A completed birthday project (and one to come)

Last January, I asked Brian for my most ambitious DIY birthday gift ever: cleaning up our unfinished workshop/laundry room/storage room. I wanted to get rid of all the unnecessary stuff, neatly organize the stuff that remained, and most importantly, cover up the bare insulation that currently served as the wall surface. I knew at the time I asked that this was a big project that might take up to half a year to finish. But as it turns out, that was a serious underestimate. 

It took us a couple of months just to get around to the first stage of the project. In March, we went through all the stuff in the room and identified several things we didn't need: a junker bike we'd picked up off the curb, loads of other bike parts, my unused guitar case, a hanging-file box, a big box full of brown glass bottles that we'd picked up for free at a yard sale and used only a few of, a box of wooden blocks, and a packing tape dispenser. We donated all the bike stuff to the New Brunswick Bike Exchange and disposed of the rest without difficulty on Freecycle. 

After that, we couldn't get started on covering the walls until we'd bought the necessary lumber. But since it came in large sheets and our little Honda couldn't possibly hold more than one, this step required renting a truck. We finally got around to doing that in June, when we were able to use the same truck to pick up a new patio set from Craigslist (along with the lumber for Brian's planter project). The year was more than half over before we actually got the boards cut to size and up onto the walls (first flipping around the batts of insulation so that the moisture barrier was properly positioned on the outside, facing toward the heated space). And it took us all the way until my next birthday—and just a little bit longer—to complete the job of tidying and reorganizing the stuff that remained.

But tidy it we did, and I'm ready at last to unveil the final result. First, as a reminder of what we were up against, here's the "before" picture of the room as it looked when I asked for this present a year ago. 

And here's the "after," as seen from roughly the same angle.

The lighting is still terrible for photography, but everything else is so much better. The two remaining bikes are both neatly hung from the ceiling, the boxes are all neatly stowed on the shelves, the work table has been cleared off, and all the tools have been arranged so that they're visible and easy to access.

Here it is from another angle: the before...

...and the after. In this shot, you can see the neat reorganization of the shelves, the workbench (which has a usable surface for the first time in years) and, most of all, the scrap wood pile. It's now all neatly tucked into the back corner, arranged by size, rather than spilling out onto the floor.

 

Let's come in for a couple of close-ups. Here's one of the wall nearest the door, with its nice new wood covering. In addition to hiding away the insulation, the OSB wood panels make a suitable spot for hanging things. We put up a little hook to hold our clothespin bag (my old purse) and hung up the extra sections of our shoe rack to provide convenient, accessible storage for safety gear and extension cords. This also had the advantage of getting them out of their storage box so we could throw it away, freeing up more shelf space.

And here's a look at our reorganized tool storage. We already had that pegboard and most of the hooks; it was just a matter of arranging them optimally to display most of our tools. The few that don't fit are either tucked in a toolbox or neatly laid out on the cabinet below. (We did buy a few extra tool hooks, but they cost less than $15 total.)

The one problem with this new layout is that I can't quite reach the top row of tools on the board. But Brian addressed that with one more DIY piece, completed just today: a little step stool made out of scrap lumber. (He realized after completing it that the supports were placed too far in, so he added markings to indicate where I could step on it without tipping it over. But he'll probably take it apart and reassemble it at some point.)

Here's one last area that I didn't manage to get a good "before" picture of: the floating shelf over the utility sink. Previously, this shelf was a piece of MDF that was seriously bowed under the weight of all the various detergents and cleaning tools piled on it. Now it's a smaller piece of leftover plywood that neatly holds a pared-down assortment of cleaning supplies we'll actually use.

So how much did the project cost in total? Well, it depends on how you count. We spent $244.56 on lumber at Home Depot, but about half of that was for the planter project, so that's only about $125 for the walls. Add the $15 or so we spent on tool-hanging hardware, and that's around $140 worth of supplies. But if you include the $102 we spent on the U-Haul to get all that lumber home, that brings the total cost to around $242—still less than the cost of the closet doors that were my 2016 birthday present, but not by much. And in terms of time and elbow grease, this project was probably at least as demanding.

After this complicated project, I'm hoping my birthday request for this year will be a lot easier to fulfill. Over the years, the grout in our shower has become increasingly stained, despite my best efforts to keep it clean. Also, bits of it have fallen out, leaving deeper gaps between the tiles, which makes the stains even harder to remove. So, for this year, I've asked to redo all the grout, then seal it so that it will stay put and stay clean. We've done this job once before, so we know we can handle it, but last time we neglected the sealing step. I'm hoping that with a good sealant, we can keep the grout clean and intact for at least a few years, and when it starts to wear off, we can just reapply the sealant instead of having to replace all the grout. I've already invested in a bottle of Aqua-X Grout Sealer, which got good reviews from several professional review sites (including this professional tiler). Now all we need is a tub of grout and—always the tricky part—a free weekend to apply it.

Our first big-venue experience (and why we won't repeat it)

This weekend, Brian and I did something a bit out of step with our usual ecofrugal spending habits. As regular readers know, we're both big fans of the show Critical Role (in which "a bunch of nerdy-ass voice actors sit around and play Dungeons & Dragons"). So when we learned that the Critical Role cast would be running a live "Critmas" event at the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion in Camden, New Jersey—their first ever show in our state—we decided to spring for tickets. We'd already been to see a live show in Brooklyn featuring a subset of the cast and had a lot of fun, so we figured this event would probably be worth the cost of admission.

From the moment we first started planning the trip, though, the venue seemed determined to convince us we were wrong. First, there was the cost and hassle of ordering the tickets. They were only available through Live Nation, so I had to set up an account with that site—which turned out to be a subsidiary of Ticketmaster—in order to place the order. The process of setting up the account, linking it to my PayPal account, and placing my order took well over an hour, requiring several attempts before the transaction would go through. And by the time Ticketmaster had finished piling on taxes and fees, our two "Standard Tier" tickets, allegedly priced at $75 each, came to a total of $226.88.

This already high price, as we quickly learned, did not include parking. The Freedom Mortgage Pavilion's website informed us that while parking was "available" at various nearby lots, we would have to find and pay for it ourselves—unless, of course, we wanted to shell out an additional $50 for "premier" parking. We couldn't bring ourselves to swallow that additional expense, especially since it would most likely mean fighting our way through a massive traffic jam at the end of what was already likely to be a very late night. So we spent several more stressful hours poring over maps of the area trying to find other parking options. Our best bet seemed to be the Rutgers Camden campus, especially since Brian has a Rutgers parking permit that would allow him access to lots that might not be open to the general public. A campus map showed several parking lots, but it didn't explain who was allowed to use them. Some were clearly labeled as resident parking, but others were unmarked. We ended up planning out a route that would take us past several different lots so that if one was full, we could move on to the next.

Then there was the matter of food. The venue's website clearly stated that we could not bring in any outside food or drink except for one sealed bottle of water. However, we would be allowed to bring in an empty bottle and fill it up at one of the water fountains. So that would take care of basic hydration, but nourishment was another matter. The show was scheduled to start at 7pm, and it would take us about an hour and a half to drive there, so we wouldn't be able to eat dinner beforehand. We couldn't tell from the website what food options would be available, but we could be pretty sure they would all be expensive and would involve waiting in long lines. So we planned to pack a picnic supper—peanut butter sandwiches, fruit, baby carrots, and a couple of cookies—that we could nosh on before and after the show.

A final source of stress was the Freedom Mortgage Pavilion's bag policy. It was clear from the venue's website that my purse, which is practically a part of my body, would not be able to come to the show with me. The venue allowed only clear plastic bags no larger than 12 inches square and 6 inches deep and "small clutches, wristlets, or fanny packs" no bigger than 6 inches by 9. I had a zipper bag that was just within those limits, so I figured I could squeeze the essentials—my large phone wallet, a pillbox, and maybe a couple of small toiletries like a nail clipper and lip balm—into that. But then, less than a week before the show, I received an email from the venue reminding me about its policies, and the size limit it gave for clutch bags was only 4.5 by 6.5 inches—roughly half the size stated on the venue's own website. Confused by these conflicting rules, I consulted Reddit and found that the venue had adopted these smaller size limits two years ago and somehow never bothered to update its website to reflect them.

With only a few days until the show, I posted a couple of frantic messages on Facebook (one in our local Buy Nothing Group and one in our board-gaming group) asking if anyone could loan me a plastic stadium bag that fit the venue's limits. I ended up getting not one but two offers and, just to be on the safe side, accepted them both. However, that didn't solve the problem of what to do with my phone. I had to bring it with me, because our tickets were on it; they contained a digital code that changed regularly, so I couldn't just print them out ahead of time. But I couldn't bring the wallet that normally holds the phone because it was over the size limit. It was possible they'd allow the wallet if it was inside a clear bag, but it was also possible they wouldn't, and we didn't want to take the chance. And carrying the phone around naked would have put it at risk of damage.

Rather than run out and buy a case for it, Brian decided to try making me one. He borrowed the phone and basically built the case around it, cutting two panels out of corrugated cardboard and wrapping them in fabric cut from an old pair of fleece tights. Then he wrapped the whole thing in thinner, more flexible cardboard cut from a cereal box and secured it with a rubber band. The finished case was right on the edge of the 6.5-inch limit, so there was always a chance some zealous security guard would seize it, but losing it wouldn't cost us anything.

The last thing we had to worry about was getting to the venue. Google Maps offered multiple routes, but the most straightforward one appeared to be the NJ Turnpike. We carefully reviewed the steps to get from the Turnpike to the parking lot, going over each turn in street view so we'd know what to expect, and also how to get from the parking lot to the venue on foot. Google said the journey could take anywhere from 60 to 110 minutes, and the show was scheduled to start at 7:30 pm, with the doors opening to regular ticket holders (as opposed to those who had paid $250 a seat for VIP tickets) at 6pm. We decided to leave at 4:30 pm to give ourselves plenty of leeway in case we got lost, ran into traffic, or had some other sort of mishap.

As it turned out, none of the things we'd worried about came to pass. We made it to Camden in about an hour, and the first parking lot we looked at had plenty of available spaces. We made the chilly one-mile walk through the streets of Camden without difficulty and arrived at the venue right as the doors were opening. The guard took only a cursory look at my borrowed stadium bag before waving us through, raising no objection to Brian's homemade phone case. We made our way through the crowd, found our seats, filled our water bottle, and still had over an hour to spare before showtime. 

We did make one deviation from our careful plan; despite having partaken of sandwiches and carrots in the car, I realized soon after we seated ourselves that I wasn't going to make it through the whole show without something to munch on. Luckily, we didn't have to stand in the long concession lines, as there was a vendor passing through the aisles selling big boxes of popcorn for $10. Normally, I would balk at paying this much for a snack I can make at home for pennies, but under the circumstances, it seemed like the best deal we were likely to get. So I shelled out an extra $10 for a box and nursed it through the entire four-and-a-half hour show.

The Critical Role cast, as always, put on a great show. From where we were seated, far back in the huge auditorium, they were only tiny figures on the stage, but the venue had large screens set up that allowed us to see their facial expressions in close-up. This meant that most of the time, we were looking at the screens, rather than the live actors on the stage, so visually, it wasn't all that different from watching on our own small screen at home. But being part of the crowd, laughing and shouting and cheering when the characters did something awesome, definitely added to the experience.

Still, as we walked back to our car through the cold December night, we found ourselves asking: Did it really add that much? Yes, being in the room where it happens was a lot more fun than watching at home. But everything we had to do in order to be in that room was a lot less fun. In fact, everything other than the show itself—ordering the tickets, planning our route, searching for parking, packing sandwiches in lieu of a proper dinner, driving to and from Camden, walking from the parking lot to the venue and back on a cold December night, and arriving home exhausted at 2 am—was extremely stressful. Neither of us could say with confidence that the experience, taken as a whole, was better than staying at home and watching the show curled up on the couch in our jammies with some hot cocoa. And we certainly couldn't say that it was so much better as to be worth the roughly $241 we spent in total for the tickets, gas, tolls, and vastly overpriced popcorn.

So, while this was a worthwhile experience, it isn't one we're eager to repeat. The joy of watching the show in a room full of fellow Critters (fans of the show) just wasn't enough to balance out all the cost and hassle. I kind of feel like if Critical Role ever returns to New Jersey, rather than pay over $200 to see them live in a huge arena, we should try to find a group of local Critters and have an at-home watch party. We can share a potluck dinner, sit on comfy chairs to enjoy the show together, use the bathrooms during the break without having to wait in a long line, and still get to bed before 1 am.

September discoveries

We're only a week into September, but we've already made several interesting discoveries this month—either by design, by happenstance, or by a combination of the two. Here, in order of occurrence, is a summary of our September adventures so far:

Discovery #1: A stealth melon

Most of the time, Brian and I make a point of uprooting any "volunteer" plants that pop up in or near our compost bin. We know from past experience that if we leave them be, they're liable to take over the side yard, making it difficult to navigate. Plus, they're usually the offspring of supermarket tomatoes that don't breed true, so any fruit we get off them won't be particularly tasty.

But this summer, we made an exception. A couple of what appeared to be squash vines sprouted directly out of the bin, which kept them mostly confined. Since they weren't really in the way, and since we would have had to open up the bin to remove them, we let them stay put. And this week, when Brian went to trim the weeds around the compost bin, he uncovered this underneath one of the vines.

As far as we can tell, this is the offspring of a Galia melon (a cantaloupe-honeydew hybrid) that we bought last April to put into a fruit salad for a May Day morning potluck breakfast with our Morris dance team. If that's correct, then we should be able to tell it's ripe when it turns from green to yellow-orange. The closer to orange it gets, the sweeter it's liable to be. Since the Galia melon is a hybrid, I'm not getting my hopes up too much that this fruit will be as sweet and juicy as its parent. But just in case, I've tucked a flowerpot underneath it to get it off the ground so it won't rot from excess moisture.

Discovery #2: A found puppy

After completing his planter project in July, Brian had a lot of little scraps of wood left over. Last Sunday, he came across them in the workshop and thought he really ought to get rid of them. But since they were pressure-treated, he didn't want to burn them the way he usually does with chunks of wood too small to be useful. So, rather than just toss them in the trash, he decided to play with them a little and see if he could make them into anything interesting. He also had a bunch of wood screws we'd saved after dismantling the old patio set we replaced in June, so he grabbed his drill and a screwdriver bit and started piecing them together. And when I came into the shop to ask him a question, I found him putting the finishing touches on this little guy. 

Brian and I both decided, independently, that the most appropriate name for this new addition to our family was Woody. I adorned him with an old collar we'd bought that turned out to be too big for either of our cats, and we set him outside underneath the planters that are sort of his parents. He's close enough to the street that passersby can spot him if they're paying attention, but close enough to the house that he won't be mistaken for trash being discarded. Since he's made out of pressure-treated wood, he should hold up as long as the planters do, provided no one decides to steal him.

Discovery #3: Tofu pepperoni

After his semi-successful attempt at creating a vegan pizza topping from Soy Curls, Brian decided to try the same thing with tofu. He cut half a pound of tofu into thin strips and soaked it in a mixture of canola oil, Dijon mustard, soy sauce, Liquid Smoke, paprika, garlic powder, and ground red pepper and fennel seeds. Then he baked it for about 20 minutes at 350F before adding it to the pie, which he'd already loaded with eggplant, bell peppers, and our vegan mozzarella.  

The resulting concoction looked more similar to pepperoni than his previous attempt, but the flavor and texture were wider of the mark. The tofu didn't soak up the spice mixture as well as the Soy Curls, so it tasted mostly like tofu with a dusting of spice. And despite the pre-baking, it never really browned. The texture remained soft and tofu-like, not meaty and chewy.

So, we probably won't be using this recipe again (which is why I didn't reproduce it in full). But that doesn't make this attempt a failure. It just means that, like Thomas Edison, we have succeeded in finding a method that doesn't work.

Discovery #4: An easier way to milk almonds

A second kitchen experiment was a bit more successful. A few years ago, in an attempt to cut down on packaging waste, we experimented with making our own almond milk. The first version we tried, made from almond butter, was easy but not that milk-like. And the second version, made from whole, blanched almonds, was so much hassle that we decided it wasn't worth the effort. 

But this week, I started reconsidering the issue while reading the comments on a YouTube video titled (rather prematurely, I thought) "The DOWNFALL of Plant-Based Milks." Several comments remarked on how much cheaper it is to make your own, and the thought suddenly popped into my head, "Why not try starting with almond flour?" Almond flour is basically ground blanched almonds, so using it would eliminate two of the steps involved in making it from scratch. 

A quick search revealed that I was not the first to come up with this idea. Most of the recipes I found online called for a ratio of 1 cup of almond flour to 4 cups of water. They generally included dates for sweetening as well, and sometimes vanilla, but I decided not to bother with any of that. I figured if I wanted it sweeter, I could always add sugar after the fact.

So, one morning this week, Brian obligingly loaded half a cup of almond flour and 2 cups of water into our blender and ran it on high for three minutes, the minimum time most recipes recommend. He tried straining it with a fine mesh strainer, but it just ran right through, so he poured it through an old nylon stocking and squeezed out as much liquid as possible. And the result was...okay. The flavor was very almond-forward, much more so than the stuff we'd made from whole almonds, and entirely devoid of sweetness. The texture was watery and, even after straining, faintly gritty—nothing at all like the creamy smoothness of the emulsifier-laden commercial product. And, nutrition-wise, it has nowhere near the protein content of my Lidl soymilk.

So, sadly, this homemade almond milk isn't the cheap, sustainable milk alternative that will finally get those cardboard cartons out of our lives once and for all. But it is less work than the whole-almond method, so we'll keep it in mind as an emergency backup. If we ever run out of soymilk and can't easily make it to the store, this stuff should see us through until our next visit.

Discovery #5: Decorative basil

Several of the new crop varieties we ordered this year from True Leaf Market, our new seed supplier, have been distinctly underwhelming. The biggest disappointment: a Thai basil variety we tried called Red Leaf Holy Basil. The plants were quite healthy, but the leaves were entirely flavorless. This is not an exaggeration. When Brian used the Thai basil in a dish, neither of us could detect it at all. Even when I tried putting a fresh leaf in my mouth and chewing it up, I got nothing. It was indistinguishable from chewing on a blade of plain grass.

So, when I noticed yesterday that the plants had gone to flower, I thought, well, they're not doing any good here in the garden; why not just cut them and put them in vases? Waste not, want not. And while they're useless as food, they work rather well as decoration, so at least we'll get some use out of them. (But certainly not enough to justify devoting any garden space to them next year.)

Make or buy: food items

Back in July, I posted about which personal care products Brian and I make at home and which ones we buy. That post was fairly popular, so I thought folks might be interested in a similar one about food products. We tend to come down on the "make" side a bit more often where food is concerned because most foodstuffs are a lot easier to make in your own kitchen than, say, soap. Food recipes generally don't call for obscure (and often pricey) ingredients or special equipment. They're written for home cooks, so they only include things the average home cook is likely to have.

Bread: Make

Brian and I have never been in the habit of buying bread—neither the good stuff from the bakery nor the cheap, squishy loaves at the supermarket. When we first got married, we had a bread machine, so either of us could quickly throw together a loaf of any bread we fancied. When that machine died back in 2013, Brian started making all our bread by hand. He'd always enjoyed working with dough, and this just gave him an excuse to do it more often.

His go-to recipe is Brian's Basic Brown Bread, which costs us about $1.70 per batch (85 cents per loaf) and requires about half an hour of hands-on work. Even with the cost of the fuel used to bake it, it's probably under a dollar a loaf. A loaf of supermarket whole-wheat bread costs around $3, so he's saving us $2 per loaf by baking it himself. That works out to $8 per hour—more than the pathetic federal minimum wage, but only about half of New Jersey's. But since he enjoys the process, it doesn't feel like work to him.

Buns: Buy

Although Brian is very good at baking bread, for some reason his skill doesn't translate to making hot-dog or hamburger rolls. He's tried it a few times, and the buns always come out kind of flat, not at all the right shape for a burger or a dog. Maybe if we ate them more often, he'd keep working on trying to master this baking skill, but for the few times a year we cook veggie burgers on the grill, it's much easier to pick up a bag of buns for $1 at Lidl.

Tortillas: Make

We used to assume that flour tortillas, like buns, wouldn't be worth the effort to make from scratch. But the first time Brian tried making his own, using a simple recipe he found online, we discovered that homemade tortillas are reasonably easy and much, much tastier than the packaged kind. He started out making them with all-purpose flour, but eventually he switched to chakki atta flour from Costco, which makes a more fiber-rich tortilla without compromising the texture. A batch of 16 tortillas costs about 85 cents, or 5.3 cents per tortilla—about one-sixth the price of whole-wheat tortillas from the store. And, as I said, so much better.

Plant butter: Make

Back when we were regular dairy users, Brian and I used butter for baking and Blue Bonnet vegetable-oil spread on toast. When we shifted away from dairy, we switched from real butter to Country Crock plant butter. At around $5 a pound, it was actually more expensive than the real thing, but it was the plant-based product that gave us the best result for cookies and shortcrusts.

Until, that is, we tried the homemade plant butter recipe from The Loopy Whisk. At roughly $1.30 for a 2-cup batch, it was less than half the price of the Country Crock and even slightly cheaper than the Blue Bonnet, and it was perfectly suitable for both baking and spreading. Plus, it contained no palm oil, an ecologically questionable ingredient (though, as I've since learned, not nearly as harmful as it's made out to be). And since it takes only a few minutes to whip up a batch, using it is a complete no-brainer.

Plant milk: Buy

One of the greatest annoyances in the ecofrugal life is that plant-based milks, which are unequivocally better for the environment than dairy milk, are also significantly more expensive. In an attempt to cut the cost (and reduce packaging waste), we've made several attempts over the years to make our own plant milk from oats, canned coconut milk, and almonds, but they were all a lot of hassle. Moreover, none of them had a taste or texture as good as the commercial stuff, and a few (like our first attempt at oatmilk) were outright undrinkable. Even though some of these homemade recipes were significantly cheaper than the $2.44 we pay for half a gallon of soymilk at Lidl, the savings just weren't enough to justify the work involved. (Besides, soymilk is the only plant-based "schmilk" that has as much protein as the cow-based variety.)

Coffee creamer: Buy

My favorite plant-based coffee creamer used to be Silk Protein milk, which had a nice creamy texture, a neutral flavor, plenty of protein, and very little sugar. Unfortunately, it became much harder to find when our local supermarket closed down, and it now appears to have been discontinued altogether. In an attempt to find a substitute that would provide a decent dose of protein, I tried several methods of making coffee creamer from soymilk, but none of them worked very well. 

So far, the best compromise I've found is to buy the coconut-based creamer from Trader Joe's, which costs $1.99 per pint, and cut it half and half with soymilk. The resulting product costs $2.60 per quart, and I use about a quarter-cup—roughly 16 cents' worth—per cup of coffee. It doesn't have nearly as much protein as the Silk, but at least it isn't loaded with sugar like some plant-based creamers.

Whipped cream: Buy

Even back when we were using real whipped cream, it made more sense to buy it than make it for everyday use. If you buy a container of cream and whip it by hand, you have to use it up right away; even if you whip only a little bit at a time as needed, you still need to use it all up within a week or so if you don't want the cream to go bad. The canned stuff will stay good for months, allowing you to use it up gradually. So, while we weren't thrilled about all the excess packaging, we figured throwing away a can every month or two was better than going through a cup of cream every week. And we eventually found a way to recycle the cans, which helped take the curse off. So we would buy cream and whip it up ourselves only if we needed a bunch of it at once to make something like raspberry fool. 

After we went nondairy, we found the coconut whipped cream from Trader Joe's was ideal for everyday use. However, it wasn't suitable for any recipe that used whipped cream in bulk. We tried a plant-based product called Coco Whip and it worked reasonably well, but the store where we found it soon stopped carrying it. 

We made several attempts to make our own plant-based whipped cream from various combinations of coconut milk, aquafaba, and soymilk, but the results ranged from limited success to epic fail. None of them was really an adequate substitute for the real thing. So these days, for desserts that absolutely depend on whipped cream, such as our anniversary cake, we give in and buy a container of real cream. As long as it's only once or twice a year, that's a compromise we can live with.

Ice cream: Make

Ice cream is another dairy product we had a hard time making a plant-based version of. We tried various homemade recipes, such as iced coconut milk and plum whip, but none of them quite ticked all the boxes for flavor and texture. But last month, we tried a version made with much richer coconut cream, and this was considerably more successful. 

We'll most likely tinker with the recipe some more to see if we can tone down the richness a little or replace at least part of the allulose sweetener we used with plain sugar, which is considerably cheaper. But even in its present form, this is better than most nondairy ice creams we've tried. And at around $3.50 per batch (about 1.5 cups), it's cheaper than Oatly or Ben & Jerry's and not too much more than Breyer's.

Plant cheese: Make

Before we went off dairy, Brian and I could usually pick up cheese on sale for around $2 a pound. The really good stuff, like fresh mozzarella, was pricier, and we once attempted to save a little money by making our own, but it wasn't nearly as good as the store's. And since it wasn't any cheaper than the sale-priced stuff, we saw no point in trying it again.

But once we went off dairy, we discovered that a good plant-based cheese was much harder to find. Fortunately, we were able to find an ideal DIY substitute: the vegan mozzarella from the It Doesn't Taste Like Chicken blog. It's much closer to real mozzarella in both flavor and texture than any store-bought substitute, and cheaper, too. The first batch we made cost $4.56 for two cups, but we've since found cheaper sources for some of the ingredients, bringing the cost down to around $3 per batch—equivalent to $6 per pound. That's a lot more than we used to pay for real cheese, but a bargain compared to store-bought alternatives like Daiya, which cost over $10 a pound.

Meat substitutes: Make and buy

Brian and I use a variety of substitutes for meat. The simplest one is tofu, which we've never attempted to make ourselves since it's so cheap to buy. It's gone up a bit in price recently, but it's still under $2 a pound, and I doubt we could make it for less than that.

Another commercial product we really like is Butler Soy Curls. These chewy soy strips absorb the flavor of whatever liquid you soak them in, so they make a reasonable substitute for almost any kind of meat. They can replace ground beef in chili, sausage in a savory cabbage dish, chicken in fajitas, pork in a kebab, and pepperoni on a pizza. We buy them in bulk from the manufacturer for $6.47 a pound, which works out to about $2.15 for a pound of rehydrated, cooked curls. Not many real meat products can beat that price.

We used to buy commercial veggie burgers as well, but we never found a brand we really loved. Fortunately, we recently developed a veggie burger recipe that's both better and cheaper than most commercial alternatives. Our grill-friendly mushroom seitan burgers have a savory flavor and a hearty, chewy texture that we actually prefer to Impossible Burgers, and at roughly 70 cents per patty, they're less than one-third of the price.

Sadly, there's one meat product we've never found a decent substitute for: sausage. We used to really love the free-range pork kielbasa from the Amish market, and we've never found a vegetarian version that could come close to it. We tried one recipe that billed itself as "The World's Best Vegan Sausage," but it turned out to be disappointingly dry. And while the Impossible Brat proved to be spot-on in terms of texture and, according to Brian, flavor as well, I discovered that I apparently don't care much for bratwurst. So, in this one area, neither making nor buying has proved satisfactory, and our search continues.

Pasta: Make and buy

For the most part, Brian and I are perfectly happy to buy our pasta at the store. We don't own a pasta machine, and the one time we tried rolling it out by hand, it was a huge amount of work and came out lumpy. For something you can buy for $1 a box, it just doesn't seem worth it.

The only pasta we do make is gnocchi. We used to buy those too, since a $2 bag from Trader Joe's made such a handy last-minute meal. But a few years ago, I learned in a Reddit forum that it's reasonably easy to make your own gnocchi with potato flakes. We tried it, and it was so easy and tasty that we've never gone back to the store-bough gnocchi since. (Brian has also tried making them from scratch with baked potato, and those are still better, but too much work to make on a regular basis.) 

Cereal: Make and buy

Brian's usual breakfast is a bowl of homemade granola. He cuts the sweet, baked clusters with a roughly equal volume of plain oats, making the finished cereal both healthier and cheaper. At the prices we currently pay for all the ingredients, it's about $4.85 per batch, or 61 cents per bowl.

However, he doesn't always have time to bake a new batch of granola before he runs out, so he relies on Kellogg's raisin bran as a backup. It costs $2.05 per pound at Costco, and his usual breakfast is about 3 ounces, or 38 cents' worth, with an additional nickel's worth of oats on top. That's only 43 cents per bowl, making the commercial product actually cheaper than the homemade one. But Brian likes the granola better, so he considers it worth the cost and effort.

That pretty much covers our make-or-buy list as it currently stands. Most of the items on the "buy" list are ones we'd be happy to make if we could find a recipe for a homemade version that was cheaper and not too complicated. But for now, this is what works best for us.

Make or buy: personal care products

I'm always pleased when I can figure out how to replace one of the products in my personal care routine with a homemade alternative. It's not just that these homemade products cost less than store-bought alternatives; they're also more sustainable. Since I decide what goes into them, I can make them with nontoxic, low-impact, cruelty-free ingredients, and they produce no packaging waste whatsoever. As an added perk, I know they can never be discontinued—something that invariably seems to happen to any commercial product I get really attached to.

But much as I like to make my own products, I don't do it for everything. It's possible to find recipes online for almost any kind of product (with one exception that I'll get into later), but some of them are so much hassle that I can't imagine the savings would be worth it. Others aren't that hard to make, but they just don't work very well. And a few DIY recipes call for ingredients so costly or hard to find that once you add up all the costs, including shipping, it's actually more expensive to make a product than to buy it.

I've written several blog entries over the years about my successes and failures with homemade personal care products, but I've never gathered them all together into one place. So, for this entry, I thought I'd offer a complete rundown of which products I do and don't make for myself, and why. And since Brian and I share a lot of the same products, I figured I might as well cover his choices as well.

So, starting with the basics:

Soap: Buy

For showering and washing hands, we use Trader Joe's honey-oatmeal bar soap. It costs $1.99 for two four-ounce bars, and the packaging is minimal: just a thin plastic wrapper. And while it does contain some palm oil, I've discovered that this ingredient isn't actually so harmful as it's made out to be. The reason it's used in so many products is that oil palms are a lot more productive than other oilseed crops; if we replaced all the palm oil we use with alternatives like coconut or soy, we'd need a lot more land to grow those crops, possibly resulting in even more deforestation. So making my own soap from a recipe like this one, which calls for a mixture of olive and coconut oil, wouldn't necessarily be greener. 

What it would definitely be is a lot more work. Not only would it involve working with lye, which is highly hazardous stuff, it would also require a bunch of special equipment—including molds, a soap cutter, a candy thermometer, an immersion blender, and a set of spatulas—all devoted exclusively to soap-making use and never used for foods, because lye. And how much could it possibly save me? According to this soap-making site, the ingredients alone come to roughly $1.22 per bar, which is more than we're paying now for the TJ's stuff. The only possible advantage would be to avoid a couple of grams of plastic waste, and when you weigh that against all the stuff I'd have to buy, I find it hard to believe it would be a more sustainable choice.

Face wash: Make

Unlike soap, face wash is incredibly easy to make from scratch. In fact, I just whipped up a batch and the entire process, from getting out all the ingredients to cleaning up and putting everything away, took 8 minutes—less time than it would take to go to the store and buy some. My recipe calls for only three ingredients, all of them easy to find in stores: aloe vera gel, honey, and olive oil. A half-cup batch of it costs me about $1.50 and lasts at least a month. And it leaves my skin smoother and softer than any commercial face wash I've ever tried. Making my own is an absolute no-brainer.

Moisturizer: Buy and make

During the day, I use a moisturizer that contains sunscreen. The way I see it, if I didn't do this I'd just have to buy a separate facial sunscreen anyway, and this way is less work and less irritating to my skin. I also don't consider either sunscreen or SPF moisturizer to be something I can reasonably make myself. Although there are recipes for homemade sunscreen online, experts generally say you shouldn't trust them. So I just use e.l.f. Holy Hydration SPF 30, which I can buy at the local drugstore. It costs around $13 for a little pot that lasts me a couple of months, and it works well for my often finicky skin. I just have to keep my fingers crossed that they'll never discontinue it.

At night, however, sun protection isn't a concern. I've tried various night creams containing different ingredients, including some that claimed to miraculously halt the signs of aging (spoiler alert: they don't). As far as I can tell, none of them works any better than straight aloe vera gel, which costs me around $5 for a 16-ounce bottle at Target. So that's what I use now, on top of my rosacea meds. It's not a miracle cream, but it does keep my skin moist, which is all you can really expect a moisturizer to do.

Shampoo: Buy

I don't generally use shampoo on my dry, curly hair, but Brian uses it on his long, flowing mane. He recently traded in his store-brand shampoo from Target, which cost around 4 cents per washing, for a low-waste bar shampoo from Trader Joe's that's even cheaper: about 3.5 cents per washing. There's no bottle to throw away, only a cute little cardboard box that can be reused. And it's much easier to use up every drop than it is with the liquid shampoo: he simply presses the last flimsy sliver of the old shampoo bar against the new one, the same way we do with our bar soap.

Now, it's theoretically possible that we could find a homemade shampoo that would cost even less and produce even less waste than this bar shampoo. Unlike me, Brian has never tried (and failed) to wash his hair with plain baking soda. But since he already has a shampoo that's quite cheap, produces little waste, and agrees with his hair and his scalp, I don't see replacing it as a high priority.

[Edit, 12/14/24: Sadly, the last time we tried to buy a shampoo bar at Trader Joe's, it was no longer available. A friend who works there confirmed that it was not just sold out but fully discontinued. Fortunately, we were able to find another brand, Love Beauty and Planet, that's costs $4.99 at Target for a four-ounce bar. That's a little less convenient and a little more expensive, but it's still only about 4.4 cents per washing, only about 10 percent more than the store-brand shampoo he used to use. That's a small enough price difference that we're willing to pay it for the sake of discarding fewer plastic bottles. However, Brian hasn't actually tried the new bar yet because he's still finishing up his last bar of the Trader Joe's stuff, so we don't know how well it will work for him.]

Conditioner: Buy

Although I don't use shampoo, I use quite a lot of conditioner. In fact, it's pretty much my only styling product. After showering, I let my hair dry until it's just damp, then comb in some conditioner with my fingers. A quick finger-fluff, and I'm good for the day. 

Since conditioner is such a major part of my beauty routine, I'd love to be able to make my own. Over the years I have attempted several different recipes, from extremely simple (apple cider vinegar, pure olive oil, canned coconut milk) to more complex concoctions (coconut oil with shea butter and honey, coconut oil with distilled water and guar gum). But sadly, none of them gave me good results for more than one day. 

So, for now, I'm sticking with Suave Almond and Shea Butter, which costs about $5.50 for a 28-ounce bottle. I've never timed how long this bottle lasts me, but it's at least a couple of months, which means it costs around 9 cents per use at most. As far as I'm concerned, it's not worth trying any more DIY recipes unless they can meet or beat that price.

Hair tonic: Make

Conditioner isn't the only product I use on my hair. As menopause descended upon me, I noticed my hair was growing decidedly thinner, and I considered shelling out for a product with Rogaine. But given that it costs around $55 for a 3-month supply and you have to keep using it forever, I wasn't sure it was worth it. Instead, I decided to try another treatment I'd read about online: rosemary essential oil. At least one study suggested it worked just as well as Rogaine and caused less scalp irritation. And at just $8 for a 10-mL bottle, it would certainly cost less to try.

Unfortunately, the articles I found online about rosemary oil were a little bit vague about how to use it. They said to dilute it with a carrier oil and rub it into the scalp a few times a week, but they didn't specify how strong to make the solution and they disagreed on how long to leave it on. (The Cleveland Clinic suggests applying it at night and washing it out in the morning, while Elle says leaving it on that long can cause irritation.) So, taking a wild guess, I mixed ten drops of rosemary oil into two tablespoons of coconut oil and started applying that every evening at bedtime.

I've been doing this for about six months, and it does appear to be working. There's less of my scalp visible and more short hairs growing in on the top and at the temples. And I still have most of that initial $8 bottle left. On the down side, it does seem to be causing a bit of scalp irritation, so I've backed off from using it every night to every two or three nights. That means my $8 investment will last me even longer, making it decidedly a better value than Rogaine.

Toothpaste: Buy

Toothpaste, even more than sunscreen, is not really possible to make at home. Sun-blocking ingredients such as zinc oxide are at least possible to buy over the counter, even if they're hard to distribute perfectly throughout a homemade mixture. But cavity-fighting ingredients such as fluoride are not. Thus, although there are recipes for homemade toothpaste online, I would never consider using one. 

We've been relying for years on Trader Joe's toothpaste, which is one of very few brands that (a) is cruelty-free, (b) contains fluoride, and (c) does not contain sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which tends to give Brian canker sores. And, until recently, it was also available at any Trader Joe's store for a very affordable price: just $3 for a 6-ounce tube. 

But about a month ago, we went looking for a new tube of toothpaste at Trader Joe's and couldn't find any. We thought it was just temporarily out of stock, but a friend of ours who works there said that the store has actually had problems with its supplier and needs to find a new one. Unless it finds one before our current tube of toothpaste runs out, we will have to find a different brand. 

We have a couple of sample-size tubes of SLS-free Sensodyne that we got from our dentist, and we can use those as a stopgap measure, but I don't want to buy it because it's not cruelty-free. So we might end up having to switch to a pricey, hard-to-find brand that has to be specially ordered. Needless to say, I am not happy about this, but I'm not unhappy enough to risk my teeth on a homemade toothpaste.

Deodorant: Make and buy

I've always found it frustrating to buy deodorant. It's very difficult to find a brand that's cruelty-free and actually works. And even the few brands that meet these criteria come in plastic tubes that can't be recycled and that inevitably make it impossible to use up every bit of the product.

I've tried many homemade deodorants over the years, most of which either didn't work (baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide) or had unfortunate side effects (milk of magnesia). Eventually I figured that I could get pretty decent results with alcohol-based hand sanitizer. During the pandemic, when hand sanitizer became incredibly difficult to find in stores, I learned to make a homemade version from rubbing alcohol and my trusty, multipurpose aloe vera gel. But even that wasn't a truly waste-free solution. 

So, earlier this year, I switched to a simple DIY deodorant made from baking soda, cornstarch, and coconut oil. It works about as well as the hand sanitizer, costs even less, and produces no waste at all. Its only fault is a tendency to separate a bit, but I can easily remedy that by stirring it up with a toothpick before applying it.

Brian has also had problems over the years with commercial deodorant. He dislikes most of the scents that it comes in and finds them irritating to his skin. For a while he tried just going without it altogether, but that proved not to be satisfactory on days when he was riding his bike to work. So for now, he just switches off between the two brands he can find that come in a fragrance-free version (Speed Stick and Arm & Hammer), stocking up on them whenever he can find a good price. 

However, I've suggested that he should also give my new baking-soda mixture a try. If it works for him as well as it does for me, maybe he can also strike this commercial product from his shopping list. Watch this space for updates.

[UPDATE, 9/30/24: Brian has found that the new baking-soda deodorant does indeed work reasonably well for him. He has now finished up the last of his commercial deodorant, and we won't be needing to buy any more.]

Perfume: Make

For most of my life, I wasn't in the habit of wearing perfume regularly. I'd tried a few different brands over the years, but I never found one that really felt like my own signature scent. But early in the pandemic, feeling in need of a mood booster, I decided to try experimenting with creating my own. I sent away for a few bottles of essential oil and a little roller bottle and experimented until I found a ratio I liked: 20 drops of sandalwood, 10 of vanilla, and 5 of cinnamon, then fill the bottle up with carrier oil. (At first, not knowing if I would like the results, I used plain canola oil out of the pantry, but eventually I invested $4 in a little bottle of sweet almond oil from the drugstore.) 

I paid $4 each for the essential oils, and the supplier threw in an extra bottle of the sandalwood for free, so that initial supply has lasted me through the entire four years since. So, all told, I've paid $16 for four years' worth of perfume—a price I doubt any commercial fragrance could beat. And it's a signature scent that is truly my own.

Cosmetics: Buy

There are only two cosmetics I use at all regularly: concealer to hide any stray pimples and white nail pencil under my fingernails. I use the pencil not so much to whiten the space under nails as to create a barrier there so dirt doesn't accumulate. Otherwise, my fingernails always seem to get dirty by the end of the day, even if I haven't touched dirt anywhere.

I'd be happy to make either of these products from scratch—particularly the nail pencil, which is increasingly difficult to find in stores—but I've never found a good recipe for either one. Recipes for DIY concealer always call for too many hard-to-find ingredients, like "non-nano titanium dioxide" and "zeolite ultrafine clay," and I've never found any recipe at all for the nail pencil. When I search for "homemade nail pencil," I find lists of tips on ways to whiten my nails with baking soda or lemon juice, which isn't what I'm trying to do. And when I search for "how to keep dirt out from under nails," I find tips on how to clean the dirt out after it accumulates, which isn't what I want either. I've experimented with substitutes like white crayon, which isn't exactly homemade but would at least be easier to find in stores, but it doesn't seem to work. 

Fortunately, neither of these store-bought products is all that pricey. I think I paid $4 for my last tube of Wet N Wild concealer, which has lasted me quite a while, and $10 for a set of three nail pencils. So my beauty routine isn't exactly breaking the bank.

Conductive gel: Make

My one major concession to vanity over the past couple of years was shelling out $150 for a mini microcurrent device. Every evening, I spend just a couple of minutes running this little gadget over my neck and jawline in the hope that it will help me keep my over-50 skin firmer. Does it work? Hard to say for sure, but at least my skin doesn't seem to be getting any saggier since I started using it, and that's enough for me to keep at it. 

However, I would not be willing to stick with this routine if I had to shell out $59 an ounce for the fancy "conductive serum" that the manufacturer recommends. Before buying the device, I searched online to see if there were cheaper alternatives, and many people said all you really needed was plain aloe vera gel with a pinch of table salt. That's what I currently (har!) use, and I can't detect any difference between it and the (tiny) sample of pricey serum that came with the device.

And that's it for my personal care routine (and Brian's). It's not as complicated, and certainly not as expensive, as many people's, but I'm still happy to learn about ways I could make it even simpler and cheaper. So if you happen to know of any fabulous DIY recipes for the few products I'm currently buying, please share them in the comments.

The planter project

Last month, when I told you about our new patio set, I mentioned that we'd been able to haul it home because we'd already rented a truck to tote lumber for the laundry room and for another project that I promised to tell you about later. Well, that time has come. Allow me to present our new outdoor planter.

The background on this: When we moved into our house, there were several barriers between our property and our next-door neighbor's. Our driveway was lined with a couple of hefty concrete road barriers, and our neighbor had some large evergreen bushes and an aging picket fence along the side of his yard. The bushes covered up the gaps in the picket fence and softened the industrial forms of the crumbling concrete barriers, so taken as a whole it didn't look too bad. But a few years ago, our neighbor cut down those shrubs, and their absence exposed the full extent of the fence's battered condition—not to mention the ugliness of the concrete barriers on our side.

So, around that time, Brian started noodling with ideas for ways to replace those concrete blocks with something more attractive that would also be tall enough to conceal the fence. He considered putting up a new fence, then toyed with the idea of planter boxes with attached trellises for climbing vines. But eventually he settled on the idea of a couple of plain, trellis-free planter boxes that he could build out of two-by-fours. He spent several months sketching out different designs until he settled on one he was satisfied with: a long, deep V shape formed by stacked two-by-fours mounted on three sets of crossed legs. Then, after hauling home the lumber, he spent much of the past two weekends sawing all the boards to the proper length and assembling the pieces that could be assembled indoors. And finally, today, he had a few free hours with decent weather to put it all together.

Mind you, when I say "decent," I don't mean "pleasant." As of 10 am, the thunderstorms that the weather forecast has been consistently and inaccurately predicting all week still had not materialized. But in their place we had blazing sun, heavy humidity, and temperatures that were already into the upper eighties. When I wasn't helping Brian with the parts of the job that required an extra pair of hands, I was bringing him cold drinks and dishes of salty pickles and cherry tomatoes to keep his electrolyte balance up. And even with all that, he didn't attempt to assemble more than one of the two planters he had planned. But that's enough to show you how it was done.

He started by lining up all the cut pieces in the driveway, like this:

Then he attached the leg pieces together and connected them with long two-by-fours that would form the tops of the the planter's two sides, like this:

Then he unfolded it again and started attaching additional two-by fours to  complete the sides. Once they were all in place, the frame was much heavier, so we had to work together to fold the two sides into place. To hold them that way while he worked on attaching the end pieces, Brian applied a couple of clamps and pushed the legs into a set of little foot brackets he'd made for them. (Later, he plans to remove the end pieces and turn these into the feet of the second planter.)

He ran into a slight complication when he tried to insert the bottom piece. According to his design, there should have been just enough room to slide one intact two-by four into the V of the crossed legs. But since the boards he was using weren't perfect (some wider than others, some slightly warped), there wasn't. So, rather than try to shave down the side of one of the two-by-fours, he simply slid it in with its shorter edge facing up. That left a bit of a gap in the bottom, but since we're filling up the bottom with rocks for drainage anyway (or, to be more accurate, chunks of the old concrete barriers), it shouldn't matter.

I helped hold the end pieces while he drilled the pilot holes and screwed them into place. Then, working together, we flipped the now very heavy planter upside down so Brian could attach the feet. And finally, we got it back upright and maneuvered it into the spot where he wanted it. That was when he discovered one final complication: since our driveway is neither level nor flat, one end of the planter was floating nearly an inch off the ground. He had to shim it up with a couple of the boards stripped from of our old patio set. Some additional, smaller shims were needed to stabilize the planter from side to side.

This project took up the entire morning and about an hour of the afternoon, but we managed to get it done before the long-promised thunderstorms finally hit. Of course, "done" doesn't mean completely done, because we still have to assemble the whole second planter and fill them both up with dirt and plants. (I've been doing some research on suitable perennials to keep in an outdoor container year-round, but we haven't made any firm decisions yet.) But already, even this single planter sitting there empty looks much better than the dilapidated fence behind it.

Quick updates

On this blog, I tend to focus on what's new and different in our ecofrugal life. This makes sense, but it has a downside: you hear the beginnings of a lot of stories without hearing the endings. I tell you that I've tried a new homemade conditioner, but I don't think to tell you that it turned out not to work all that well with everyday use. I tell you that we've added a strawberry bed to our garden, but I don't remember to follow up and tell you whether we got any actual strawberries out of it. 

So for this week's blog entry, instead of telling you what's new, I'm going to fill you in on the latest updates to some older stories. I'll start with the most recent stories and work my way backwards, so we're going from the smallest updates to the biggest ones.

Update #1: Potato plants

Last summer, when we got our new rain barrel, I mentioned that Brian was planning to use the old one to grow potatoes. We'd tried before to grow them in five-gallon buckets, but the results were disappointing. Brian thought that a bigger vessel, with plenty of room for the stems and tubers to form, might give us a better crop.

It's too early to say yet what our harvest will look like, but the plants themselves are flourishing in their new home. The stems have already reached the top of the barrel and are loaded with lush green foliage. They just recently flowered, as well. Brian snipped off the flowers because apparently you get more potato production that way, but I got a picture of them first. The trimmed-off blooms are now in the bud vase in our kitchen, so we've already gotten some benefit out of the plants regardless of how the potato crop turns out.

Update #2: Garden paths

Over the years we've had our garden, we've struggled to find a suitable covering for the paths between the beds. I thought I'd hit on the perfect solution with the leftover stone dust from our patio project, but within a year, weeds (and a few stray vegetable plants) were forcing their way through it. So, last winter, I decided to try a new approach: covering the paths with leaves. Using all the leaves we raked up in our own yard, as well as a bag or two of our neighbor's that we scavenged from the curb, we managed to cover all the paths a couple of inches deep.

This approach has been a moderate success. The blanket of leaves hasn't managed to suppress weeds entirely, but we're getting far fewer of them, and the ones that do pop up are easier to remove because they're rooted in loose, leafy soil rather than solid clay. (I'm only bothering to do this with the tall weeds, like crabgrass and dandelions. Ground-hugging weeds like barren strawberries, I figure, can just get walked on. If they pop up in the garden beds themselves, I'll yank them, but otherwise, they can stay where they are.) And since the leaves cost us nothing, we can simply keep replenishing them year after year.

Update #3: Strawberry bed

Last year was our first attempt at growing strawberries. Our new seed supplier offered seeds for the small Alpine variety, and we decided on a whim to add a packet to our order. The plants grew faster than we expected, and we actually managed to get a small handful of fruit off them that first year. But this year, they have really come into their own. The plants are flourishing, and we have already harvested 6 cups of tiny red and white fruits. (They're supposed to be red and yellow, but it's a very pale yellow. Alongside our honeyberries, which ripen around the same time, they make a very patriotic-looking fruit salad.) 

These little berries aren't as plump and juicy as regular strawberries. Their flavor is more concentrated, with a sort of floral undertone to it. They also don't keep nearly as well, which explains why you don't tend to see them in stores. We have to eat them up within a day or two of picking or they turn into mush. This means we can't use really use them in recipes, since we only get a cup or so of berries with each picking, and we can't save them up to get enough for a fruit crisp or a batch of jam. But eating them fresh every day (by themselves or in salads) is certainly no hardship.

So, all in all, I'd consider this experiment a success. The question now is, how long can we keep it going? According to the seed packet, these plants will only remain productive for about two years. But other sources on Alpine strawberries recommend dividing the plants "every four or five years" to keep production high and prevent overcrowding. That suggests that we should be able to expect them to last another couple of years at least. I guess we'll keep an eye on them next spring, and if it looks like they're not coming up, we can pick up a few strawberry plants of the more conventional type to replace them.

Update #4: Homemade deodorant

Over the years, I've tried various alternatives to commercial deodorant in an attempt to avoid both animal testing and excess packaging. Plain baking soda, vinegar, rubbing alcohol, and peroxide didn't work very well; milk of magnesia did but turned out to have an undesirable laxative side effect. The best of the bunch was alcohol-based hand sanitizer; it wasn't strong enough to keep me fresh as a daisy on hot summer days, but it was good enough for light activity in mild weather. 

However, this sanitizer deodorant had a few drawbacks. It still produced some plastic waste; the bottle was recyclable, but the pump top wasn't. Also, annoyingly, the pump was never able to extract all the sanitizer from the bottle, and it also made it impossible to turn the bottle upside down to get the last drops. And it became difficult to obtain during the pandemic, though I was able to get by with a homemade version made from rubbing alcohol and aloe vera gel.

So when I came across a recipe for another homemade deodorant with just three ingredients—one part baking soda, two parts cornstarch, and three parts coconut oil—I thought it was worth a try. True, straight baking soda hadn't worked that well for me, but neither had straight rubbing alcohol, yet the alcohol-based gel worked fine. In any case, it wouldn't cost much to mix up a small batch and test it out.

Well, as it turns out, this baking soda mixture works at least as well as the hand sanitizer. Like the sanitizer, it doesn't always last all day, but it's no big deal to reapply it. It also produces no plastic waste whatsoever, and it's easy to get every last drop of it out of the container. And it's cheap—less than 25 cents for that initial batch (6 tablespoons total), which has already kept me going for a few weeks and is nowhere near running out. Can't get much more ecofrugal than that!

Update #5: Patio furniture

Back in 2013, we furnished our DIY patio with a cheap patio set from IKEA. At $120 for a table and four chairs, it was a much better deal than anything available at Home Depot or Lowe's, where outdoor furniture sets started at around $500. We refinished it once in 2014, but after that we decided to just live with the weathered look.

After 11 years of use, though, the furniture was starting to have problems with more than just its appearance. The pieces had become rickety, wobbling noticeably when we sat down, and tightening the bolts didn't solve the problem. We finally concluded that we were going to need a replacement.

The obvious place to look for one was Craigslist, which we now prefer to IKEA for home furnishings. But there was a snag: unlike IKEA furniture, pieces on Craigslist come fully assembled. How would we fit a whole patio set into our little Honda Fit?

The answer: we didn't. We already knew we'd have to rent a truck at some point to haul home the lumber for our laundry room renovation (which, yes, is still in progress) and for another project that Brian wants to do outdoors (more on that one in a future post). So, once we'd booked the truck for that, we took advantage of the opportunity to haul home a $135 patio set from Craigslist as well. We were still able to get the truck back by the end of the day, so the rental fee was the same; all it cost us was a little extra for gas.

Our new patio set is superior in almost every way to our old one. The glass-topped table is larger and includes a center hole where we can add a patio umbrella, should we ever feel the need for one. The chairs, with their woven plastic seats, are quite comfortable even with no added cushions. And both table and chairs are made of materials that should stand up better to the elements than our old wooden pieces. The previous owner had already kept them outdoors for several summers, and the table during the winters as well, and they're all still in good shape. So, given the same treatment, this new set should serve us for many years to come.