Adding and removing leaves

Thanksgiving is over, and that means it's time for our annual garden ritual: the Stealing of the Leaves We've found a good thick layer of leaves is the best possible surface to cover our garden paths and keep the weeds under control, and they're useful for mulching the planting areas too: the flower and herb beds, trees and bushes, asparagus and rhubarb, and even the raised garden beds. However, our three smallish plum trees don't drop nearly enough leaves in the fall to cover all this area, so we've resorted to swiping bags of leaves from the curb outside our neighbor's house. 

Brian argues that this isn't really stealing, since the neighbors clearly don't want them and the borough is probably only picking them up to keep them from accumulating in the street. However, I can't shake the feeling of guilt that we might be depriving the borough of a revenue source by taking them. Its website says only that the leaves get "delivered to a compost facility," not whether it gets paid for them, so I have no way of knowing whether the few bags we've snatched represent an added cost to the town or a net benefit. (I wouldn't mind paying the borough to compensate for what we take, but I don't know how to make the offer.) 

Either way, though, I don't feel guilty enough about it to stop doing it. For one thing, there's no other obvious way to get leaves in the quantities we need. Also, the bagged leaves are extra handy because we can use the brown paper bags as well as the leaves. Today, for instance, Brian dumped out several bags' worth of leaves in our front yard, then ripped up the bags into strips to lay down on our garden paths as an extra weed barrier. He then worked his way around the garden like Gromit laying down model railroad track, dumping leaves on top of the papered area and then laying out more paper in front of the leafed area until all the paths were covered.

As we raked out the scattered leaves, we discovered something odd: a lot of them weren't real. We kept spotting flashes of unnaturally bright color amid the brown, and when we zoomed in, we found they were fake leaves made of some kind of stiff fabric. We eventually ended up with a double handful of fake leaves and even some kind of branch covered in glitter and little baubles. We could only assume that some of our neighbors' yard decorations had fallen down and inadvertently got raked up along with the real leaves. This made me feel a bit better about stealing them, since this faux-liage definitely wasn't biodegradable and would only have created a headache for the composting facility.

Along with adding leaves to the places where we wanted them, we also had to make sure we didn't have any where they weren't wanted: in our gutters and downspouts. This is a considerably more onerous job, since we have to haul out our massive 18-foot extension ladder and run it up the back of the house. Brian ran into a bit of a snag trying to do this: he got the ladder fully extended on the ground only to discover that he couldn't lift it upright in that form. He had to telescope one end of it back down, prop it up against the wall, and then ratchet it up to full length before inching carefully up it while I held it steady from below. Luckily there were no leaves in that area, so all he had to do was take a quick peek before climbing back down. The front of the house, which is only one story, was much easier to check, and there he did spot a small clump of leaves near one end of the gutter that he had to clean out by moving the ladder to the porch steps on the south end of the house. Fortunately, it has multiple configurations, so he was able to set it up with one end on the steps and the other on the ground.

Thanks to our sturdy, adjustable ladder, this job was doable, but it would have been a lot easier if we had some way of viewing the gutters without the ladder so Brian would only have to climb up there if they were actually clogged. I've been toying with the idea of getting him a cheap camera drone for this purpose, like this $43 model on eBay. When I mentioned the idea to him, he admitted that he'd consider it $43 well spent if it saved him having to hoist himself up that ladder every fall. However, when I ran an online search on this idea, I found a Reddit thread arguing that (1) a drone of reasonable quality will cost at least a few hundred dollars, and (2) it's not actually all that easy to fly one close to a building. 

Fortunately, one Redditor in this thread offered what might be a better idea: taping a camera to "a very long aluminum pole/selfie stick" instead. I did a little hunting around on the Home Depot Site, and it looks like it's possible to buy one of those for around $40. It would probably be even better than a drone, since we could not only strap a camera phone onto it to check the gutters but also attach a tool to do the actual cleaning if necessary. That would be both easier and safer than sending Brian up a 16 foot ladder once a year. And it would leave us more time to to focus on moving leaves around at ground level.

Bonus recipe: Vegan pumpkin pie

My family's Thanksgiving dinner is a collaborative effort. My dad cooks the turkey, stuffing, and a veggie (which we supplement with our roasted broccoli). My aunt and uncle bring an assortment of delicacies for lunch (cheese, crackers, veggies, dips, and so forth). My brother-in-law brings a couple of good bottles of wine. And we provide our homemade pickles, cranberry sauce, and the all-important pies: one rhubarb, one pumpkin.

For years, Brian made both pies with butter crusts. But when we started making our own plant butter a couple of years ago, Brian decided to try using that in the crust instead. He had to experiment a bit with the recipe to get a dough that would make a reasonable lattice crust, but eventually he found that a ratio of about 3 parts canola to 8 parts refined coconut oil, without the soy milk, would do the job. It's trickier to work with than a butter crust, as the coconut oil has a lower melting point, but if you get it good and cold ahead of time and then work quickly, it can be done.

With this change, our rhubarb pie became vegan. However, we assumed that it would be impossible to do the same with our pumpkin pie, which has eggs and evaporated milk in the filling. And since no one in my family is vegan or otherwise averse to dairy, there was no strong incentive to try. 

But this year, with a bunch of leftover silken tofu in the fridge that needed to get used up before Thanksgiving weekend, Brian started wondering whether it could be put to use in pie form. And this got him thinking about the kappa carageenan that we use in our plant-based mozzarella. After all, this stuff is commonly used as both a thickener and a gelling agent; could adding it to our pumpkin mixture help it set up nice and firm without eggs?

To test this idea, he made a mini pie the week before Thanksgiving, replacing the evaporated milk and eggs with tofu, soymilk, and a teaspoon of kappa carageenan. This did indeed make the filling firm—quite a bit firmer than he expected. Rather than a soft custard, it came out as a smooth, solid layer with a texture that could best be compared to bologna. It proved that the idea was workable, but it was clear that we'd need to dial the carageenan way back to get the texture we were after. 

So, when preparing the pies for the actual Thanksgiving feast, Brian made two pumpkin pies: a full-sized one using our regular recipe, and a smaller one using only a quarter-teaspoon of the carageenan. He also added a bit of baking soda to help the filling puff up. He didn't want to slice into the pie before the family got to see it, but he tested the bit of filling that was left in the saucepan once it had cooled, and he found that the texture was indeed pretty close to what you'd expect in a pumpkin pie. 

This made him confident enough about the mini vegan pie to serve it up alongside the regular pumpkin and rhubarb pies on Thanksgiving Day. Most of the family ventured at least a small taste, and they all agreed that it tasted just like a pumpkin pie. With the two pumpkin pies side by side, it was quite clear that they weren't identical; the original version had a much softer texture. But it wasn't necessarily better, just different. If you like your filling a little on the firmer side, you might even prefer this version.

So, if you'd like to try this vegan pumpkin pie for your next holiday gathering, or any other time, here's the full recipe. The one Brian made was only one-quarter this size, but he's quadrupled all the quantities to produce a 9-inch pie recipe.

Vegan Pumpkin Pie

First, make the vegan pie shell. If you don't normally keep your flour in the fridge, start by putting 1 cup all-purpose flour in the refrigerator to chill. 

Melt 1/4 cup refined coconut oil and mix it with 1.5 Tbsp. canola oil in a medium-to-large bowl. Place oil mixture in fridge for 5-10 minutes, take out to whisk, then return to fridge. Repeat until the mixture has just solidified, then whip with an electric mixer for a minute and return to fridge for 30+ minutes. 

Add 1/2 tsp. salt and the cold flour to the solidified whipped oil mixture and use a pastry blender or fork to quickly combine the ingredients until the oil has disappeared into the flour. Return to the fridge if necessary. 

Add ice water to the mixture, one tablespoon at a time, using a fork to work it in after each addition, until the mixture begins to cohere and can be formed into a ball. Return to the fridge if necessary.

Generously coat a flat surface and a rolling pin with cold flour and carefully roll the dough flat (about 2 mm thick). Fold the rolled dough in half, lift it in the pie pan (5-6” for pilot; 9” for full), then unfold it. Adjust the position of the dough in the shell and use ice water to glue any breaks closed. Cut the dough hanging over the edges to about 1-2”, then roll it up and crimp it. Place the finished pie shell in the fridge until the filling is ready. 

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. 

To make the filling, combine 1 cup sugar, 1 tsp. kappa carageenan, 1/2 tsp. salt, 1 tsp. cinnamon, 1/2 tsp. powdered ginger, 1/4 tsp. cloves, 1/4 tsp. allspice, and 1/4 tsp. nutmeg. Mix thoroughly and set aside.

Blend 12 oz. silken tofu until smooth. Add 1 cup soymilk and 1 can pumpkin puree and blend thoroughly. In a saucepan, heat the liquid mixture, stirring, until it starts to bubble. 

Add combined dry ingredients to liquid and stir for five minutes. Mixture should continue to bubble throughout. 

Add 1/2 tsp. baking powder and quickly whisk it completely into the mixture. Immediately pour mixture into the prepared pie shell, then bake for 25+ minutes, until pie shell is thoroughly baked.

Three quick fixes

A big part of living ecofrugally is finding ways to fix problems without throwing a lot of money at them. Just in the past week, we've had three problems that most people probably would have solved by purchasing something—possibly something quite expensive. Instead, we fixed them with minimal expense, plus a little ingenuity.

Problem #1: The Unkindest Cut

During one of our afternoon walks, Brian and I decided to pop into the supermarket and see what kind of Hanukkah candles they had available. (Answer: the cheap kind that drip all over the place.) On the way back out, Brian bumped his arm against the railing that runs along the pedestrian pathway leading up to the store—right at the spot where there was a small gap in the railing. And apparently that little, innocuous-looking break was pretty sharp, because it slashed right through the sleeve of his winter coat, leaving a right-angled gash a couple of inches long.

If this had happened to any other garment, I'd just have whipped out my trusty sewing kit and stitched it up as soon as we got home. But because it was his winter coat, I had some doubts about whether I could sew up the tear securely enough to make it watertight. Brian thought maybe the best fix would be to darn it first, then add a patch to protect the stitches, and then, as a final layer of protection, give it a coat of waterproofing spray. But as it turned out, once I'd finished darning it—going over the entire length of the rip twice, first with a back stitch to fasten the torn pieces together, then with a whip stitch to tack down the raw edges—Brian thought it looked secure enough to wear as is. If it turns out not to be, we can still go over it with the waterproofing spray, but it seems to be good enough for now.

Obvious fix: a new winter coat for around $200. Ecofrugal fix: a few cents' worth of thread and about 20 minutes of work.

Problem #2: The Dark Room

In order to stitch up Brian's coat, I had to take it into the bedroom, which is the only place I can reasonably sew without being interrupted by cats. (This is not only a hassle but a hazard, since eating a length of thread—something they would definitely do if they got the chance—could literally tear up their insides.) Unfortunately, this room isn't really ideal for the purpose. The only place to sit is the bed, which is also the only surface to work on, but the worst problem is the light level. Like most of the rooms in our house, the bedroom has no built-in lighting, and there's no spot in the room that could accommodate a floor lamp like we use in the office. So for the past 18 years, it's been lit solely by a table lamp on Brian's dresser with a single 1600-lumen bulb. This might be enough to light up the whole room if it were more centrally placed, but as is, it leaves the bed largely in shadow. Several times while working, I had to haul the bulky coat over to the dresser and maneuver the sleeve up next to the light to see my work, then take it back to the bed to continue sewing.

From time to time over the years, Brian and I had discussed ways to get more light into that room, but we'd never settled on anything. But this time, I decided I'd had enough. I told Brian I really, really needed more light in there, and he proposed a trip up to the Habitat for Humanity ReStore in Manville. I was hoping to find a table lamp there that could accommodate two bulbs, like the one we currently have in the guest room, but their limited lamp selection didn't include any. What we did find was a little desk lamp with a flexible neck that we could set up on my dresser as a secondary light source. It was marked at $5.49, but because it had a half-price orange tag, the final price was only $2.74.

Since the lamp didn't come with a bulb, and since we didn't have any spares at home that were bright enough, we made a side trip over to the nearest Home Depot. There we discovered that LED light bulb prices, after falling steeply for years, had apparently shot back up. A four-pack of soft white, 1,600-lumen LED bulbs would set us back a minimum of $16, or $4 per bulb—twice as much as we'd paid in 2016. Fortunately, there was a Target right next door, so we checked there and found a 4-pack of soft white, 1,340-lumen bulbs—not quite as bright, but probably bright enough—for only $10. With one of these installed, our new lamp provides perfectly good task lighting on the bed surface. It can also be angled up to splash light against the ceiling for more general illumination. And with three bulbs left over, we were able to upgrade the two-bulb fixture in the guest room to get a bit more light in there too.

Obvious fix: a brand-new two-bulb lamp for around $107 plus $16 for new bulbs, for $123 total. Ecofrugal fix: Around $13 for the lamp and bulbs together.

Problem #3: The Face Monster

For about five years now, Brian has been using a CPAP machine for sleep apnea. And hating it. He hates being tethered to it while he sleeps. He hates the way the mask feels on his face. He hates having air literally forced down his throat. He hates having to haul it with him whenever we travel. After a lot of effort, he's trained himself to fall asleep while wearing it, but if he wakes up at any point during the night, he can't get back to sleep with it on. So he ends up unplugging for the rest of the night, which means he's often just teetering on the edge of the minimum four hours a night required to be a "compliant" patient (a loathsome term that strips the patient of any agency in their own care and replaces it with a duty to obey orders without question).

But perhaps the most annoying thing about it is that it was kind of forced on him. When he was first diagnosed with sleep apnea, his doctor told him that he "needed" a CPAP, without so much as mentioning other options like positional therapy (side sleeping). True, positional therapy doesn't work for everyone, but neither does CPAP; as many as 50 percent of patients give up on the machine because it's more unbearable than the symptoms that sent them to the doctor in the first place. Wouldn't it make sense to let patients at least try the cheaper, less intrusive method first?

Brian has tried a couple of DIY solutions to force him to sleep on his side, like attaching a tennis ball to the back of his T-shirt and wearing a backpack to bed, but neither one worked very well. The tennis ball didn't stay put, so he'd wake up on his back with the ball twisted around to the side of his body. The backpack did a better job of keeping him in place, but it was too uncomfortable to wear all night.

Still, in light of how much he dislikes the CPAP, I thought it was worth another try. I was going to suggest he try a commercial device like the Rematee "bumper belt," which is basically a mini backpack filled with inflatable air pillows. But then it occurred to me that we actually had something that might serve the same purpose: a mini backpack Brian picked up years ago as conference swag. I fished it out of the box where we'd stowed it and experimented stuffing it with different things. First, I tried some old T-shirts from the pile bound for textile recycling, but Brian said those were too soft; if he had that squishy pack on his back, he'd just roll right on top of it. Then I tried it filling with books, which offered more resistance but tended to slide around a bit. Finally I went to the stash of old boxes we keep for wrapping gifts and found a couple that filled the bag snugly: one large flat one and one smaller one in front, shimmed up by an old pair of sandals (also from the textile recycling pile) on either side. When Brian tested the pack with these in, he found that it fit on his back without sliding around and was rigid enough to prevent him from rolling over.

So far, this is just an untested prototype. We still have to see how it performs in an actual sleep situation: whether it can manage to keep him on his side, and if so, whether that's enough to keep him from snoring and sputtering. But if it does, it may allow him to finally free himself from the face monster.

Obvious fix: a $125 commercial device. Ecofrugal fix: a makeshift gadget that took only a few minutes to assemble and cost nothing at all.

Recipe of the Month: Smoked Cauliflower Soup

This is going to be a very full weekend. Tomorrow I'm spending the entire afternoon with my Citizens' Climate Lobby chapter, watching CCL's Fall Virtual Conference (which technically has already started, but tonight's session is just a "reception" that I don't consider important). On Sunday, we've got a role-playing game session scheduled in the afternoon, after which we'll just have time to grab some dinner before dashing off to a rehearsal for the Cotillion Singers—an ad hoc group that forms once a year and learns four or five pieces for a single performance at the Princeton Country Dancers Winter Cotillion. So tonight is about the only time I have free to dash off a quick blog entry about November's Recipe of the Month: the Smoked Cauliflower Soup from Everyday Happy Herbivore.

This is the fifth recipe we've tried from this cookbook, which we picked up at Half Price Books last Christmas, and all the others were varying degrees of lackluster. The Spicy Orange Broccoli was decidedly lacking in orange flavor, the Chickpea Tenders were dry and crumbly, and the low-sugar, high-fiber Glazed Pumpkin Biscuits and Apple Fritter Cups were both stodgy and insufficiently sweet. So I was feeling a bit disillusioned with the book, but I decided to give it one more try, this time with a simple recipe that looked like it could hardly go wrong. Then, if that one proved as disappointing as the others, I'd pass on the book to someone else.

The Smoked Cauliflower Soup recipe certainly looked straightforward enough. The first step is chopping up a whole cauliflower and boiling it until tender. While that's going, you whip up a soup base from a cup of nondairy milk (we used soy) seasoned with onion powder, garlic powder, Cajun seasoning, salt, paprika, and liquid smoke. Then you add the cooked cauliflower, blend it all together, and heat it through. 

It seemed pretty foolproof, and yet Brian was wary. Based on his knowledge and our previous experiences with this cookbook, he was convinced the amount of seasoning in the recipe was going to be woefully inadequate. So he doubled the liquid smoke from an eighth of a teaspoon to a quarter, tripled the Cajun seasoning from a half-teaspoon to a half-tablespoon, and bumped up the salt from a tiny dash to a robust teaspoon and a quarter. He also decided the meal needed more protein, so he supplemented the dish with some roasted chickpeas. These were even simpler than the soup itself: he just drained a can of chickpeas, tossed them with a half tablespoon of canola oil and a teaspoon of Cajun seasoning (to match the soup), and baked them at 450F for 20 minutes. 

Both these alterations turned out to be wise choices. The thick soup had a texture rather like Cream of Wheat, and without Brian's additional seasonings, it would probably have tasted pretty much like it too. Instead, it was reasonably flavorful, and sprinkling the chick peas on top gave it a bit of textural interest as well. In fact, I thought the chickpeas were by far the best part of the meal, and I saw the soup as little more than a vehicle for carrying them. Brian liked it better than I did, enough to take seconds at dinner and willingly polish off the leftovers for lunch the next day, but he didn't absolutely love it. All in all, we both agreed that while there was nothing wrong with the soup recipe, it wasn't nearly as interesting as most of the other things we do with cauliflower, such as his aloo gobi and the roasted cauliflower dish that was our Recipe of the Month for June. So while we both liked it all right, we don't see any compelling reason to make it again.

All in all, I'd give this dish a solid C, maybe a C plus. It's a passing grade, but I'm not sure it's a good enough one to bring up the cookbook's GPA to a reasonable level—particularly when you consider how much Brian had to amplify the seasoning in the recipe just to get it up to that passing score. So I can't decide if we should keep tinkering with the cookbook or give up on it. Maybe we should pick out just one more interesting-looking recipe, give that one a try, and let that be the deciding vote. If that dish is a keeper, so is the cookbook; if not, it's time to write the book off as a loss.

Taming the hell strip, part 2

So, I realize there's not much to see in this photo. But there's a lot more going on below the surface. 

Remember how, four months back, Brian first embarked on his project to transform our hell strip (the narrow sliver of land between the sidewalk and street) from a ragged patch of weeds to an actual planting bed? At that time, we planted about one-third of it and assumed the rest would have to wait until spring. But on further consideration, Brian thought it would make more sense to plant seeds now, in the fall, rather than start seedlings indoors and transplant them in springtime. That way, they'd get a head start on germination, the same way the weeds do, and they wouldn't have to deal with transplant shock. 

Last weekend, we started the process. Brian used our King of Spades shovel to chop up the turf into blocks, which I turned over and whacked with a trowel to knock as much dirt off the roots as possible before dumping the top layer into a bucket destined for the compost bin. Then, while Brian went to empty the buckets and fetch his supplies, I set to work with the trowel excavating a narrow channel running along the edge of the road. When he returned, he set down one of the two-by-fours he'd brought into this channel, forming a boundary for the bed. (The main reason he had to do this is that there's a curb cut along that stretch of sidewalk, so he couldn't rely on the curb to form a boundary. But the two-by-fours will also form an extra barrier to keep the plants from impinging on the sidewalk and make the bed look more defined.) 

We then worked together to dig out a similar channel along the other side, next to the sidewalk, and fill it in with a second two-by-four. After that, Brian had to get out his big tape measure and measure the exact distance from the end of this section to the end of the bed, right at the property line, and go inside to cut the boards to the right length. Actually, he had to break one of them up into two smaller pieces, because there's a sewer access pipe right at the edge of the sidewalk. So he fitted two shorter pieces around it, one on either side, and capped the whole area off with a short piece at the end.

At this point, we had a nice, empty planting bed, but we weren't quite ready to plant in it. We'd used up all the free mulch we got last summer, and Brian didn't think it would be a good idea to put the seeds in without a layer of mulch to protect them. We could have used leaves, as we do in some of our other beds, but he wasn't confident they'd stay put in such an exposed area. And by that point, it was getting a bit late in the day to run out to the store and buy some. So we left the bed empty until we had a chance to pick some up at Lowe's (along with a few other things I'll tell you about shortly).

Yesterday, with mulch in hand, we were ready to finish the job. We had three kinds of seeds to plant: salvia, which we already have some of in the first part of the bed; rudbeckia, or black-eyed Susans, which we'd picked up a couple of packets of at Ocean State Job Lot; and golden ragwort, a native plant that we got a small packet of as a freebie at a town fair. It combines low-growing foliage with tall flower spikes that bloom in April and May, making it a good complement to the salvia and rudbeckia, which bloom from midsummer into fall. And all three are supposed to be reasonably deer resistant, a key requirement if we want the plants to survive in an area where deer stroll right up the street browsing on anything they can reach. (It's less clear how the new flowers will fare against groundhogs, but we'll have to wait and see.)

To ensure a good mix of the three varieties throughout the bed, I worked out a staggered arrangement for planting them: ragwort on the near side of the bed, then salvia about four inches along on the opposite side, then back to the near side for rudbeckia, then across to the other for another ragwort, and so on. Brian marked up a ruler with pieces of masking tape to indicate the lengthwise spacing, then placed the roll of masking tape on the ground at one end to mark the spot where his seeds would go. He added a small pinch of seeds in the circle formed by the tape, moved it to the next spot, added a pinch of seeds there, and continued the pattern along the whole length of the bed. My job was to scoot along beside him, handing him the packets of seeds in the correct order, so he wouldn't have to juggle all three. He had to be pretty sparing with his pinches—no more than three or four seeds at a time—to make the ragwort and salvia seeds last the whole length of the bed, but he managed it with a tiny bit to spare. I sprinkled the remaining ragwort and rudbeckia seeds in amongst the existing salvia plants in the older portion of the bed so everything would eventually have the same mix of flowers. Once that was done, we covered everything up with a nice layer of mulch to protect the seeds from wind and hungry birds (and, equally important, make it clear that the hell strip is now a planting bed and not merely a bare patch of ground). Then, as a finishing touch, I took one of the phone line insulators from the edges of our other flowerbed and set it over top of the sewer pipe opening. Besides looking nicer, this will keep the pipe from getting covered up by mulch, so it will be easy to locate.

All told, yesterday's portion of the job took about an hour, and we had lovely weather for it. Then, not content to rest on his laurels (or ragworts), Brian went on to tackle a couple of other jobs that needed doing in the front yard. To put this in context, I need to go back a month or so. One morning in early October, Brian and I noticed a lot of hustle and bustle going on in our next-door neighbor's yard, which turned out to be a bunch of workers attempting to unclog a blocked sewer line. They eventually worked out that to do the job properly, they'd have to dig up and replace the entire line, all the way out to the curb. And although it was technically his sewer line, a good portion of it was on our property. (Apparently these two lots used to be one larger lot, which would explain that unused curb cut in the middle of our curb.) To get at the pipe, they'd have to tear out the hedge on that side of our yard and rip up the underlying ground.

Unfortunately, we were about to head off to Virginia for a weekend with friends, so we couldn't stick around to supervise this process. We told him to do whatever he needed to do and not worry about replacing our hedge, which wasn't in such great shape anyway. And the workers took us at our word, because when we returned home, one whole side of our yard was missing. There was just a big crater in the ground, surrounded by caution tape and plastic sheeting.

Over the next couple of days, the workers filled in the hole, leaving a huge patch of bare dirt, and cleared away the plastic. At that point, it became apparent that a lot more than just the hedge was missing. The excavation had torn up part of the slate flagstone path that led from our front door to the street, and at least three stones were completely gone. It had also damaged our raspberry trellis, shearing off the lines and ripping out both the U-post at the near end and the anchor stake we'd secured it to. Brian was able to find the post, but it was too badly bent to reuse, and one of the three turnbuckles attached to it was missing. And, since the lost post had also been one corner of the invisible deer fence around our front flowerbed, that was damaged as well.

Luckily, none of this damage is terribly difficult or costly to repair. We were able to pick up a new U-post and another turnbuckle for about $26 at Lowe's, and we already had one additional anchor post left from the set of four we'd bought to stake our plum tree in 2020. After finishing up the hell strip on Saturday, Brian drove the new U-post into the spot where the old one had been, and I held the trellis wires in place while he tightened them up. He secured the new anchor into an undisturbed patch of ground a little farther back from where the old one had been and fastened another length of cable, which we still had left over from last time, around the anchor and up to the top of the post. We also had some of the fishing line we'd used for the deer fence left, so fixing that was a simple matter of tying a piece to the new post.

As for the flagstones, Brian wants to hold off on replacing those until the disturbed patch of dirt in the yard has fully settled. By the time that happens, the ground may be frozen, so it's possible it will have to wait until spring. But whenever we're ready, we have a couple of extra flagstones in the back yard, half buried next to the clothesline, that we can unearth and add to the damaged end of the path. And for the third, Brian thinks he can cannibalize one from the rainwater channel he added to the side slope in our backyard last year. If we find that the channel doesn't work so well without it, we can always replace it with one of the leftover tiles from our downstairs bathroom renovation.

Gardeners' Holidays 2025: Late Harvest

With the days growing shorter and temperatures dipping ever lower, Brian and I have spent a lot of the past few weeks getting ready for winter. We've had our boiler tuned up, put our warm comforter on the bed, and gotten our flu and COVID jabs. I've stashed away my light cotton socks and filled up my sock drawer with my warmer wool and acrylic ones. My wearable blanket and pressure cooker space heater have already been pressed into service. And, out in the garden, we've harvested all the tender crops and pretty much everything else.

Sadly, this didn't take very long. Our gardening year appears to be ending not with a bang, but with a whimper, particularly in the squash department. After last year's 42-pound bumper crop, we thought we'd hit on a winning strategy by sticking to the Waltham variety, but this year it fell completely flat. Our four vines produced only six squash, including one so small you can't even see it in the photo. In total, they weighed just 14 pounds, one-third of what we got last year. 

This has me questioning whether our all-Waltham approach is so wise after all. Maybe next year, it would be a good idea to hedge our bets by adding a second variety, such as Burpee's Butterbush. Even if it's less productive overall, it could be something to fall back on if the Waltham is a flop again. Or perhaps we should upgrade to Fedco's new "primo strain," Wig Out Waltham, which promises "the best in yield and consistency" for only marginally higher cost.

However, there is one bright spot in our fall harvest. We currently have a pretty good haul of one crop that we didn't actually plant: black walnuts.

Every fall since we moved to Highland Park, I've noticed the ground in certain areas being strewn with these odd sort of greenish balls, roughly the size of an egg. Sometimes, I'd see one split open and what looked like a blackish nut poking out. However, I vaguely assumed they probably weren't edible because no one seemed to be gathering them. It wasn't until this year, when there were so many of the green balls underfoot that I had to kick them off the sidewalk to keep from slipping on them and tumbling arse-over-teakettle, that I bothered to investigate the matter. After a little research, I learned that the green balls are indeed the fruit of the black walnut tree, and while they aren't themselves edible, the nuts are.

Mind you, it takes a bit of work to get at them. First, you have to strip off the husk—carefully, as it can stain almost anything it touches. Then they need to cure in their shells for a couple of weeks to develop their flavor. And once they're ready to eat, you can't just crack them with an ordinary nutcracker; to get through their extremely hard shells, you have to bang them with a hammer, crush them in a vise, or even back over them with your car. But according to aficionados, their strong, earthy, bittersweet flavor is well worth the effort.

So, over the course of several walks, both in our neighborhood and while visiting friends in Virginia, we gathered up a whole bunch of these little walnut balls. I removed the hulls from a few of them by stepping on them and rolling them under my foot, but Brian threw caution to the wind and tore most of them off with his hands, which, just as the article warned, retained greenish-brown smudges for days afterwards. Then he spread them out in small batches in front of the dehumidifier in the laundry room to dry. It took a few weeks, but eventually we ended up with a quart or so of cured nuts in their shells—about 40 in total.

Then came the really hard part, both literally and figuratively: getting those shells open. Brian cracked the first one by putting it in a vise and tightening it until it snapped (the shell, not the vise, although it felt like kind of a close call which would give first). We each sampled a bit of the nutmeat and found it...odd. It was a bit like a regular walnut, but with a sort of funky, musty flavor underneath. Not bad, exactly, but weird. I kept nibbling at mine, trying to figure out what to compare it to, and the best I could come up with was to say it's a bit like a strong cheese but without the saltiness. Brian tried cracking a few more (taking about ten minutes to get through four nuts) and toasting them to see how that affected their flavor. The toasted nuts smelled absolutely lovely, powerfully nutty and rich, and their flavor was a bit darker, but that odd mustiness was still there. 

These nuts were so different from anything else we've tasted that we weren't quite sure what would be the best way to use them. I did a bit of searching and found several recipes at Southern Living, both savory and sweet: an ice cream, a pasta dish, a sweet bread, a pie, and a salad. To get a better idea of how the walnuts might taste in a sweet dish, I tried sprinkling some cinnamon sugar over one and found that the combination worked quite well: the sugar and spice seemed to soften the funkiness of the walnuts, making it just one element in a more complex blend. Then, for a savory counterpart, I tried one with a bit of our homemade spaghetti salt, and the effect was much the same: the mustiness blended into the background instead of dominating the flavor. So I think that will be the key to enjoying these walnuts: blend them with other strong-tasting ingredients so that their musty, earthy quality will become an interesting element of the flavor rather than the primary note. This recipe for maple-Dijon roasted Brussels sprouts with walnuts might be a good place to start.

I've been plagiarized

I just did a search on the term "gazingus pin," trying to see if there was a better way to explain it than the way I did in this 2014 post. One of the first hits I found was from a blog called Simple Vegetarian Concept, and it looked oddly familiar. I didn't quite realize why until I saw the photo accompanying it, which I immediately recognized as one that I had taken. Turns out, this blogger had lifted the entire post—text, photo, and all—from my 2014 blog post.

And it wasn't just this one post. Looking at the "popular posts" listed in the sidebar, I realized that every single one of them was lifted directly from my blog. "Holiday Tour of Highland Park": my blog, December 2012. "A Futile Gesture of Protest": November 2014. "Gardeners' Holidays": February 2013. The entire blog was nothing but posts copied from my blog, verbatim.

Naturally, I'm rather irked that this person is appropriating my words without giving me credit for them, and possibly diverting traffic from my blog in the process. (Given that the plagiarized post showed up in my search results while my original post did not, I rather suspect that's the case.) But even more than that, I'm baffled. The Simple Vegetarian Concept blog doesn't appear to be monetized in any way: there are no ads on it at all. So what is this person getting out of stealing my words? 

Right now, the best idea I can think of is that maybe this person intended to create "a blog about simple vegetarian tips," but after setting it up, they never quite got around to posting anything. Then, perhaps, Blogger warned them that they had to post something or lose the site, so rather than come up with something to say, they stole from me, and they've been doing it ever since. But that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean, why would they care about losing the site if they're not actually using it?

The other thing I can't figure out is what I can possibly do about it. The "Contact" link on the Simple Vegetarian Concept blog just leads to a blank page, so I can't send this so-called blogger a polite request to take down all the posts they blatantly stole from me. I could report the blog to Google for copyright violation, but I'd have to report every single post that was plagiarized separately, providing a direct link to the specific article on Simple Vegetarian Concept and a direct link to the original on Ecofrugal Living. Since this blogger has stolen literally hundreds of posts from me (I stopped counting after page 75), this would take hours if not days (particularly since Google won't let you report more than ten violations in a single report).

For now, I've settled for reporting the gazingus pin article that I found with my search, as well as nine others that were listed in the "Popular posts" sidebar on Simple Vegetarian Concept. If Google responds to that report, I'll see if I can get in touch with anyone there to simplify the process of reporting the entire blog.