Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Late Harvest

Production in our garden hasn't entirely wrapped up, but it's definitely slowing down. We picked several of our plants clean about a week ago after getting a phone alert about impending frost. Naturally, this arrived just as we were settling down for the evening in front of the telly, so we hastily threw on our jackets, grabbed a flashlight, and ran out to harvest everything that we thought was at risk. Our top priority was the tender-skinned peppers, so we grabbed all the ones we could see, red and green alike. This brought our total pepper harvest for the year to a very respectable 85: 59 Carmens, 14 Aconcaguas, and 12 small but tasty Apples.

We had already picked all the tomatoes that had shown any hint of blushing, but there were still lots of green ones left on the vines—far too many to gather in a hasty session by torchlight. Covering the plants was also impractical, as the trellises are far too tall. So we settled for picking the largest few green fruits on the vines, covering our one stand-alone plant (a Vivacious tomato given to us by our friend Louise, which we planted out in the old asparagus bed), and hoping the smaller fruits would survive the frost. Fortunately, this plan seems to have worked, as nearly all the tomatoes left on the vines made it through unscathed. We might even have been able to get away with leaving the few big ones that we picked, but we thought it was better to take our chances with box-ripening than with frost. And even if the green ones don't ripen up, our tomato harvest to date is certainly nothing to complain about: over 1,000 of the little Sun Golds, and more than 450 of the larger varieties. (I observed to my dad, who is a fan of both gardening and classical music, that the tomato section of my garden log was starting to look like Leporello's notebook.) It's by far the biggest haul of tomatoes we've ever had, and quite an impressive showing for only nine plants.

Then, a little later in the week, Brian decided to go ahead and pick all our butternut squash. He'd observed that the plants had already died back, and while the squash wouldn't come to any harm hanging out there on the withered vines, they'd be more accessible if we brought them indoors. We'd already picked and used two of them, so the ones you see here bring our total to nine fruits totaling about 20 pounds. That's a pretty average harvest for us—better than last year's six squash, but nowhere near as good as the 42 pounds we got in 2024. Next year we may try adding a second variety to the mix and seeing if that boosts our total yield.

There are a few crops left in the garden that are still producing. Brian's continuing to gather in the green tomatoes as they blush, and we're still getting beans off our Climbing French vines. (They've also been having an exceptionally good year, producing about 8.5 pounds so far—about four times as much as they've ever given us before, and more than three times as much as our normally prolific Provider beans. I would say we got a particularly good batch of seeds, but they were just saved from last year's crop, so I guess the credit belongs to the hot summer weather.) And, amazingly for early November, we're still getting a trickle of raspberries from our canes, which have already yielded over 42 cups—not their absolute best harvest ever, but far better than average.

Still, with the clocks now turned back for winter and the air growing steadily nippier, it's clear the end is in sight. By the end of the month, most likely, the remaining produce will be all gathered in. After that, we'll have to subsist on supermarket veggies until spring, eked out by the few containers of home-grown bounty in our freezer (a few pints of tomato puree and a smaller one of basil). We could try growing another tray of microgreens just to spice things up, but most of our gardening efforts will be focused on planning ahead for next year.

Recipe of the Month: Sweet-and-Spicy Roasted Tofu and Squash

I was expecting to choose October's Recipe of the Month from the new vegan cookbook we acquired at the annual town-wide yard sale. But then, while browsing the New York Times Cooking section, I came upon an intriguing-looking recipe called "Sweet-and-Spicy Roasted Tofu and Squash." (Sorry, my stripped-down NYT subscription doesn't allow me to share the recipe as a gift link.) I showed it to Brian, and he agreed to give it a try.

For once, we didn't make any significant changes to the recipe as written. Brian's inclination was to substitute the firm tofu we had on hand for the extra-firm the recipe called for and to leave out the sriracha, since I normally don't like my food too hot. But I argued that these changes would fundamentally alter the character of the dish, and we should at least try it as written before making any major changes to it. Unfortunately, this decision made the ingredient list considerably more expensive. Instead of using a butternut squash, which we could have just gone out to the garden and picked off the vine, we had to pay $2.89 for an acorn squash. We also dropped $2.99 at Trader Joe's on a package of "super firm" tofu and $3.99 on a bottle of sriracha (although this particular purchase was probably long overdue, as we've already left sriracha out of quite a few recipes because we didn't have any). And the one change we did make to the recipe—replacing honey, which we already had, with agave nectar, which we didn't, to make the dish vegan—set us back an additional $4.75. So, not even counting the ingredients we already had in our pantry, acquiring everything we needed to prepare this dish cost us $14.62, or about three days' worth of our normal grocery budget.

Nor did our troubles end once we got the groceries home. I went into the kitchen while Brian was preparing the dish to find him struggling to get a paring knife through the tough rind of the acorn squash. The recipe didn't actually say the squash had to be peeled—it just said "cut squash into 1/2-inch thick half-moons"—but he assumed it wouldn't be edible otherwise. But when we checked the picture on the web, we saw that the squash clearly had its rind still on, and the caption at the top mentioned "a slight chew from the squash peel" as one of the dish's interesting features. Fortunately, the rest of the instructions were pretty clear, though Brian was initially a bit puzzled as to why the tofu and the squash had to be cut into such large chunks. But it became clear when he got to the step that said "Flip and roast until uniformly golden," since you can't reasonably flip a whole bunch of little pieces.

The finished dish was rather pretty to look at: big, golden-brown slices of tofu and squash, sprinkled with pale sesame seeds and green celery leaves, nestling on a bed of brown rice. (Brian also added some green beans on the side to boost the meal's veggie content.) And the taste was quite interesting too, although we both agreed that calling it "sweet-and-spicy" was a bit of an exaggeration. The squash had a natural sweetness to it, but the single tablespoon of agave didn't lend any noticeable sweetness to the sauce, and the heat from the mere half-teaspoon of sriracha was barely detectable, even to me. But it was still quite flavorful, with sweet, earthy, and salty notes all overlaid with the faintly nutty crunch of the sesame seeds. 

As for the texture, we found that Trader Joe's isn't kidding when they call their tofu "super firm." It was quite dense and chewy, and it didn't absorb the sauce terribly well. Also, what the recipe called "a slight chew from the squash peel" was a bit of an understatement. While the roasted peels were mostly edible, there were still tough bits that were entirely impossible to chew and had to be discarded. This was more annoying to Brian than it was to me, as he particularly dislikes having to fish inedible pieces out of his food or, worse, out of his mouth. He doesn't mind eating roast chicken off the bone, but if he's served a bowl of chicken cacciatore, he wants to be able to eat it with his fork and not have to remove anything with his fingers.

On the whole, we both rather liked the dish, and we'll probably make it again (especially now that we've already invested in the agave and the sriracha, so it won't cost nearly as much next time). However, Brian plans to tinker with the recipe a bit. For starters, he'll probably replace the acorn squash with delicata squash, which has a tender rind that should be easier to chew. He'll also use our usual firm tofu, or possibly one of the brands available at H-Mart that comes in an extra-firm variety, rather than the super-firm TJ's stuff. And he plans to try boosting both the agave and the sriracha content to bring it closer to the sweet-and-spicy flavor the recipe promised, but didn't quite deliver.

But even if we never make the dish again, we did learn two useful things from trying it. First, agave appears to be a reasonable substitute for honey, although you may need to use a bit more of it to achieve the same level of sweetness. And second, sriracha sauce is apparently mild enough for me to handle, and we both quite like it. I wouldn't go so far as to snack on pieces of matza topped with peanut butter and sriracha, as Brian has been doing ever since we opened the bottle, but I'll happily use it in any recipe that calls for hot sauce and possibly even some that don't.

Yard-sale haul 2026

This year's town-wide yard-sale weekend—normally one of my favorite occasions of the year—didn't get off to a great start. When we set out on Saturday morning, it was cold and grey out, and I was shivering even under four layers of clothing. The weather seemed to have deterred a lot of sellers, too. Many of the sale sites marked on the official map weren't actually there, and many others were just tables or piles at the curb labeled "free," where the hosts had evidently decided the few bucks they might earn from their stuff weren't worth spending the morning out in the chill.

So, after finding only a couple of small items, Brian and I decided to abandon the map and focus on the few parts of town that were sure things. We started at the library, which always hosts its fundraising book sale on yard-sale weekend. Despite the tempting prices, we kept our purchases moderate, knowing that we'd have to carry them with us for the rest of the morning. We came away with just seven books totaling $10—mostly fiction, plus a cookbook titled The Voluptuous Vegan that will probably be the source for October's Recipe of the Month.

That $10 worth of books, as it turned out, accounted for most of the day's spending. Although we visited several other hotbeds of sale activity—Felton Avenue, the parking lot behind the Reformed Church, and after lunch, a long swath of Lincoln Avenue on the north side—most of the items we actually picked up were from free piles. By the end of the day, we'd acquired a total of eight books, three board games, a small skillet, an assortment of cooking ingredients, a bicycle taillight, a set of flavored lip balms, and a small bagful of scallion bulbs for planting, and we'd only spent $15.50.

After Saturday's experience, I took extra care to bundle up before setting out on Sunday, but it proved unnecessary. Although the air wasn't much warmer, the sun was out, so I ended up shedding my coat and stuffing it into one of our bags within the first half hour. And the sun seemed to be shining on our excursion, too, as we found a lot more useful items for sale this time around. Over the course of the morning, we scored a couple of Pyrex storage containers, assorted office supplies, a string of battery-powered holiday lights, a couple of potential holiday gifts, and a Philips screwdriver to replace our old one that's stripped out. (This last one was something Brian had been explicitly looking for, and the sale where he happened to find it was at the home of a former coworker, so we had a nice chat with him as well.) Our most fortuitous find was a couple of sealed packages of our favorite hand soap from Trader Joe's, which, as we discovered on our last trip, has just been discontinued because the supplier has gone out of business. With luck, these four extra bars will be enough to get us through until the store finds a new supplier to work with. After returning home with three full bags and $13.50 less in my wallet, we decided we'd done well enough that we didn't need to go back out in the afternoon.

However, that wasn't quite the end of our sale adventures. Today, we returned to the library, which was disposing of the leftovers from the book sale at just $5 per bag—no matter how big or how full that bag happened to be. Since the prices were so good, and since we didn't have anyplace to go afterward but back home, we were much less selective this time around, stuffing our bag with a total of 14 books (mostly mysteries and science fiction). So, all told, we spent $34 over the course of the weekend—exactly twice as much as last year—and acquired a pretty good mix of entertaining and practical items. And we've made a nice start on this year's holiday shopping, too.

The best platform for selling art online

Every so often, people ask Brian what he's been up to since he retired back in February. He usually answers, truthfully, that he hasn't tackled any big new projects; instead, he's just doing more of the things he used to do outside of work. For example, he's spending more time in the garden, on his bike, and on the couch reading books. But he has also embarked, with my help, on one little project we haven't revealed until now: a shop to sell his artwork.

Folks who were around back when this blog first got started may recall that it was originally an offshoot of Brian's blog, Modern Troll, which he used mainly to share his drawings. After I started mine, he let his fall by the wayside and hasn't updated it since 2010. But I always had this vague idea that it would be cool at some point to make some of his art available to fans in a physical form, like posters or T-shirts. So, once he was officially retired and had some time to spare, I suggested setting up an online store for this purpose.

The first thing we did was go through his collection of artwork and select various pieces we thought might be appropriate for different uses. For instance, we thought this piece, which I've dubbed "Objects in Mirror are Closer Than They Appear," would work well on a T-shirt, as would his "Killer Tofu" sketch (which I envisioned with a snarky caption like, "Don't mess with Soy Boy"). Some of his bigger pieces, like "Mind" and this cartoon inspired by a trip to the Grounds for Sculpture, seemed suitable for posters. And a few of his little sketches, like this little guy, looked like they'd be nice for note cards.

Once we'd figured out what kinds of merch we wanted to sell, I started looking at websites that offered these types of products on a print-on-demand basis. That way, instead of having to order a whole batch of, say, 100 shirts and then try to find buyers for them (and a place to store them in the meantime), we could just list our choices online and wait until someone placed an order to print one up and ship it out. The two most familiar sites of this type are Redbubble and Zazzle, which have the advantage of a wide reach, making it easy for people to find the products they sell. The downside was that these sites charge both high prices for shoppers and high fees for sellers. For instance, the base price for a T-shirt on RedBubble—not counting the artist's cut—is $20.39. You can set your own markup on top of that, but with a basic account, RedBubble also keeps half of all your earnings as an account fee. So if Brian were to charge, say $24 for a T-shirt—which is more than he'd personally consider a reasonable price—he'd only get to keep $1.80 in profit for each shirt sold. Zazzle is a little more generous, keeping only 30 percent of the profits, and the base price for the cheapest "value" T-shirt is only $16.24. That means we could price them at a slightly more reasonable $20 and earn $2.63 per shirt—better, but still not great.

We also considered alternatives like Printify and Printful. These stores charge only a base price for the materials (for example, a unisex T-shirt from Printful costs $9.44) and you can decide how much profit you want to tack on top of that. The catch is that these sites provide only the printing; you have to set up your own online store to sell your products through another site. If we used a platform like Shopify for this, we'd have to pay a monthly fee of at least $29, which we'd almost certainly never sell enough product to cover. If we went with Etsy, we'd pay a one-time fee (of an unspecified amount) to set up the store, plus a multitude of other fees for product listings, sales, and payment processing. For a little store like Brian's, all these fees would probably more than eat up all our profits—and while we weren't expecting to make much money from selling Brian's designs, we weren't willing to set ourselves up to lose money.

Eventually, we settled on a platform that seemed like a happy medium: Fourthwall. It allows you to set up your online store right on the site, with no up-front fee and no listing fees for its basic plan. There's no fee for sales, either; all you pay to the site is a reasonable flat fee for its materials ($11.75 for a unisex tee, for instance, or $5.50 for a matte poster). You can set your own final price, so how much you earn on each sale is up to you. The site handles sales and customer support for you. It even has an AI assistant to help you create your designs (though, once I figured out what I was doing, I found it easier to go in and build the products myself).

So, without further ado, it is my pleasure to present Modern Troll Designs. So far, we've only created listings for a small handful of products (two T-shirts, a poster, and a notecard), but I thought we'd go ahead and unveil the store now so we could get feedback on these few products, and on the layout of the store itself, before adding more. Check it out and let me know what you think. And if you're a fan of Brian's art who would like to put in a request for a specific product featuring one of his pieces, like a sticker or a mug or something, let me know—we can probably make it happen.

How to feed a family for WAY less than $28 a day

Last summer, the New York Times Cooking section published an article called, "How to Feed a Family for $28 a Day." (Warning: the article may be paywalled. I tried to share it as a gift link, but apparently my subscription doesn't allow that for Cooking articles.) In it, recipe developer Kevin Pang chronicles how he challenged himself to feed his family of three (himself, his wife, and their "picky 10-year-old") for a whole week on a budget of just $200. He says that may sound like "a nice, big number," but it's actually less than $10 per person per day, which he claims is roughly equal to the $196.25-plus-tax limit set by the USDA's Thrifty Food Plan. (Actually, according to the site, that isn't quite right. For a 10-year-old, picky or otherwise, and a man and a woman between 20 and 50 years old, the Thrifty Food Plan budget is $187.90 per week. But it's possible the number has come down a little since he checked it in August.)

For Pang, this was a major challenge. The budget left "no room for impulse buys" and forced them to cut corners in several places, swapping out strawberry jam for cheaper grape jelly and a $4.35 tub of baba ghanoush for $3.77 hummus. They also had to forgo convenience items like "a microwavable frozen dinner here, a jar of marinara there." But they succeeded in feeding themselves three meals a day, using some new recipes that he links to in the article, such as carnitas, bacon cheeseburger meatballs, and sesame soy chicken. At the end of the piece, he proudly outlines the lessons they learned, such as "Assign a role to everything in your cart" (as opposed to "buying whatever looks good"), "Give leftovers a new life," and "Buy produce that lasts."

That's all sound enough, but it struck me as awfully elementary. Brian feeds our two-person family on a grocery budget of around $3,535 per year, which works out to only $4.84 per person per day—roughly half as much as Pang's. Even if you adjust for the two weeks or so per year we spend visiting, and eating with, friends and relatives, it's barely over $5 per person per day. I thought perhaps his higher budget reflected the high cost of living in NYC, but no; the Pang family lives in "the Chicago suburbs," where living costs generally and grocery prices specifically are nearly identical to what we pay in central NJ.

After reading the article, I thought maybe I should write my own, following the same structure as Pang's, to explain how we feed our family on roughly half as much as his budget. I could list all our grocery purchases and their cost, outline exactly what we ate every day for a week, and wrap it up with some general budget eating tips. But after thinking about it for a minute, I realized I'd already done this (except in even more detail) in my 2014 Reverse SNAP Challenge. Our eating habits have changed a bit since then, as we've shifted away from dairy products and started making more foods from scratch. But our principles remain roughly the same:

• Eat plants. Pang spent $43.60 of his $200 budget—about 22 percent—on meat. Six of the seven dinners the family ate were meat-based. Brian and I, by contrast, eat fish maybe once every week or so, poultry only a few times a year, and red meat basically never. As I outlined in my 2022 Ecofrugal Manifesto and observed again at the supermarket checkout this spring, skipping the meat and getting most of our protein from beans and grains cuts a big slice off our grocery budget.
• Cook from scratch. Convenience foods are an even bigger budget-buster. Pang recognized this, which is why he steered away from frozen meals and jarred pasta sauce. But it didn't occur to him to make his own hummus, which would have taken all of ten minutes and shaved an extra dollar off his budget (according to the Homemade Hummus Cost Calculator, which apparently is a thing that exists). And he certainly didn't go so far as to make bread, granola, or tortillas from scratch, all things that Brian does routinely.
• Shop around. I think Pang put himself at a disadvantage right from the start of his challenge by purchasing his entire week's worth of groceries in one go at "our favorite grocery store, Fresh Farms in Niles, Ill.," which doesn't sound like a particularly budget-friendly place. Our approach is to keep track of prices at different stores and make the rounds of them all over the course of a month, picking up whatever we need at whichever store has the best price.
• Use a discount grocery. Although we shop at multiple stores, the one we rely on most heavily is Lidl, a "limited assortment" grocery that sells primarily its own store brands. Before Lidl opened, we were regular patrons of Aldi, which works along the same lines. And we spring for a Costco membership because, while it doesn't have the best prices on all foodstuffs, just a few truly unbeatable bargains in the grocery aisle are enough to cover the membership cost three times over.

To anyone who reads this blog regularly, none of this comes as news. But it's always nice to get a little confirmation that what has worked for us all these years is still working, and that our bargain-hunting skills can beat the smart kids as handily in 2026 as they did back in 2012.

Recipe of the Month: Chick Pea Pancakes

I discovered this month's recipe while doing my daily walk-and-watch exercises (which I've started doing for at least a short spell after most meals to help keep my blood sugar down). I came upon a video titled "$25. One week. 21 VEGAN meals," which was exactly what you'd expect from the title: vegan YouTuber Merle O'Neal attempting to cook for a whole week on a $25 budget. Naturally, this piqued my interest, since it combines three things I love: plant-based food, saving money, and a good challenge. 

So I watched the video and made mental notes about which dishes looked the most appealing as potential future Recipes of the Month. I ruled out some, like the potato cheese, because they didn't contain enough veggies (no, potatoes are not a veggie, no matter what your school cafeteria says) and others, like the tomato confit, because they were too similar to something we already make (the roasted tomato pasta from The Clueless Vegetarian). Of the remaining dishes, the one I found most intriguing was something O'Neal called a "chick pea flour omelette," which she described as high-fiber, high-protein, and pretty simple to make. And I also knew we happened to have some chick pea flour in the pantry, so we wouldn't even have to take the extra step of grinding up the chick peas.

O'Neal had thoughtfully provided links to all the recipes below the video (except for a couple that she typed out in full), so I clicked the link for the "omelette," which took me to a recipe on The Hidden Veggies. And for a change, Brian followed this recipe exactly, with no tweaks. It calls for a quarter-cup of "vegetables of choice," so he threw in a bit of broccoli and red bell pepper. He also made a second batch in which he doubled the veggie additions to half a cup to give it a bit more body. 

First things first: Neither of these versions looked or tasted even remotely like an omelette. They were more similar to our homemade veggie cakes (originally based on the spinach pancake recipe from Snack Girl, but we now make them with all sorts of veggies). I would say the one made strictly according to the recipe, with just a quarter-cup of vegetables, was much less successful than the one with the extra veggie boost. It was sort of doughy and didn't seem to have cooked all the way through. The double-veggie version was firmer and crisped up much better. As for the flavor, not surprisingly, it tasted mostly of chick peas, which is a perfectly fine flavor, but a trifle bland. I think it could have used a bit more salt and nutritional yeast than the recipe called for, along with maybe some spice (garlic? Pepper? Cumin?) to punch it up a bit. 

All in all, I'd say this isn't a great recipe, but it has potential. Brian says if he were to try it again, he'd want to make it "as an adjunct to something" rather than a stand-alone dish. For instance, maybe the cakes could replace the rice as an accompaniment to a stir-fry, or maybe instead of forming the batter into pancakes, he could make balls to add protein to a pasta dish. It's worth experimenting with a bit more, but it's unlikely to become a staple meal in its current form.

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.