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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recipe of the Month: Creamy Vegan Cabbage Pasta

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defining frugality

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

 

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

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

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

More small solutions

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

Quick fix #1: Earring storage

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

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

Quick fix #2: Reinforced sunglasses

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

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

Quick fix #3: Car windshield shade

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

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

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

Quick fix #4: Thrift-shop wallet

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

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

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

Quick fix #5: Pants patching

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

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

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

Stepping up our deer game

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recipe of the Month: Peach Crumble

With June drawing rapidly to a close, I found myself scrambling this week for a new plant-focused dish to try as my Recipe of the Month. I had a couple on hand that I'd printed out from the New York Times' "The Veggie" newsletter, but neither of them was really June-appropriate. The asparagus in the Vegan Spring Vegetable Frittata is already past its season, and the basil in the Basil Tofu isn't yet ready for picking. So I started hunting through all our vegetarian cookbooks, and right near the end of Nava Atlas's Vegetariana, I found a recipe that I'd bookmarked ages ago but never tried: Fresh Peach Crumb Cake. 

Lavish as this title sounds, the ingredient list actually looked pretty healthful. The whole cake (billed, somewhat optimistically, as 6 to 8 servings) contained only 1/3 cup of brown sugar and 1/2 cup of melted margarine (for which we could substitute our own cheaper and marginally healthier homemade plant butter). And while it did call for 3/4 cup of white flour, it took the curse off that by adding an entire cup of wheat germ. How could a recipe with wheat germ possibly be bad for us?

There was just one problem: We didn't have any wheat germ at home, and we weren't sure where to buy it. We couldn't find any at Lidl, and a trip Brian made by bike to the nearby Shop Rite came up empty as well. We were sure they'd have it at the Whole Earth Center in Princeton, but that store's earlier hours make it harder to fit in a visit before our Thursday dance practice. Brian thought we might be able to find some at the Amish market, which we could swing by after a dance gig on Saturday. But I suggested we check our local Superfresh first, and when we located a half-pound bag there, we decided to take the $4.29 bird in the hand rather than take our chances on finding a cheaper one in the bush. This purchase, along with four fresh peaches from Lidl, gave us everything we needed to make the "cake."

I put the word "cake" in quotes because this recipe really seemed more like a crisp or a crumble. There was no batter involved, just a crumb mixture made from flour, brown sugar, finely chopped almonds, melted margarine, and baking spices. This got layered in a pan with the sliced peaches (the recipes didn't say whether to skin them first, so we put them in skins and all) and baked for 20 minutes covered in foil, then 20 minutes more uncovered. When it came out of the oven, it pretty much just looked like a pan full of crumbs, so I dished some out into one of our nice blue IKEA bowls to show it to better advantage.

If I'd been expecting this mixture of ingredients to miraculously bake up into a luscious and decadent dessert, I'd have been disappointed. Fortunately, I had no such expectation, so I was reasonably satisfied with it. It's hard to go too wrong with a fruit crisp, and while this one wasn't quite as tasty as our usual (and less healthful) recipe, it was still enjoyable, particularly topped with coconut whipped cream. It reminded me a of a dish my dad used to make called "cereal pie," which was made from all the leftover crumbs at the bottom of our cereal boxes, tossed with sugar and spice and layered with fruit. That recipe was even easier to make and probably about as healthful, with a bit more sugar but no fat whatsoever. But it only works if you have leftover cereal crumbs, and we don't eat enough packaged cereal for that these days.

Still, we're not in any great hurry to make this dessert again. We both enjoyed it well enough, but to be honest, we'd have enjoyed those nice fresh peaches almost as much if we'd just eaten them, which would be even healthier and easier. Given the cost of the ingredients and the relatively modest payoff, it doesn't seem worth the effort.

Gardeners' Holidays 2026: First Fruits

June is the month when our garden really hits its stride. It's the last hurrah of the arugula before it bolts in the summer heat, but our all-season lettuce is still going full blast, giving us enough leaves for salads with every meal if we want them. We just harvested our first full meal's worth of snap peas, and we've already started gathering dill for pickles (though with store-bought cucumbers, as ours aren't producing yet. By the time they are, the dill will be all bolted. A bit of poor planning on Mother Nature's part). Our honeyberry bushes are yielding about a half cup of berries every day, and we've just started gleaning the first early raspberries and a few little strawberries.

Unfortunately, it looks like all this production may soon be cut short—literally. 

Just a couple of days ago, Brian came in from the garden and declared grimly, "We're going to have to step up our deer game." As the deer in our area have grown more numerous, they've also grown more rapacious, and apparently our makeshift deer fence is no longer enough to deter them. The latest intruder had eaten the tops of all our pea and bean plants, a few tomato vines, and even one leaf off a prickly zucchini plant. Strangely, it had left almost everything within three feet of ground level untouched, so we still have plenty of lettuce and herbs. Even the arugula, which has almost all flowered by now and would have been no loss, was unscathed. But this damage (accompanied by a pile of deer scat that clearly identified the culprit) was a clear warning sign that we'd need to take more drastic measures to guard the rest of the crops.

Unfortunately, when it comes to deer, that's easier said than done. They can easily jump over anything under eight feet tall, and while a shorter fence can deter them if it's completely solid, that would also block sunlight out of the garden, defeating the purpose. Of all the ideas in this article, the only one that seems practical is to augment our existing groundhog-proof fence with eight-foot poles, then wrap the whole construction in deer netting. Unfortunately, this would also make it difficult for us to get in, as we'd have to duck under the netting to get through the garden gate. We might try to leave that area net-free and instead add some tall spikes to the top of the gate itself. These would (we hope) deter the deer while still allowing us to open the gate.

In preparation for this project, Brian has pruned away the lower branches of the big evergreen at the corner of the garden, which were thick enough to be entangling the existing fence. The next step is to take an inventory of our existing supplies and see if we have enough netting to go all the way around the garden. If we do, we can just try attaching it to the poles forming our current deer fence and see if that's enough to support it. If not, we'll have to buy more.

I'll keep you posted here to let you know how the construction of the fence goes and whether it succeeds in keeping out the intruders. Until then, we'll just do our best to keep our eyes open and be prepared to go chase away deer as needed. And we'll also focus on enjoying the produce we still have while we have it, for tomorrow it may be deer food.

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.