that I'm willing to put in the effort to keep them alive just a little bit longer.

Stepping up our deer game

Two weeks ago, Brian discovered that a deer had yet again invaded our garden. Somehow, it managed to get into the backyard and through our string deer fence without snapping a single line, whereupon it proceeded to wreak havoc among our beans, peas, and even tomatoes. This brought our snap pea harvest to a premature end, and we knew we'd have to, in his words, "step up our deer game" if we wanted to save any of the beans.

Since time was of the essence, we decided to do this with the quickest and easiest method available: adding a layer of deer netting over our existing string fence. Brian initially hoped we could do this job, or at least part of it, with the extra netting we had stored in the shed. But when we went out into the yard and attempted to wrestle this stuff into place over the posts, it stretched less than halfway around the garden enclosure and gave out in a gap between two posts. Clearly, we wouldn't be able to tackle this project without buying some more materials.

First, we went to Ocean State Job Lot and paid $8 for six more of the 7-foot poles we'd used to construct our current deer fence. These don't quite reach the 8-foot height that most experts say is necessary to block out a determined deer, but even if we could have found longer poles, we wouldn't have been able to haul them home in our little Honda Fit. We'd have had to rent a truck, adding an extra layer of planning to a project we needed to get done now. And as Brian pointed out, deer don't get into our yard all that often, so this fence doesn't have to be truly deer-proof. Like his bike lock, it just has to be good enough to deter casual thieves.

Our next stop was Home Depot, where we shelled out another $26.65 for a 100-foot roll of 5-foot-wide deer netting. This was actually a bit bigger than we would have preferred, since the gap between the ends of the posts and the top of our groundhog fence is only around 3 feet. We had a bit of discussion over whether to let the extra netting hang inside the garden enclosure or outside, so it would drape over the protruding "baffle" of the groundhog fence. I was in favor of leaving it inside, which would probably be easier and look neater. But Brian pointed out that the posts holding up the deer fence aren't precisely aligned with the shape of the garden enclosure. When we put them up, we'd set the ones on the far side about eight inches in from the corner of the groundhog fence so that the lines wouldn't obstruct our clothesline. So if we draped the netting inside those lines now, it would leave a gap on that side that he feared an enterprising deer might exploit. I wasn't quite sure how a full-grown deer could squeeze into such a small space, but I figured it couldn't hurt to do it his way.

To get the netting into place, we worked in tandem. I stood outside the garden enclosure holding the big roll of netting, and Brian stood inside hauling the netting up and over the posts and fishing line. We worked our way slowly around the fence line with me spooling out the netting and him fastening it to the posts and the line with a series of little twist ties. The hardest part of this job was keeping track of the edge of the netting, which kept tangling up and clinging to itself like Velcro. But eventually, inch by inch, we struggled and sweated and swore our way all the way around the outside, from the front corner back to the far edge of the gate. Then Brian took two of the new posts we'd just bought and affixed them to the gate itself, weaving them through the wire lattice to hold them in place. Draping the netting over these two new posts extended its protection all the way around the enclosure while still allowing us to open and close the gate.

That took care of the garden enclosure itself, but Brian wanted to add an extra layer of protection. He figured the deer were most likely getting into the back yard by jumping over the gate in the side yard, since it's the only spot that offers a straight shot to the yard from the street. So, to reinforce this area, he took the other four stakes, draped them with netting, and wove them into the chain-link fence, just as he'd done with the garden gate. With about 6 feet of the posts sticking up above the existing 4-foot fence, this new structure stands well above 8 feet, so we can hope it will be enough to prevent deer from hopping into our yard by this route. And if they somehow manage to get in from the back or from one of our neighbors' yards, we'll have the string-and-net fence around the garden enclosure as a fail-safe.

This netting contraption isn't an elegant solution, nor a permanent one. The plastic netting will eventually break down with exposure to the sun, if the deer and other wildlife don't chew through it first. At some point, we'll probably replace it with a post-and-wire fence: 8-foot metal posts all around the garden enclosure, wrapped in multiple rows of wire. This design is like our original fishing-line fence, but taller and more durable. But we're hoping our quick-and-dirty mesh barrier will at least keep the deer out long enough for us to harvest what's left of this season's crops.