Smart meter mystery

Once again, I must apologize for being late with the blog. Even after shifting my usual weekly update from Sunday to Monday, I couldn't make that date this week because we were away all weekend for a family wedding. (This event was much snazzier than our big fat cheap wedding, but it still included some interesting ecofrugal elements. For instance, my sister-in-law, the mother of the nonbinary "broom," got all the reception drinkware secondhand—some by cleaning out family cupboards, some from thrift shops. All the pieces were different, making it easy to tell which drink was whose, and we got to take them home afterwards—perhaps the only wedding favor I've ever received that was actually useful.) When we got home last night after an all-day drive, I had to spend most of the evening dealing with all the emails that had piled up in our absence. I still haven't finished unpacking.

One of those emails that arrived while we were away was from our electric utility, which has recently taken to sending us weekly updates on our energy use as recorded by our new smart meter. On Thursday, it sent us a message warning, "Your electric usage this month is estimated to cost $77. That is $34 more than last month." This puzzled me, since I couldn't think of anything we'd done in the past month that would have jacked up our electric usage. The email suggested the change was likely due to "Outside temperatures that are 6° hotter and other factors (changes in schedule, more people at home, etc.)," but I didn't see how that could have made such a big difference. We may have been running our fans more in June than we did in May, but we haven't so much as touched our air conditioner. And adding to my confusion, the little graph included in the email showed that our usage over the past month was actually lower at most hours of the day than it had been the month before, except for four hours where it was "similar." So how the heck could it have increased by around 80 percent?

 

To get to the bottom of this mystery, I clicked the link in the email labeled "See Your Usage." It led me to the "My Energy Insights" section of PSE&G's website, which shows various graphs of your recent energy usage and how it compares to other homes in your area. But this covered our usage only through last month's bill, providing no info about what might have changed this month. Finally I found a link on our PSE&G account page for "MyMeter," and that took me to an interactive tool for exploring the data from our smart meter. I could see our usage over a period of anywhere from two weeks to a full year and click various buttons to see how it matched up the weather and with our usage from the same time either last week or last year. 

This was fun to play with, but still not very illuminating. Looking at the past three months, it appeared that our usage from mid-May to mid-June was indeed higher than our usage from mid-April to mid-May, but nowhere close to 80 percent higher, neither in kilowatt-hours nor in dollars. And comparing it to our usage from the previous year, it looked like it was generally a bit lower, even without counting the five days we'd just been away from home. So clearly we hadn't developed any new energy-guzzling habits in the past month. 

Looking at the raw data, rather than graphs, didn't make matters any clearer. When I added up our total usage from April 15 through May 14, it came to around $31; when I added it up from May 15 through June 14, it was about $6.50 more. That's an increase of a little over 20 percent, a far cry from 80 percent. So as best I can tell, PSE&G simply made a mistake and sent us an estimate of our monthly electric bill that in no way reflected our actual usage. I guess we'll just have to wait and see if our bill, when it comes, reflects the made-up numbers or the real ones.

One thing I know for sure is that the tips PSE&G provided in the email on how to reduce our energy use won't help us at all. They suggested that we "use the sun's free heat by opening the window coverings on your sunny windows during the day, and then reduce heat loss by closing curtains and shades at night," which is exactly the opposite of what you want to do on a hot summer day. They also invited us to "save 10% or more on lighting costs by replacing outdoor floodlights with motion-activated lighting," which is pretty useless advice since we only turn on our outdoor lights when we're actually outdoors or when we're expecting someone. For a company that's supposed to know so much about our energy usage, they're not very helpful when it comes to cutting it.

Tracking our household food waste

Every so often, I see a statistic about food waste that makes my jaw absolutely drop. It's shocking enough to hear that the world as a whole wastes about one-third of all the food it produces, to the tune of $388 billion and 2 million tons of CO2 equivalent each year. But that number is so big and abstract, it's hard to visualize how it applies to you personally. If you want a real head-spinner, check out this 2025 EPA report, which says the average family of four in the U.S. throws away around 1,025 pounds of food every year, at a cost of more than $2,900. Nearly three grand, going straight in the trash.

When I saw this number, I found it kind of hard to believe. How is it even possible to throw that much food away? Do most Americans dump all their leftovers straight in the bin instead of saving them for lunch? Are they leaving entire watermelons to rot in the fridge uneaten? 

But then I started second-guessing myself. According to a 2025 Slate article (currently available only to subscribers), 75 percent of Americans think their personal food waste is less than average, and clearly they can't all be right. Was I seriously underestimating our own household's food waste? Were we actually chucking away ten pounds of food every week without realizing it?

There was only one way to be sure. In April 2025, I started keeping track of all the food we wasted in our household, from the bad spots we removed from our strawberries to the teaspoon of coffee grounds I spilled while emptying out the old container. For an entire year, I made an entry every time any food in our house went into the bin, listing the type and amount of food, the reason we had to toss it, and where it ended up. Here is that list in full:

4/24/25: salad dressing, about 2 Tbsp, bottle popped open while being shaken. Wiped up on rag and rinsed down drain.
5/7/25: popcorn kernels, about ½ cup, knocked over container. Compost.
5/14/25: dried Biquinho peppers, about 1 tsp, grew mold. Compost.
5/27/25: coffee creamer, ¼ cup, went sour. Down the drain.
Coffee, 1 cup, ruined by sour creamer. Down the drain.
5/30/25: Strawberries, about 5 oz, bad spots removed immediately after purchase. Compost.
6/1/25: 1 batch vegan whipped cream that didn’t whip (about ½ cup coconut oil, ½ cup soy milk). Compost.
6/7/25: ½ cup coffee w/coconut milk, got too slimy to drink. Down the drain.
6/11/25: Strawberries, 3.6 oz, bad spots removed. Compost.
6/13/25: Strawberries, 2.3 oz., bad spots removed. Compost.
6/15/25: 1 tsp cocoa and 1 tsp sugar, added too much water during prep. Down the drain.
7/29/25: True Lime, 1 packet, congealed. Trash.
8/16/25: 1 cup coffee with creamer, added too much inulin. [N.b.: this is a fiber supplement I've been adding a teaspoon of to my daily coffee to help regulate my digestion.] Down the drain.
10/20/25: 1 tsp coffee grounds, spilled. Most swept up into compost, some down the drain.
11/7/25: 1 tsp sugar, spilled. Into compost.
11/9/25: ½ tsp coconut creamer, spilled. Wiped up, rinsed down drain.
11/15/25: nearly full box of corn starch, infested with bugs. Into compost.
11/23/25: about ½ cup powdered sugar, also infested. Into compost.
About 2 cups mashed potato flakes (ancient), also infested. Into compost.
About 2 cups corn grits, also infested. Into compost.
½ jar mayonnaise, 18 months past “best by” date (bought during low carb period that mercifully ended). Compost. [N.b.: this might still have been safe to use, but we decided not to take the risk.]
1/9/26: ½ cucumber, spontaneously disintegrated. Compost.
⅓ apple, cut off bad spots. Compost.
1/15/26: ⅔ apple, went mushy. Compost.
2/26/26: 12 ancient peppermint tea bags, no flavor left. Compost.
1 package brownie mix, burst open. Bagged and binned.
3/14/26: ½ c coffee creamer, went sour, down drain.
1 c coffee, ruined by sour creamer, down drain.
3/29/26: ½ plum tomato, went slimy. Into compost.
4/6/26: 2 green potatoes, into compost.
4/8/26, 1 spoiled potato, into compost.
4/10/26, 7 dates, went bad in storage. Into compost.
4/14/26: 4 homemade veggie cakes, dropped on floor, into compost.

I didn't actually weigh all the food we discarded, but based on a very rough estimate, it appears to be between 12 and 13 pounds. For the whole year. For both of us. It's still a lot more food waste than I'd like; if I'd been really on the ball, I wouldn't have let that coffee creamer go off (not once but twice) or knocked over the popcorn container or added too much water to my morning cocoa. But it's clearly much, much less than the EPA's estimate of 256 pounds per person per year.

The value of all that discarded food is a bit harder to calculate because some of the items were so old. I can determine how much we'd pay for a box of tea bags or a jar of mayonnaise today, but I have no idea how much we paid for those items when we actually bought them years ago. The best I could do was figure out roughly how much all those items would cost to replace at today's prices. That number, as closely as I can calculate, is around $20.40. Again, that's much more than I'd like, but it's a far cry from $1,456 for the two of us.

Now, it's possible the EPA's numbers are way off. The report is based on a USDA data set that the USDA itself admits may not reflect "actual loss rates." However, I've also seen a 2023 survey of actual Americans showing that the average household wastes 6.2 cups of food per week, while our household wasted roughly 22 cups in an entire year. So it seems more likely that our two-person household is an outlier, producing only (at most) 5 percent as much food waste by weight and 1 percent as much by cost as the average.

So, on the one hand, this experiment shows yet again that our ecofrugal lifestyle isn't normal, at least not by American standards. But on the other hand, it shows that reducing household food waste is a very attainable goal. Brian and I don't do anything particularly odd or extreme to avoid wasting food; we just do the straightforward, common-sense things most sources recommend. We eat up leftovers; we store food properly (produce in the produce drawer, heat-sensitive stuff toward the rear, pantry staples in closed jars); we try not to buy or prepare more food than we can reasonably eat. And if anything looks like it's getting close to the end of its shelf life, we make a point of using it right away. The only thing we do that most Americans couldn't is composting, and that's more like recycling food waste than reducing it.

In short, reducing household waste looks like a pretty simple way to cut carbon emissions. It doesn't require any up-front investment; in fact, it actually saves you money by directing more of your grocery dollars into your stomach instead of the trash bin. All that's needed, apparently, is a bit more education about how costly food waste is and how easy it is to avoid. So...consider yourselves educated.

Honeyberry netting 2.0 (and a new honeyberry treat)

Last week, we discovered that the honeyberries on our bushes were just starting to get a little bit of color. They weren't ripe yet, but we knew our backyard birds wouldn't wait until they were to start helping themselves. If we wanted to save the berries for human consumption, we'd have to get our honeyberry netting tents up pronto.

This year, however, Brian wanted to try to improve on our original teepee design. Rather than covering each bush separately, he wanted to put up three frames—one at each end, plus an extra one for support in the middle—and cover the entire row with one giant piece of netting. This way, we'd be able to duck under the netting and work our way along the row, picking berries off each bush in turn, rather than wriggling into and out of the tents one at a time. He also believed it would be easier to set up one big tent than to put up and take down a bunch of individual frames and cover each one. I was a bit more skeptical, since I feared one big piece of netting would be more unwieldy to work with than several small ones. But since he was the one doing most of the work, I figured it couldn't hurt to try it his way.

Fortunately, we didn't have to buy any new materials for this project. We already had a big roll of bird netting that we'd scavenged off the curb on bulk trash day, and we had the six lengths of PVC pipe that we'd used to make our two original berry tents. To make the third frame for the middle, Brian dug into his stash and pulled out the narrower PVC pipe that we'd used for our very first garden trellis before figuring out we needed something sturdier. For nearly 20 years, he'd been holding on to this just in case we could use it one day, and now that day had come.

Brian then did a little experimenting to figure out the best way to arrange the pipe frames for his new design. He set up the first frame in roughly the same place it would go to cover just the one bush at the near end of the row, but skewed a bit more toward the outside and with the front legs a bit closer together. This made the whole frame taller to create as much vertical space as possible under the netting. He set up the second frame in a mirrored position at the other end of the row. Then he played around with the pieces of narrower pipe to figure out the best arrangement for the central trellis before cutting them to size. As he'd done with the first set of trellises, he drilled holes in the ends of the pipes to thread the string through, making it easier to tie them together.

Then came the tricky part: deploying the netting. We got out the big roll and worked in tandem to unspool it, with me in charge of holding the loose end down while he rolled it out across the yard in front of the bushes. When he'd unrolled enough to cover the entire row, we picked up the loose end and draped it over the trellis at the near end, making sure it reached all the way to the ground on all sides with room to spare. Then I held that piece in place while Brian lifted the unrolled netting over the middle trellis and finally over the end one, all while it remained attached to the roll. Only when we had the whole thing in place and were sure it reached down to the ground on both ends did he cut it off. Because the bird netting was only 7 feet wide, it took two lengths of it to cover the row of frames fully: one for the rear side, one for the front. We clipped the two pieces together with binder clips to make sure they wouldn't separate and leave a gap in the middle.

Next we needed a way to secure the netting in place. With the mini-tents, we'd simply draped the netting over each set of poles and held it down with rocks, but for this big tent, we wanted something to hold it in place at the top of each frame so it wouldn't sag too much. I suggested rubber bands, and as it happened, Brian had a whole bunch of them out in the shed that he'd recently discovered just sitting in our back yard near the fence. (His best guess was that some critter had dragged them in there and left them, though he had no idea why.) They turned out not to be very good rubber bands, as several of them broke while we were trying to wrap them over the ends of the poles, but eventually we managed to get one in place on the top of each frame.

That took care of the top of the frames, but we still needed something to hold the netting down at ground level. In fact, we got a vivid demonstration of why this was necessary, as two birds managed to get under the netting during the brief time it was unsecured and were flapping around in a panic trying to escape. After shooing them out, we made sure they wouldn't get back in by covering the netting with rocks. Luckily, we had plenty of these, because we'd hauled away several buckets that my parents didn't want during my Mother's Day patio cleanup. They even gave us several slate flagstones they were no longer using, allowing Brian to replace the one he'd scavenged from his backyard rain channel to repair the damaged path in our front yard. On the western end of the honeyberry hedge, we tucked the edge of the netting under these slate pavers to secure it; on the north side, Brian shoved it under the big concrete blocks lining the fence. Along the other two sides, we used the biggest rocks out of the collection we'd hauled home from my parents' place, one every 8 inches or so. 

This new, all-in-one honeyberry tent is a bit harder to get into than the old, individual tents. Since it's all one big piece of netting with no openings, you have to remove all the rocks along a stretch about eight feet long to give you enough slack in the net to squeeze under. But once you're in, you can move about pretty freely, crawling from bush to bush to harvest from each of them in turn. Occasionally one of the binder clips will come loose if you jostle around too much under there, but it's easy to clip it back on after you exit. Eventually, we'd like to replace this array  with some sort of more permanent structure that will require less setup work each year and be easier on our aging backs and knees. But on the whole, this design is probably a bit easier to set up and use than the single-bush teepees, and it won't take up much more room in the shed during the off-season.

Safe under their new protective cover, the honeyberries are ripening rapidly. Most of the ones nearest the house have turned a lovely deep blue, and we've already gathered about a cup of fully ripe ones. To celebrate the harvest, Brian decided to try something new: honeyberry ice cream. Here's his improvised recipe:

Mash 1/2 cup honeyberries with 3 Tbsp sugar and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla. Let it sit awhile to get juicy. Add 2 Tbsp soy milk and mix thoroughly. Stir together with 1/2 cup Country Crock Dairy-Free Whipping Cream (our current favorite now that Trader Joe's vegan whipping cream has been discontinued) and chill for several hours. Churn it to soft-serve consistency in an ice cream maker and transfer to the freezer to set fully. 

The finished product has a vivid pink color and a powerful fruity flavor—a bit too powerful for Brian's taste, in fact. He's thinking of reducing the amount of fruit next time and possibly increasing the amount of vanilla to counterbalance the acidity of the berries. But speaking for myself, I think it's lovely just the way it is.

Recipe of the Month: General Tso's Cauliflower and Tofu

May's Recipe of the Month came about because on our last Lidl trip, Brian picked up a cauliflower without having any specific plan for it. When he asked me if there was any particular cauliflower dish I'd like, I suggested that he kill two birds with one stone by trying a new recipe that I could post on the blog. So he did a little search and came across one called General Tso's Cauliflower and Tofu on the Cinnamon Society website. As far as he could tell, we had all the ingredients for it except the chili sauce, and he figured he'd most likely want to cut way back on that anyway to accommodate my sensitive taste buds. So he decided to just omit it and see how the recipe turned out.

As he started preparing the dish, however, he discovered he'd made a mistake. The recipe called for "baked tofu," which he had assumed meant that it would involve baking some cubed tofu in the oven. But apparently, what the author had in mind was commercial baked tofu that comes in a package. She warned that you could not simply substitute pressed tofu, as it "falls apart too easily." Rather than run out to the H-Mart for some baked tofu, Brian opted to cut his pressed tofu into cubes and pan-fry it to give it a firm, golden outer skin. He also made a few minor adjustments to the seasoning: cutting the amount of canola oil tossed with the cauliflower from a quarter-cup to 2 tablespoons, increasing the teaspoon of sugar to one and a half teaspoons, and cutting the quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes down to a mere eighth of a teaspoon. And he disregarded the direction to separate the white and green parts of the scallion, simply slicing up the whole thing and tossing it in the wok as he always does.

Most of these alterations, as far as we could tell, worked fine. The tofu did not fall apart during cooking, and the sauce, though mild, was far from bland. The one thing we both noted was that its flavor was rather bright. Although it contained only half a tablespoon of rice vinegar, which is milder than many other types of vinegar, the combination of that and the tomato paste gave it quite a strong acidic tang. Brian suspected part of the reason was he'd left out the 2 to 3 tablespoons of chili sauce, which would otherwise have increased the volume of the sauce and diluted the other flavors. I suggested that next time he could make up the extra volume with water, but he feared that would thin the sauce too much. My other idea was to replace some or all of the sugar with molasses, adding a darker note to balance out the brightness of the other ingredients.

In any case, the extra acidity wasn't a major drawback, particularly after the first few bites. We both enjoyed the dish enough to take second helpings and happily gobbled up the leftovers for lunch. We'll definitely be adding this recipe to our stable of cauliflower dishes, which means we'll have plenty of opportunities to tinker with it further. One note I gave him for next time is that so long as he's leaving out the chili sauce, I think he can safely increase the red pepper flakes to the full quarter-teaspoon the recipe calls for. Even my wussy palate should be able to handle that much.

More quick fixes

Well, here I am again, updating the blog on a Monday after a busy weekend. After being away in Virginia last Sunday, we spent Friday in Hopewell having a delayed Mother's Day celebration with my mom, this time tidying up the patio area in the back yard. We topped that off with back-to-back dance gigs on Saturday and Sunday, each at least an hour long and at least 45 minutes away, and the latter of the two in blazing noonday sun and 90-degree heat. I'd originally planned to come home and write the blog entry after that, but all I had the energy to do was drink a quart of water and spend the rest of the afternoon playing puzzle games. 

With all this going on, we didn't have time to tackle any big projects, so instead I'm writing about three small ones we've done over the past few months. These are all the sort of quick fixes that are a mainstay of our ecofrugal lifestyle: solving problems by substituting a bit of time and creativity for new, store-bought items.

Quick Fix #1: Free wall art

Our house is a...well, I don't know what style it is, exactly. It was built around 1970, so it has neither the charm of an old-fashioned Cape Cod or bungalow nor the practicality of a modern open-concept home. Instead, it has a single narrow hallway connecting the office at one end to the bathroom at the other, with entrances leading off it into the living room, bedroom, hall closet, and kitchen. It's a pretty drab space, and until this year, we hadn't done much of anything to it. We'd hung one piece of art—actually, six small nature sketches in one long frame—but since they were all in black and white, it didn't do much to liven up the area.

But the thing that bothered me most about the hallway was the two small, rectangular bumps on the side wall. One, located about at my eye level, is the thermostat, and the other, higher up the wall (just barely visible in the photo) is our doorbell. They don't even line up neatly with each other, but since they're both wired into the wall, there's no way to move them. They're just two randomly placed horizontal rectangles sticking out of the wall like warts.

So, last year, I came up with an idea to make those two oddly placed rectangles look intentional by surrounding them with a bunch of other rectangles: an array of small art pieces hung horizontally on the wall. To this end, we picked up a set of four small picture frames (roughly 6" by 8") for 50 cents each at a thrift shop. The problem then was what to put in them. We had only one piece of art the right size, a tiny abstract oil painting done by one of our niblings as a grade-school project. Should we try to thrift some artwork to fit the other frames? Should Brian draw some pictures to fill them? Or should we perhaps make enlarged prints of some family photos?

We continued dilly-dallying until last March, when Brian had a brainwave: If all we wanted was to make those awkward rectangles on the wall look intentional, it didn't matter what was in the frames. He hung the two pieces of horizontal art we had—the little abstract oil painting and a colorful David Goodsell painting of a virus that he got as a retirement present at work—and then simply filled up the rest of the frames with sheets of origami paper in coordinating colors. They're just blocks of solid color, but seen as part of a group, they look intentional. And we can always swap them out later if we find some other art we like better.

Quick Fix #2: A hands-free phone stand

I like to do the Wordle and other New York Times puzzles on my phone each morning while I eat my breakfast. The problem is, using one hand to eat and one to type leaves none free to hold the phone. I've tried propping it up against something, but it isn't very stable that way and tends to topple down with any stray movement. 

When we went to IKEA last March to pick up a new set of window shades, Brian spotted a little phone stand that he thought could solve this problem. The design was quite elegant: just a small slab of bamboo with a slot cut into it to hold the phone at the right angle. It was compact enough that it wouldn't be in the way on the kitchen table, and the price tag was a mere $5. But then he thought, why spend even $5 on something he could probably make himself for free?

He cut a scrap of plywood to approximately the same size as the IKEA stand, then set about gouging a slot in it with his Dremel tool. It wasn't set up to make angled cuts, so he had to place a triangular block of wood on top of the plywood scrap and use that to line up the cut. This awkward arrangement made it difficult to control the tool, and he ended up making the slot too big and having to nail a little shim to the inside. The finished piece isn't exactly elegant, but it serves its purpose: allowing me to eat my toast and solve the Wordle at the same time.  

Quick Fix #3: Not-so-visible mending

One of my most successful visible mending projects to date was the rainbow of stitches I added to my lightweight blue jeans last year to cover up the wear along the thigh inseam. I later added a similar row of stitches along the inseam of the other leg and eventually, as the worn areas spread, expanded both rows by adding a row of darker red stitches to the end. But last time I washed the jeans, I discovered a new threadbare patch farther in on the thigh. I've repaired holes like this before by adding colorful patches, but I didn't want to do that here because I feared it would clash with the colorful stitching I'd already added. How could I patch the hole in a way that wouldn't distract from my rainbow repair?

To solve this problem, I adapted a method I read about on the Wonderfil blog. I patched the jeans not on the outside, but on the inside, using a small fabric scrap a little bigger than the threadbare area. Then, to reinforce the patch, I put in several rows of stitches through both layers of fabric (the denim of the jeans and the patch underneath), running all the way across the hole. Not being proficient with a sewing machine, I couldn't do as thorough a job of this as the Wonderfil blogger did, but I ran multiple rows of stitches across the patch horizontally, then multiple rows vertically. When I was done, I trimmed away all the excess fabric from the patch, leaving a piece just big enough to cover the hole.

The finished repair is far from perfect. My hand-stitching is nowhere near as neat or precise as stitches put in by machine, and the navy thread I used isn't an exact match for the fabric of the jeans. But it should keep the hole from expanding, and it blends in well enough that a casual observer probably wouldn't spot it. And even if someone happens to notice the repair, it blends into the background well enough to let my rainbow stitching stand out as the real star of the show.

Hell strip purgatory

For the second week in a row, I must apologize for being late with this blog entry. This time it's because we were away for the weekend visiting our friends in Virginia, and after driving home and unpacking, I didn't have the energy to tackle it. (I'm starting to think I should just switch to updating the blog on Monday every week, rather than over the weekend. We've been a lot busier in retirement than we expected to be, but the weekends seem to be even busier than the weekdays. Or at least, they're more likely to be busy for whole days at a time.)

Anyway, remember how we decided last summer to tear out the grass from our hell strip, that narrow sliver of turf between the road and the sidewalk, and replace it with some native wildflowers? And how we put in a bunch of seeds last fall and were just waiting for spring to see what came up? Well, spring is now here, and the answer is officially, "Not much." Here's how the hell strip looked as of last week: just a long patch of lightly mulched dirt with a few rogue tufts of grass and weeds. There were a few surviving salvia plants down at the far end, and the one yarrow we put in next to the street sign was actually looking pretty healthy. (Yarrow, as far as I can tell, is literally impossible to kill.) But none of the stuff we'd started from seed appeared to have germinated at all.

Disappointed but not deterred, Brian spent an hour or so last Thursday clearing out the patch. He didn't want to till the whole thing up for fear of disturbing any flowers that might still decide to germinate, so he sat on the sidewalk and painstakingly pulled out the weeds by hand. That got it back to its baseline state of a bare bed with a thin covering of mulch, which looks dull but at least reasonably neat. Then he put in a few rudbeckia seedlings (black-eyed Susans) that he'd started over the winter, using our new seed snail method. 

However, these are so tiny that he's not that confident they're going to survive, so we're on the lookout for additional plants that might be suitable for this difficult area. They need to meet several fairly stringent criteria:

• Perennial and low-maintenance
• Small enough to fit in a one-foot strip of dirt
• Tolerant of full sun and clay soil
• Able to withstand some exposure to road salt
• Unappetizing to deer

It's a tough order to fill, but I've found a few possible candidates, including catmint, creeping thyme, and something called antennaria (commonly known as pussy-toes). And if we can't find any of those, well, we can always fill in the whole thing with yarrow. We'll have to go out there with the string trimmer to beat it back occasionally, but that's less work than mowing.

In the meantime, I can offer one update on a project that's been resolved a bit more satisfactorily. Around the same time we finished planting out the hell strip last fall, we also had to fix several other things in our yard that got damaged by our neighbor's sewer-line repair. We were able to put most of it to rights, but we couldn't repair our flagstone path because that area of the yard was still torn up—and it stayed torn throughout the winter and most of the spring. But this month, our neighbor finally managed to get the sunken area filled in and planted with clover seed. This covered up the new sewer access that the workers had put in, but Brian went back in and uncovered it so that in case they ever need it again, they won't have to rip up the yard to find it. To make the pipe a bit more sightly, he constructed a hex-shaped wooden frame for it, then carefully fitted in the flagstones around it. So now we have a direct path from the street to our door again, and soon enough we should have some nice green clover to fill in the area around the stones. Based on how well it's coming up so far, we expect this area will be fully filled in a lot quicker than the hell strip will.

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: Spring Planting

Once again, this blog entry has been slightly delayed due to a very busy weekend. From Friday through Sunday, we had not one but two RPG sessions and not one, not two, but three dance gigs. So it wasn't until today that we had a couple of free hours to take care of our big spring planting: peppers, tomatoes, climbing beans, bush beans, cucumbers, basil, and dill.

We ran into an unexpected challenge with the Climbing French beans. This is a variety we can't get from our normal seed supplier, so we save and dry some of the beans from each harvest to plant the following year. Unfortunately, when Brian opened up the jar in which he'd been storing last year's beans, he discovered they'd grown some kind of fuzzy mold in storage. It was only on the surface, but we still weren't sure how it would affect their viability. Fortunately, we still had some dried beans left from our 2024 crop, so to be on the safe side, we planted one of the old beans next to each of the newer, fuzzier ones. If we end up with too many plants as a result, we can always thin them.

We also decided, on the fly, to shake up the way we plant our dill. We don't use very much of it, so in previous years, we've set aside a single square for it in the garden. Not only does this create an awkward little asymmetry in our garden plan, it doesn't do much good, since the dill almost never comes in where we actually planted it. Instead, we get little rogue plants popping up all over the bed, as you can see here. To get around this problem, this year we intended to put in the dill toward the north edge of one of the large blocks set aside for zucchini. The zucchini plants, though large and sprawling, never actually fill this entire block; they tend to stretch themselves out southward, toward the sunlight. So we thought we could easily tuck the dill in next to one without impinging on it.

However, as Brian was transplanting the pepper seedlings, he had a better idea. Last year, we started doubling up our pepper plants, putting two into each four-square block. To give each plant as much room to spread as possible, Brian puts them in diagonally across the block rather than side by side. This leaves a little gap in the corner of each bed where a dill plant could probably nestle quite comfortably in the shade of the nearby peppers. So instead of planting all our dill in one square, I dropped a few seeds into each of these little corner spaces. If they all come up, that'll give us three dill plants, which should be more than enough for our modest, mostly pickle-oriented needs.

As we were getting these crops into the ground, we discovered that we might have a whole new crop to look forward to this year. Eleven years after we first planted our hardy kiwi vines, we finally have flowers on both the male and female plants. The female vine first flowered in 2020, and we initially hoped that the male would follow a year or two after. But sadly, before it ever got the chance, it was brutally murdered by the landscapers who work at the apartment building behind our house. (Brian had caught them snipping at the kiwis before, so he'd put up a sign on the fence reading "This is a plant, not a weed. Please do not cut it!" in both English and Spanish. But apparently the landscapers either couldn't read either language or couldn't be bothered to try, because not long after, we saw them stick their shears right through the fence, onto our property, and cut off the male plant at the root.) 

So, two years ago, we put in a new male plant (and protected it with a layer of hardware cloth behind the fence, too narrow for the gardeners to stick their shears through). And today, that new male plant flowered for the first time. The male and female vines are pretty closely intertwined, so I had to check carefully to confirm that these flowers were on the male and not a stray branch of the female. But I traced the vine all the way down to the base and confirmed these flowers definitely belong to the male. So, if nothing else goes wrong, we might finally have some berries to harvest in late summer or early fall. Of course, there are never any guarantees in gardening, so I'm not counting my kiwis before they're hatched. But at least there's a chance, which is more than we've had for the last eleven years.

Recipe of the Month: Egg Roll in a Bowl

As I've mentioned before, April has been a pretty full month for us. Weekdays and weekends alike have been crammed with medical appointments, game nights, last weekend's Repair Cafe, a major garden project, a stream cleanup I didn't even mention here, and a trip up to Massachusetts this weekend that combines a dance performance at NEFFA with a visit to my sister. All of which hasn't left us much time for picking and trying new vegan recipes.

So it wasn't until this week, with the end of April drawing near, that Brian asked me if I had any recipes I'd like to try as a Recipe of the Month. And fortunately, I happened to have one I'd been saving for a rainy day: this Vegan Egg Roll in a Bowl from It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken. Brian ran down the ingredient list and found that we had all the required ingredients except the plum sauce. However, we did have some frozen plums in the freezer. And being Brian, he figured, well, how hard could it be to make our own?

He did a little searching online and eventually settled on this plum sauce recipe from Serious Eats. Since we only needed a little for this recipe (and didn't expect to need it for anything else), he made just a quarter-sized batch, using half a pound of our frozen plums and correspondingly scaled amounts of the other ingredients. He used one small garlic clove in place of the half a clove the sized-down recipe called for, and we just happened to have a quarter-piece of star anise in the spice cupboard, so he didn't need to mess with breaking up a whole one. The whole process took about half an hour, including cooling time.

After that, the rest of the recipe was pretty straightforward. Aside from the extra step of tossing the tofu with the plum sauce, it came together much like any other stir-fry. He served it up over plain white rice with the extra plum sauce on the side, leaving out the other garnishes, and it was pretty good. Not extraordinary, but pretty good. The addition of the plum sauce did not magically transform it from a standard tofu-and-veggie bowl into some kind of higher-level concoction, but we both enjoyed it enough to to go back for seconds and happily polish off the leftovers for lunch.

So, will this become a regular addition to our recipe repertoire? Well, maybe. As I said, it's not necessarily better than a standard stir-fry, so Brian will probably stick to his usual method of tossing together whatever veggies we have on hand, rather than deliberately preparing this specific combination of ingredients. But we do have some of the plum sauce left over, safely stashed in the freezer, so should we ever find ourselves needing to use up some cabbage, carrot, onion, and tofu, we can thaw the sauce, follow this recipe, and be confident it will come out well.

Our first Repair Cafe

Highland Park's first Repair Cafe, which was postponed last February due to a massive blizzard, finally took place this weekend. I signed up to work in the sewing section, while Brian worked at the "miscellaneous" table. Never having attended, much less worked at, one of these events before, we had little idea what to expect. Would anyone even show up? And if they did, would any of them need repairs that were within our (particularly my) modest capabilities? 

The answers to both questions turned out to be, "And how."

The night before, Brian and I both spent some time deciding what tools and supplies to take with us. Having no clue what we'd need, we ended up packing everything we could reasonably carry to cover all the basics. Brian stuffed his backpack with roughly 30 pounds of tools, including a hammer, an adjustable wrench, screwdrivers, pliers, a set of nut drivers, wood glue, epoxy, a multimeter, assorted hardware, a staple gun, a hacksaw, and probably several other things he can't currently recall. I took only my main sewing kit, but crammed it to the limit with extras I thought might come in handy: a few fabric scraps, my big darning needles, a small spool of yarn, some hooks and eyes, extra buttons, and my entire collection of embroidery floss, because you never know what color you'll need. (Brian made me stick a padlock on the overstuffed box to ensure it wouldn't pop open en route and spill all that stuff out onto the sidewalk.)

A little before noon, we arrived at the site with all our tools in tow. Sustainable Highland Park, which was organizing the event, was in the process of setting up tables and chairs and had put out some maps to show what was supposed to go on each one. I was mildly surprised to see that there were three entire tables for the sewing crew, the same as for electrical repairs, while "miscellaneous" had only one largish table in the opposite corner. There were also stations for bicycle, jewelry, woodwork, and guitar repair, and one table specifically for knife sharpening. We got set up, introduced ourselves to the other folks at our respective tables, and partook of some pizza provided by Sustainable Highland Park for the volunteers, and at 1pm, the doors opened. Or perhaps I should say, the floodgates. 

I meant to get more pictures of the event itself, but I never got a chance. I was working more or less nonstop for the next three hours, as a steady stream of "customers" presented their items for repair. I'd assumed that the work in the sewing section would be fairly light, but it turned out to be probably the busiest in the whole place. The folks with bigger jobs, like hemming pants or replacing zippers, got sent to the two ladies who'd brought sewing machines, while I and the two other hand-sewers devoted ourselves to a wide array of smaller repairs. I replaced buttons, stitched up torn seams, mended holes in pockets, reattached the band on a baseball cap, darned the worn-out bottom of a vinyl backpack, and patched up stuffed animals belonging to both a small child and a large dog. The supplies we'd all brought quickly turned into a communal pool as we passed buttons, seam rippers, fabric swatches, and thread of various colors along the table. Our section was so busy that one of the volunteers from the jewelry table, who also had some sewing skills, came over to join us, and even with her help, I suspect we didn't quite manage to serve everyone.

Meanwhile, over at his table, Brian was working on an even more mixed assortment of items. Over the course of the afternoon, he tackled multiple lamps, a space heater, a doll with a broken leg, a toaster oven with a broken door, an electric shaver, a robot vacuum, and a white noise machine, among other things. Some of these were fairly easy to fix, like the electric shaver (which showed up in pieces but worked perfectly once he managed to get it put back together) and the robot vacuum (which, after being cleaned and charged up, started cruising around the floor on its own). Others needed to be more fully disassembled to get at their inner workings. Some things got fixed, but a bit inelegantly (like the doll, which he simply reassembled with a dollop of hot glue). There were a few items he couldn't fix because no one at the table had the right tools, such as the lamp with the sagging head that would have required a longer bolt than Brian had in his collection, but he was at least able to advise the owners on how to repair them at home. And there were a few, such as the white noise machine, that completely stumped everyone at the table and ended up in the trash.

All in all, it was a hectic day, but a highly satisfying one. Ever since my paid work essentially dried up last year, I've often found myself wondering at the end of a day whether I've actually accomplished anything useful. Today, I was in no doubt whatsoever. I got to help not just one, but dozens of my neighbors live a little more ecofrugally, saving money and keeping their stuff out of the landfill. And as a group, we got to raise our collective middle finger to the disposable consumer culture that wants to keep us stuck on the buy-and-discard treadmill. It was a deeply fulfilling experience that brought our community together—one I hope will be repeated soon and often.

[EDIT, 4/22/26: Though I didn't get many photos, the organizers did. You can see them on Facebook.] 

Our new asparagus bed

First of all, I apologize for being a bit late with this week's blog entry. But as you'll soon see, there's a good reason for it. 

For several years, our asparagus crop has been steadily shrinking. In fact, checking over my posts, I see that it's been ten years since we last celebrated the May 1 Gardeners' Holiday as the Age of Asparagus, largely because there just hasn't been enough asparagus to celebrate. For the past couple of years, we've harvested barely enough for one meal. And so far this year, we've had no spears at all big enough to pick. Our mature plants have produced only tiny, spindly fronds, and as far as we can tell, none of the ten new asparagus crowns we added to the bed last year have put up any shoots at all.

In light of this, I suggested maybe we it was time to do what we considered doing last year: dig up the entire asparagus bed and start over from scratch. Brian agreed that might be a good idea, but he wondered whether we should consider starting over in a different location. In the first place, our current asparagus patch had never been all that productive, and in the second place, it was likely to get torn up at some spot to put in the condenser for a heat pump system when we finally got around to installing one. So if we had to put in a whole new bed, why not put it in a new location where we'd know it wouldn't be disturbed?

Well, it was a nice idea in theory, but there was one obvious problem: asparagus likes a well-drained, even sandy soil. The current asparagus bed has the only soil on our property with even a little bit of sand in it. If the asparagus plants didn't like that, they'd really hate the heavy clay in the rest of our yard. The only way around this that we could think of would be to build a raised bed and fill it with a more asparagus-friendly soil mixture.

I knew this was possible, because I'd recently seen a GrowVeg video that discussed the advantages of planting asparagus in raised beds. However, it didn't go into much detail about how to construct one. Digging a little deeper, I found this article at Garden Betty, which talked more about how to build the bed and how to plant and tend the asparagus for optimal growth. (One thing it recommended was a phosphorus-rich organic fertilizer, something we'd never used on our current asparagus patch, which might explain its lackluster production.) But it also called attention to one key point: asparagus crowns are only available for sale in stores for a short period in the springtime. So, if we really wanted to do this, we'd have to do it as soon as possible.

Since I already had my monthly Citizens' Climate Lobby meeting to attend in Somerville on Saturday, we decided to combine that trip with a visit to the Belle Mead Co-Op for asparagus crowns and bulk soil. That gave us just a few days to plan out the location and design for the new raised bed. We decided the best spot for it would be the area in front of the shed, which is relatively level and gets sunlight for most of the day. In that location, we'd have room for a 4-foot square bed without blocking off our access to the shed, the main garden, or the cherry bushes. After a little tinkering, Brian determined that he could build a 4-foot square frame roughly 17 inches deep entirely out of reclaimed materials: two large boards we'd recently scavenged off the curb and a bunch of narrower pieces trimmed off from the stack of wood pallets stored in the shed. He started constructing it on Friday and had it finished by Saturday morning, just in time for our trip to the Co-Op. 

We'd already called the Co-Op ahead of time and found that they had several varieties of asparagus in stock, including the highly recommended Jersey Knight and Millennium varieties. We planned to get one 10-pack of each, allowing us to plant eight of each variety in our 4-by-4 bed with a few to spare. When we got there, we found that there were two different bundles of Millennium crowns available: one-year old crowns for $10 or two-year-old ones for $20. We decided to spend the extra $10 in hopes that we'd be able to harvest at least a little asparagus from our new bed next year. 

Next on our shopping list was soil. Garden Betty recommended using a "well-draining soil" and amending it with 2 inches of "well-aged compost." To simplify things, we opted for the Co-Op's blended topsoil, which has compost and sand already mixed in. The Co-Op's website suggested amending this mixture for raised beds with a bagged product called Bumper Crop, so we added a couple of bags of that to our order, along with one bag of an organic fertilizer called Bulb-Tone that Garden Betty recommended. The total came to $129, probably the most we'd spent on any garden project since we bought our fruit trees 13 years ago, but like them, this is a long-term investment.

Loading the half-yard of topsoil we'd purchased was a lot more work than we expected. We've bought bulk compost and mulch from the Co-Op enough times to have the drill pretty well down: Dump out our half-yard into our two big trash barrels, muscle those into the car, then shovel up the rest into bags and load those. But the topsoil was much denser than either mulch or compost, and the filled barrels were far too heavy for us to lift or even drag. We had to shovel about half the dirt out of them before we could get them into the car, and even then it took all our combined strength. And although we filled the bags only about halfway full, they were still too heavy for me to lift more than an inch or two. Brian had to heave them all into the car, and then, with still more difficulty, heave them back out again. To haul them down to the back yard, we dragged out the wheelbarrow and the ramp we hadn't used since our patio project in 2013, but even hefting the bags up into the wheelbarrow was a challenge. By the time we'd finished shifting everything, we didn't have the energy to do more than change clothes, eat supper, and collapse on the couch to watch Critical Role.

On Sunday afternoon, we began preparing the bed for planting. First, we toted the frame Brian had built down to the spot we'd picked for it in the yard (popping one side loose in the process, which he had to reattach). We carefully adjusted it until we were satisfied, then set a brick at each corner to marked out its exact position. After that, we moved the frame out of the way so Brian could go all the way around the edges of the square with our King of Spades, cutting a line to mark the boundaries of the new bed. He then used the same tool to score horizontal and vertical lines across the bed, dividing the sod into squares. We removed these squares one at a time, whacking each one with a trowel to shake the clods of dirt loose from the grass roots so none of it would go to waste before dumping the grass into a bucket bound for the compost bin. 

When all the sod had been turfed up, we shifted the frame back into place. It wasn't quite level, so we scooted it over just a bit and Brian dug the hole a bit deeper along one edge to get it situated securely. Then he made one more adjustment to the frame: stapling a layer of cardboard to the inside so that none of our precious soil would escape through the cracks. On this cardboard layer, he used a Sharpie to mark three lines at the center of each side of the bed, at 8, 5, and 2 inches below the top edge. The first mark showed the level to which we'd need to fill the bed before placing the crowns; the second showed the level to which we should pile additional dirt on top of them; and the third showed how much more dirt we'd need to add later in the season, once the spears had started to sprout. The remaining two inches would be for a layer of mulch on top to protect the plants during the winter. He also marked off one-foot lengths along the top edges of the bed as a guide to help us place the asparagus crowns.

That, once again, proved to be all the work we could handle for one day, so it wasn't until this morning that we started actually filling up the beds (which is also why this blog entry was delayed). Since we weren't sure our half-yard of soil would be quite enough to fill them to the level needed, we started by adding a layer of sticks, as recommended in this other GrowVeg video. Aside from adding bulk, they'll help the soil in the bed drain more easily, and they'll break down over time to release their nutrients into the soil. On top of that, we began adding the actual dirt—first shoveling it out of the big bins until they were light enough to tip out, then dumping in about five bags' worth on top of that until we'd nearly reached the first mark. Then we dumped in one of the two bags of Bumper Crop and, following the instructions on the package, worked it into the soil to a depth of about six inches.

Once we'd reached this point, we were ready to start the actual planting. First, on Garden Betty's advice, we soaked the asparagus crowns in a bucket of water for about 15 minutes to rehydrate them. While they were soaking, we opened up the package of Bulb-Tone, sprinkled three cups of it across the soil surface, and lightly worked it in with our fingers. Then we carefully laid out the asparagus crowns according to Brian's guidelines, one per square foot, with the two-year-old Millennium crowns toward the front of the bed and the younger Jersey Knight crowns in back. 

Finally, we topped up the bed to Brian's second level marker with a mixture of soil and some more of the Bumper Crop and gave the freshly planted asparagus a good watering. Our sources said it would need 1 to 2 inches of water every week for its first couple of years, which Brian worked out to be 10 to 20 gallons—about five full watering cans' worth. However, we found the soil was looking pretty well saturated after three cans full, so we decided to leave it at that and top it off later.

After learning how much water the plants would need, Brian decided to add one more thing to the new asparagus patch: a rain gauge. The standard design for this is simply a plastic bottle with the top cut off and inverted to funnel rainwater into the opening, with lines marked on the outside to show how many inches of rain you've had. Sources like Wikihow suggest adding pebbles to the bottom to keep it from tipping over, but Brian decided to get a little fancier and use some of the colorful marbles we'd both saved from our childhood. He did a little measuring to figure out how much water the marbles would displace and adjusted the marks on the side accordingly. The new rain gauge now sits on a corner of the bed, so we can see at a glance how much water the plants have had and calculate how much they still need.

Although it was a lot of work, I'm extremely pleased with our new asparagus bed. I like the fact that Brian built it himself. I like the fact that he used only salvaged materials. I like the fact that we assembled it together (even if he did most of the literal heavy lifting). And I like the fact that, having planted it once, we can expect to continue harvesting asparagus from it from the next 15 to 20 years. Granted, at around $3 per pound for in-season asparagus, it will need to produce 43 pounds to pay for all the material that went into it, but that's less than three ounces per plant per year. I think we can hope to at least break even, and one thing we can be sure of is that any asparagus we do get will be far fresher than anything we could buy at the store. And if asparagus proves to be one of the commodities that skyrockets in price due to tariffs or global instability, we'll be at least somewhat insulated from the shock.

Being retired is a lot of work

Brian and I have just completed our first full month of retirement. Brian left his job in mid-February, and my last remaining client cut me off at the end of February, so we both spent the entire month of March living a life of leisure. Well, in theory, at least. In practice, we seem to be even busier than when we were both working full-time. 

Since neither of us has to work during the day anymore, we have no restrictions on scheduling meetings and appointments on weekdays, nor do we feel as much need to zealously protect our limited free time on the weekends. Consequently, we've been piling more and more things on our plates. We're in not one but two RPG groups, and we've taken on leadership roles for our Monday night board-game group as well. Brian has been going to the blood bank more often to donate platelets (I'm not allowed to do likewise because of some meds I'm taking). I've been taking part in more events with my Citizens' Climate Lobby chapter. And in between, we've been going back and forth to various doctors to treat all the health problems that popped up right on cue as soon as we became old, retired people. With all that going on, our calendar for the past month has had scarcely a day on it that's completely open. And looking at what's coming up (including the rescheduled Repair Cafe on the 19th, a half-dozen dance events, and a family wedding in June), we shouldn't expect it to ease up much for the next few months at least.

If our post-retirement schedule has been a bit of an adjustment, our post-retirement budget is an even bigger one—particularly where health care is concerned. Thanks to state subsidies, the monthly premium we're paying for all our new health plans is actually less than we paid for Brian's workplace plan: about $350 as compared to $619. But that smaller sum feels more noticeable because the payments come out of our checking account every month, rather than slipping invisibly out of Brian's paycheck before it ever hit our account. 

More noticeably still, our new plans come with significantly higher out-of-pocket costs. Every visit to a specialist, which would have cost only $30 on our old plan, rings up at $75 on our new one, and the bill for an MRI one of those specialists ordered came to about $519 (well below the full price, but still far from trivial). Add in the new out-of-pocket cost for prescription meds, and we've spent over to $850 on health care just in the past month. And there's going to be plenty more where that came from, including a second MRI that we haven't been billed for yet.

Another item on our post-retirement expense sheet: taxes. This one wasn't exactly new, as I'd always paid quarterly estimated taxes on my freelance income (up until last year, when I had so little work that I didn't owe enough to be worth counting). But I didn't have to pay tax on that income until it actually hit my checking account, whereas I'm now paying estimated tax on the dividends, interest, and capital gains from our investments. (All that was taxable income before, too, but between Brian's withholding and my estimated tax payments, we always paid enough in tax throughout the year to take care of it.) This, again, feels a lot more obtrusive, because I'm paying taxes on these earnings before I've even laid hands on them.

But what's even harder is figuring out how much I owe. When I got paid for a freelance job, I knew exactly how much I'd earned, so all I had to do was add the payments I'd received for the quarter and multiply the total by 25 percent, which was more than sufficient to cover the taxes. To find out how much we'd earned on our investments this quarter, I had to ask my finance guy—and instead of sending me back a number, he sent several different documents, each showing "trade activity" or "gain/loss" for a different account. He explained that to figure out our earnings, I'd have to open up each of the "trade activity" documents and manually add up all the figures listed for interest and dividends, then add (or, in some cases, subtract) the "total realized gains" from the "gain/loss" documents to come up with a total. You would think that with all the fancy software Morgan Stanley has, they'd have some way to calculate this for us automatically, but apparently not. I ended up creating a new spreadsheet page to do the math for me.

It's not the money that bothers me so much about any of this; it's the paperwork. When Brian was working, dealing with income and expenses was simple. Health premiums and taxes came out of his paycheck automatically, and our take-home pay got deposited automatically into our bank account. When we needed to see a doctor, we paid the copay, and the insurance took care of everything else without bothering us. I knew, in theory, that after retirement we'd have to do more of this work ourselves. But it does seem like it's all more complicated than it really needs to be.

Ecofrugal (semi) successes

I don't have any big news to blog about this week, so instead, I'm sharing a few quirky little incidents in our ecofrugal life. To balance out my recent post on ecofrugal fails, these are all successes—well, sort of, at least.

Incident #1: A belated curb find

In the spring, my Citizens' Climate Lobby chapter spends a lot of time "tabling": setting up tables at public events so we can talk to the attendees about climate change. This year, one of those events was NJ Makers Day, at which all kinds of groups set up tables with craft projects for the public to try. The project we chose was this mini collage based on the global warming stripes, a graphic created by a British scientist to show how much the planet has warmed since 1850. (We used a simplified version of the graphic with one stripe per decade, instead of one per year.)

Since we knew we'd have limited time for the project, we decided to prepare all the materials ahead of time: bookmark-sized strips of card stock and narrower strips of paper in various shades of blue, pink, and red. My partner in the project bought some paper from an art supply thrift shop and cut out strips on a paper cutter, so hers came out nice and neat. But Brian and I didn't have a paper cutter, so I cut my strips by hand from a mixture of junk mail and origami paper. This was a time-consuming process, and the strips I ended up with were pretty uneven in size and shape.

I didn't want to rely on this imprecise method for the backing strips, so I turned for help to my lab-trained husband. After a little thought, he came up with the method of stacking the card stock sheets (old manila folders cut in half), clamping them to his worktable, marking off the correct width, and cutting across them with a utility knife. It took several passes to go through all the layers, but we ended up with neatly cut bookmarks all more or less identical in size and shape.

Right after he finished with this task, we went out for a walk. And as we approached the library, what did we see sitting out on the curb but a paper cutter, all packed in its original box. At first it looked like it had been discarded because the handle was broken, but we quickly realized that it had just been disassembled to fit it into the box. It was a perfectly good, practically new paper cutter, free for the taking—roughly 30 minutes after we could have used it.

Of course, we took it anyway. We couldn't just let it go to waste, and if we'd passed it up we'd surely have had another need for it right away. But the timing of the find was still perfectly ironic.

Incident #2: A tale of two grocery bills

This one happened on our last trip to Lidl. As per usual, we were waiting in line at the checkout with a cart full of mostly healthy, mostly plant-based foods. Our load included a cauliflower, an eggplant, a bunch of celery, a pound of mushrooms, three pounds of apples, a can of crushed tomatoes, a can of tomato paste, three cartons of soy milk, a dozen free-range eggs, a box of brownie mix, a bag of chocolate chips, and a bar of dark chocolate. The only non-food item was a bottle of dish soap. 

As we were waiting, I noticed that the guy in line in front of us had a much smaller load that was completely orthogonal to ours. He had about six individually wrapped steaks, a package of hamburger, a small bag of pastries, and just one produce bag containing three small zucchini. The clerk rang up this assortment at a little over $80. The shopper seemed a little taken aback at this price tag, but he paid it. Then we went through with our groceries, and they came to just over $35—less than half as much for about three times the volume of food. 

Feel free to share this story next time you hear anyone trot out the myth that a plant-based diet is more expensive.

Incident #3: The case of the conflicting egg prices

The one animal-based product in our Lidl cart was a carton of eggs. We always buy the ones that are labeled Certified Humane, since we're willing to pay extra to avoid contributing to animal suffering. The dozen eggs we bought cost $2.89—not so bad compared to the $4-to-$5-per-dozen price tags we were seeing a year or so ago, but still considerably pricier than regular, inhumane eggs. Or at least, so we thought.

On our way out the door, I grabbed a copy of the sale flier for the upcoming week. It prominently advertised a special on Eggland's Best eggs: $2.59 a dozen. These are just standard eggs with no certification, yet they're selling for just 30 cents less than what we pay for the Certified Humane ones. And according to the flier, that price is discounted by $1.28. If that's true, the regular price must be $3.87—roughly 34 percent more than the regular price for the Certified Humane eggs.

I'm not sure what to make of this. Is Lidl engaging in the same pricing shenanigans some retailers use on Black Friday, deliberately raising its "regular" price for eggs right before Easter to make the $2.59 "sale" price look like a great deal? Or is this a case of humanely farmed eggs being genuinely cheaper because smaller farms are less susceptible to bird flu? And more puzzling still, if these two types of eggs are sitting side by side in the refrigerator case, why would anyone ever pay nearly a dollar more for the less humane ones? Are people so prejudiced against brown eggs that they'll pay 34 percent more for white ones?

The causes may be murky, but the upshot is clear: the eggs that are better for the environment and animal welfare are better for our wallets, as well. For now, at least, our eco and frugal instincts are in perfect harmony. 

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: First Sowing (and accidental First Picking)

Spring is officially here, with weather to match: sunshine and highs in the 60s yesterday and today. And with the arrival of spring comes the planting of the peas, our first crop of the year to be sown directly into the soil. But before we could put the peas in the ground, we had to prepare the ground to receive them. When we put the garden to bed last December, we didn't really bother pulling out all the remnants of last year's crops: roots left in the dirt, stems clinging to the trellises, and leaves scattered across the surface of the beds. All that had to be removed to make room for this year's crops, along with the few early weeds that had already started to sprout.

As we worked, we made a few discoveries—some pleasant, some less so. One of the pleasant ones was that our efforts last year to add more organic matter to the beds have already made a noticeable difference. The soil we pulled debris out of was dark, rich, and crumbly, not dense and compacted like it was the year before, and it filled the beds nearly to the top. There was barely enough room to add one bucket of our homemade compost to each bed without overflowing the edges. And when I poked my finger into the dirt to plant the seeds, it went in easily to the second knuckle.

But while the soil looked highly satisfactory, the light level did not. It was nearly noon when we started working, and roughly half the garden was still in shade. Most of this, as best we could tell, was coming from the one large tree in our yard, a scrubby cedar growing at the back right corner of the garden area. It's not clear whether we can legally remove this tree; if its trunk is more than 6 inches in diameter, we can't take it down without a permit from the borough (and if we did, we'd be required to replace it with another tree somewhere on the property, which would be difficult to accommodate). But we can certainly limb it up—that is, cut off the lower branches, some of which are not merely shading but physically impinging on the garden area. Doing that will give the garden a bit more sunlight and, we hope, improve the yields from the nearby beds.

Another pleasant discovery we made was that some of our crops from last year had overwintered. We found a few scattered scallions, some undersized leeks, and a few tiny heads of lettuce and arugula poking up through the soil. Since most of the spaces occupied by these crops won't need to have anything else planted in them for another month or so, we decided to leave them there and see if they get big enough to harvest. At least, that was the plan. Unfortunately, I got a little too aggressive with the stirrup hoe and accidentally uprooted one of the wee bunches of arugula. So, rather than let it go to waste, we cleaned it off and added it to last night's salad. 

Thus, this spring Gardeners' Holiday turned out to be not just a celebration of our first sowing of the year, but our first picking, too. I'm choosing to take that as an auspicious sign that our 2026 garden is going to produce early and often.