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' worth 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.

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.

Ecofrugal fails

I usually post here about our ecofrugal wins: successful repairs, DIY projects like our new planters, secondhand finds like Brian's new laptop. But I try to report on some of our failures too, partly to help you learn from our mistakes and partly to present a more accurate picture of the ecofrugal life, rather than a carefully curated glossy social-media version. So here's a quick midweek post to tell you about two recent problems that we could only fix in the least ecofrugal way: with a brand-new, store-bought product.

Case #1: The unsatisfactory window blinds

One of the last finishing touches we made to our guest room in 2014 was install window treatments. Rather than go out and buy some, we just hung up a set of bamboo window blinds that we'd acquired for free somewhere. We figured they'd do until we found something better, but of course, twelve years came and went and we never got around to replacing them.

These shades are just about the worst possible window treatment for this space. You have to pull the cord all the way to the right to raise them and all the way to the left to lower them, which is difficult to do with the seedling table in the way (particularly if you've got stubby little arms like mine). And even if you can manage to pull the cord across, eight times out of ten it gets caught on one of the slats, and you have to try to maneuver it loose before you can pull on it. Every time I try to open or close the blinds, I spent at least five minutes wrestling with them.

I finally decided I'd had enough and informed Brian I wanted to replace the window treatments. Since i had a meeting in Somerville last Saturday, he proposed we make a short jaunt afterwards to the Habitat ReStore to see if we could find something secondhand. And jaunt we did, but we found that the selection of window treatments was woefully limited. There was only one shade in the size we needed, and it was a Venetian blind like the ones we were trying to replace—not exactly a solution.

So we ended up making a trip up to IKEA yesterday and dropping $88 on a new set of honeycomb shades. And, of course, while there we also spent another $40 on other odds and ends: more rechargeable batteries, a few new dish towels, a couple of bowls to replace the two we've broken over the past two years, one new bed pillow for guests, and a couple of lingonberry products. Plus we spent $23 having lunch at the cafe, and while his falafel balls (a new menu item) were okay, my salmon filet was woefully overcooked and not at all satisfying.

I know it's silly to feel bad about this expense. The old blinds really were a problem, and we really did make a good-faith effort to find secondhand ones first. But I can't help feeling like a bit of an ecofrugal failure for having to resort to retail.

Case #2: The broken sink

I feel even worse about this second failure, because in a way, it was my fault.

I treat my hair every day or two with a solution of rosemary oil to reduce thinning. And, foolishly, I've been keeping this mixture in a little glass jar, allowing myself to be swayed by sustainability influencers railing against plastic use. Yesterday, as I was reaching for something else in the medicine chest, this little jar came tumbling out and landed in the sink. Fortunately, it landed top side down, so the jar didn't break and no harm was done.

Or so I thought until this morning, when I noticed a small damp spot under the sink. Brian checked it out and discovered two large chips nearby that had broken off from the porcelain of the sink itself. At first he thought he might be able to patch the hole with epoxy, but closer examination revealed that there was a huge crack running all the way up the side of the sink bowl. So he had to spend most of the morning removing the nice new sink that we just put in three years ago, heading out to Home Depot for a replacement, and installing the new one in its place. This cost us $50 and most of the morning, and we still can't use the sink until the caulk has set. And worse still, in the process of extracting the old sink, he also cracked the new laminate of the vanity top. Fortunately, he was able to stick it back down with some superglue, and the pattern of the laminate hides the crack pretty well, but still, our nice new vanity top is now permanently damaged, all because I stupidly paid more attention to anti-plastic screeds than to my own common sense. (I've now transferred the rosemary mixture to a salvaged plastic container that should prove less hazardous.)

For someone who devotes so much time and energy to looking for ways to save money, I seem to be doing an awfully good job of spending it.

In search of middle-hanging fruit

When I see an article offering advice on how to save energy or shrink your carbon footprint, I usually click on it, but without much hope or enthusiasm. I can be pretty sure that most or all of the advice in it will be about things we already do, such as:

• Replacing single-use water bottles, napkins, grocery bags, etc., with reusable ones 
• Eating less meat and dairy 
• Composting 
• Walking or biking for short trips, instead of driving
• Washing laundry in cold water and drying it outdoors
• Taking shorter showers and/or using a low-flow showerhead
• Setting the thermostat lower in winter and higher in summer
• Insulating your home and sealing up leaks
• Switching your electricity supplier to one that uses clean energy (or, better yet, community solar)
• Upgrading your old, inefficient light bulbs (honestly, is there anyone who hasn't done this yet)? 

Occasionally, these articles also recommend some bigger changes we haven't made yet, like getting solar panels, driving an EV, or swapping out your furnace for a heat pump. But in every case, we've already considered these ideas and concluded that they just don't work for us at this time. We can't get solar panels because our home electric usage is too small to meet the minimum size requirements for a solar array. We don't want to replace our only car with an EV until we feel confident that it will be practical for long trips. And we aren't prepared to spend $24,000 on a heat pump that would probably increase, not decrease, our winter heating bill.

At first glance, our problem appears straightforward: when it comes to living a greener lifestyle, we've already harvested all the low-hanging fruit. If it's cheap and easy to do, we've already done it. Our house and our car are about as efficient at this point as anything running on fossil fuels can possibly be. To improve any further, we need to reach for the higher-hanging fruit that involves more hassle and/or expense. And that's only to be expected.

But in fact, it's more complicated than that. It's not just that we've already done all the easy stuff; by doing so, we've actually reduced the value of doing the harder stuff.

Take the heat pump, for example. According to the EPA, the 295 therms of gas we burned for home heating last winter produced about 1.56 metric tons of CO2. An electric heat pump would cost us about $24,000 and would last around 15 years, for a cost of $1,600 per year, plus another $100 or so in increased heating bills. That works out to over $1,089 per metric ton of greenhouse gas saved—far higher than the $190 a ton that the EPA under the Biden administration estimated as the "social cost" of carbon emissions. And the reason that cost per ton is so high is precisely because our current carbon footprint for heating is so low. If we hadn't already turned down the thermostat, insulated the attic, and bought a reasonably efficient gas boiler, we'd be doing the climate a lot more good by going electric. As it is, the benefit is pretty slim.

It's the same thing with the solar panels. Unlike a heat pump, a solar array probably would save us money in the long term—but because our electric usage is so small, we can't install one. And while there's nothing to stop us from buying an electric car, the maximum we could possibly shave from our carbon footprint by doing so is 0.21 tons, the carbon cost of the 219 gallons of gas we burned last year. (This year, with Brian fully retired, it will probably be even less.) The problem isn't simply that we've harvested all the low-hanging fruit, and what remains is harder to reach; it's that the higher-up fruit isn't worth as much to us because we've already filled up on the easy stuff.

So where does this leave us? Do we simply rest on our laurels with the fruit we've collected, or do we keep struggling ever higher up the tree in search of ever fewer and smaller apples? 

What I'm hoping is that I can manage to find a middle ground—a few fruits hidden amongst the foliage in the middle branches of the tree. For example, consider the induction burner we bought in 2024. It has taken over about half our cooking, shaving about 2 therms of natural gas use from our monthly bill and about an eighth of a ton from our carbon footprint. Assuming it lasts us ten years, that works out to 1.3 metric tons of greenhouse gas for just $89, or $68 per ton. (The burner also adds about $2.40 a month to our electric bill, but that's almost exactly equal to what we're saving on gas.) A full-size induction stove with an electric oven would cut our gas use by about twice as much—2.6 tons over 10 years—but at a cost of around $1,300 (and possibly several thou more to upgrade our electric panel to accommodate it). That works out to $500 a ton, which is a lot more bucks for the carbon-reduction bang.

So my goal at this point is to take the same kind of half measures with our other fossil-fuel-using devices—starting with our gas boiler. Last summer, after learning that we'd need to spend at least $20,000 (after rebates) on a heat pump that would completely replace the boiler, I speculated that maybe we could partially replace it by installing a through-the-wall heat pump in place of our old, inefficient wall AC unit. I've since dug into this a bit more and found a $1,200 unit that appears to be the same size as our current AC unit, which would allow us to swap it in with no need to cut a new hole in the wall. We'll have to pull the old AC unit out and measure the space to make sure, but if I'm right, we could probably install it ourselves, making that $1,200 (or say $1,300 with tax) the only cost. 

According to the description of the unit, it's sized for a space between 400 and 550 square feet, which is about one-third of the conditioned space in our home. So, at a rough guess, it might be able to cut our gas use for heating by around one-third. If it lasts 13 years, that would be $100 per year for about a half-ton reduction in our carbon footprint, or about $200 per ton. That's less than one-fifth the cost per ton for a full-sized heat pump. It's still a lot more expensive than a few LED light bulbs or a low-flow showerhead (especially since we got most of those for free), but it offers much bigger energy savings, too. It's a medium-sized cost to gain a medium-sized benefit—the perfect middle-hanging fruit.