Meet the new toothpaste, not the same as the old toothpaste

Brian and I have a few very specific requirements for toothpaste. I insist on a brand that's cruelty-free (not tested on animals). Brian needs one that's free of sodium lauryl sulfate, which seems to give him canker sores. And we both want a toothpaste with fluoride, which, until recently, was the only chemical available that could actually prevent tooth decay. (Nowadays, there's an alternative called hydroxyapatite, which appears to be equally effective. But it's also more expensive, so most fluoride-free toothpastes don't contain it.)

None of the leading toothpaste brands (Crest, Colgate, Tom's of Maine, Sensodyne) meets all these requirements. So, for the past several years, we've relied on Trader Joe's toothpaste. Not only did it tick all the boxes, it was also much cheaper than the major brands at $3.50 for a 6-ounce tube. But last summer, we learned that Trader Joe's had discontinued its store brand on account of problems with its supplier. Our man on the inside (a friend who works there) told us the store was working with a new supplier and expected to get its product on the shelves by the end of November, but our one remaining tube wasn't going to last us that long.

So, after squeezing every drop out of that tube and exhausting all the sample tubes we'd received from our dentist, we went looking for a new toothpaste that met our stringent requirements. After a bit of online research, I determined that the best alternative was a brand called hello (without an initial capital letter). We picked up a tube of that for $5 at Target and, on the whole, liked it very much. The flavor was pleasantly minty, and being greeted by the cheerful "hello" on the tube made a pleasant start to the day. 

There were only two things we didn't like about it. The first was the price: $1.06 per ounce, nearly twice as much as our old Trader Joe's toothpaste. The other was the tube it came in. Our old toothpaste came in the traditional squeezable tube we'd both grown up with, which we could flatten and roll as we worked our way down the tube to squeeze out the paste more effectively. This new tube was made of a springier plastic and would reinflate itself after being squeezed, making it more or less impossible to squish every last bit of the paste out of the tube.

So, as November drew to an end, we kept an anxious eye on the toiletries shelf at Trader Joe's, hoping the new store-brand toothpaste would show up before our first tube of hello ran out. But November ran into December with no sign of one, and it got harder and harder to squeeze anything out of the hello tube. Finally, we gave in and bought a second tube—which, of course, was the cue for the new Trader Joe's product to show up at last. In fact, not one but two new toothpastes appeared: a "sensitivity" toothpaste with fluoride and a fluoride-free whitening toothpaste with hydroxyapatite. Both were the same price, $4 for 6 ounces—more than the old store brand, but considerably less than hello. Although we already had a full tube in reserve, we decided to spring for a tube of the new TJ's toothpaste anyway and open it first. That way, if we didn't like it, we'd have the other tube to fall back on. We hesitated over which of the new toothpastes to try but eventually settled on the one with fluoride, since it was more familiar.

After one brushing with the new toothpaste, we realized this might have been the wrong choice. It had a sort of weird taste that we could only guess was due to the desensitizing ingredient, potassium nitrate. (We'd tried sample tubes of Sensodyne before, and it also had a hint of that odd flavor, but with stronger mint and sweetener flavors to cover it up.) So now we face a bit of an ecofrugal dilemma. Do we (1) try to use up this whole tube of weird-tasting toothpaste, (2) go back to the pricier hello toothpaste that we know we like, or (3) try the other Trader Joe's toothpaste, which may or may not have the same peculiar taste?

No matter which we choose, there's one downside we'll definitely have to live with: those pesky, self-inflating tubes. The new Trader Joe's toothpaste comes in the same kind of stand-up plastic tube as the hello toothpaste. If we go for option 1, we probably won't be all that bothered about being unable to use up all the toothpaste from this tube, since we don't really like it anyway. But with option 2 or 3, we may have to resort to buying (or making) one of those special tube-squeezing tools or even cutting open the tube to scoop out the last few drips.

What we'd like best, of course, is to have our old toothpaste back, in the same old tube. But since that's not an option, we'll have to figure out which choice is next best. C'est la vie ecofrugale.

Honeyberry netting tents (and a bonus recipe)

Last week, I told you about how we mulched the slope where our honeyberry bushes are planted. That took a fair amount of effort, but when it was finished, our work still wasn't done. We also needed to cover the bushes themselves with netting to protect our berries from hungry birds. In the past, we've simply thrown the nets over the bushes, which keeps out the birds all right, but also makes it very difficult for us to get underneath the nets and harvest the berries. This year, I wanted to put up some proper enclosures that we could climb into without having to remove the netting entirely.

We had various odds and ends of material to work with for this project—a few scavenged bamboo poles and some old pieces of PVC pipe that had formerly served as trellises for our garden before we built the wooden ones. However, Brian and I had a difference of opinion about the best way to use them. His idea was to build boxes to fit over the bushes with netting on all sides.That would have made very secure enclosures that were also easy to put on and take off again, but they would have taken a lot of work to build, as well as a lot of material. 

My suggestion was to build a little teepee over each bush instead, using three poles tied together at the top, with the netting draped over it. This wouldn't be as secure as a box, but it would require less material and less effort. This idea won out mainly because Brian realized that if he built boxes, he'd have to find a place to store them in the off-season. Our garden shed barely had room to store all the mulch we'd bought at the Co-Op; we'd never be able to fit the frames and a load of mulch in there at the same time. The teepees, by contrast, could be broken down once the harvest was over and stowed away in a corner.

After a little experimentation, Brian figured out a way to build a teepee from three lengths of the PVC pipe that would stand up pretty well on the slope, with one foot planted behind the bush and two at the bottom. He used a hacksaw to cut the pieces to the appropriate length and lashed them together with a section of our old clothesline. Then we loosely draped the netting over it. We held it down at the corners by planting the feet on top of it and added a brick in front to keep it from blowing open.

We only had enough of the PVC pipe to build two of these teepees, so we placed those over the two largest bushes. We wrapped two others in our remaining netting and left the smallest one uncovered, figuring that there weren't that many berries on it to lose. As the bushes get bigger, we can always acquire more pipe, or perhaps some sturdier bamboo poles, to build enclosures for them.

So far, these little tents appear to be doing their job pretty well. I can easily remove the brick and duck under the netting to harvest berries, and I only have to stoop a little bit. And there are always berries to harvest, which suggests that the teepees are succeeding in keeping the birds out. Mind you, the two bushes that are simply draped with netting have their share of berries as well, so it appears the tents aren't actually necessary to keep the birds out. But they certainly do make it easier to get at the berries. We easily gathered a cup of them that first day, and we're getting at least a couple of handfuls every time we go out for more.

We were so pleased with our honeyberry harvest that we decided to celebrate by making a honeyberry fool, something I'd been hoping to do ever since we first got the bushes (mainly because I find the phrase "honeyberry fool" so entertaining). We had to go out and buy some cream for this, since all our attempts at making dairy-free whipped cream have been so-so at best. We didn't have a recipe for it as such, so Brian had to guess at the proportions of fruit to sugar to cream. His first attempt, using twice as much fruit as cream, came out a bit too liquid, though still quite edible. But we had plenty of cream left after that, so he kept experimenting and found that combining equal parts fruit and cream produced a dessert with just the right fluffy texture while still delivering plenty of honeyberry flavor. For anyone who has honeyberries at home and would like to try it, here's the recipe:

HONEYBERRY FOOL

Add 2 Tbsp granulated sugar to ½ cup honeyberries and mash berries with a spoon while mixing. Place in the refrigerator for 20-30 minutes, stirring/mashing occasionally.

In a chilled bowl, add 2 Tbsp powdered sugar and ¼ tsp vanilla extract to ½ cup heavy whipping cream, then beat until soft peaks form. Fold in berry mixture until fully combined.

Serve immediately or refrigerate until ready to serve.

[Edit, 5/31/26: We have now revised the design of our honeyberry tents to make one big tent that covers all the berries rather than individual ones for each bush. Check out this post for details.]

A small step away from palm oil

After my epic fail with carb counting, I've received permission from my doctor to go back to my carb-ier plant-based diet. This was a definite win for me, since aside from being much more to my taste, it's generally the most ecofrugal way to eat. Plant foods nearly always have smaller carbon footprints and water footprints than animal foods, and a diet with less meat is generally more affordable and healthier as well. But the green halo surrounding plant-based foods has one tiny little tarnished spot: palm oil. 

If you pay a lot of attention to the eco-news, there's a good chance you've already seen at least one story about how palm oil is the secret villain of the plant kingdom. Made from the fruit of oil palms, this cheap and useful oil finds its way into a huge variety of products. It's particularly handy for plant-based foods such as margarine, since it's one of the few vegetable oils that's high in saturated fat and therefore stays solid at room temperature. 

But unfortunately, the way palm fruit is generally grown and harvested does considerable damage to the environment. Because oil palms grow only in tropical climates, the growing demand for palm oil has led to massive deforestation as rain forests are cut to make way for oil palm plantations. Moreover, according to Food Revolution Network (FRN), the people who harvest the palm fruits typically work in grueling conditions for pitiful wages—if they aren't enslaved outright. Some products are made with certified sustainable palm oil, which is supposed to be grown and harvested in a more eco-friendly way. But according to FRN, these labels are often no more than greenwashing. 

The most obvious solution is to avoid products made with palm oil entirely. However, that's by no means as simple as it sounds. According to one estimate, it's found in as many as half of all packaged products sold at the supermarket. This includes both foods (margarine, baked goods, chocolate) and non-food products (soap, shampoo, detergent). In some categories, it's practically impossible to find any products without it.

Granted, it's a little bit easier if you don't buy that many packaged goods to begin with. If your diet is largely whole foods and you make a lot of your own cleaning and personal care products, you may not find quite as much palm oil lurking on your pantry shelves. When I went through ours, paying particular attention to the categories where palm oil is most common, here's what I found:

• Bread. Not generally a problem, since ours is usually home-baked. However, palm oil is listed as an ingredient on the package of flour tortillas we recently picked up. (Interestingly, the "Carb Balance" tortillas we bought when I was on my carb-controlled diet, though no better for my blood sugar, appear to be better for the earth. They contain no palm oil, only partially hydrogenated soybean oil.)
• Cat Food. Our cats eat IAMS dry food, which contains a whole lot of ingredients, but no palm oil. [EDIT, 4/16/26: We've now switched to Costco's Kirkland Signature dry food, but that has no palm oil either.]
• Cereal. We seldom buy commercial breakfast cereals, relying instead on Brian's homemade granola. Occasionally, when we can find it on sale at Costco, we'll pick up a box of Kellogg's Raisin Bran, but it appears to be entirely innocent of palm oil (and all other oils as well).
  
• Chocolate. Apparently, the "Way to Go" chocolate bars we buy at Lidl are not only Fair Trade certified but also rainforest-friendly, with no palm oil. Lidl's chcoolate chips, though not certified, are similarly clean.
  
• Cookies and other baked goods. Again, most of ours are home-baked. But we do have one box of Girl Scout cookies in our pantry (purchased when we were waylaid by Brownies while out on a walk), and it contains both palm oil and palm kernel oil. There's also palm kernel oil in the "Fiberful" granola bars we picked up one time at Trader Joe's, though the "Simply Nutty" bars we like better are free of it.
• Detergent. The last brand we bought, All Free and Clear, doesn't list palm oil as an ingredient. However, it does contain sodium laureth sulfate, which can be derived from palm oil. There's no way to tell whether it is in this case or not. As far as I can tell, there are only a handful of very pricey detergents that are certified palm-oil-free. [EDIT, 4/16/26: The same goes for the Kirkland Signature detergent we're using now.]
• Dish soap. We use Lidl's store brand, which also contains sodium laureth sulfate. So, again, impossible to tell from the label. 
• Hand soap. The Oatmeal & Honey bar soap from Trader Joe's lists both sodium palmate and sodium palm kernelate, derived from palm oil and palm kernel oil. as its top ingredients. Here, again, there are very few brands without palm oil, and they're all really expensive.
• Shampoo. Brian's shampoo contains sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), which also is often made from palm oil. Again, there's no way to tell if it was used in this particular product, but it isn't one of the few shampoos that are certified palm-oil-free. The same goes for my conditioner, Suave Almond and Shea Butter, which contains such potential palm oil derivatives as cetearyl alcohol and cetrimonium chloride. [EDIT, 4/16/26: He's since switched to a shampoo bar from Lidl, which has no suspicious ingredients.]
• Toothpaste. Although most toothpastes contain SLS, ours does not. We buy Trader Joe's peppermint toothpaste specifically to avoid this ingredient because it gives Brian canker sores.
• Vegetable oil spread. We use two kinds: Blue Bonnet for toast and Country Crock Plant Butter for baking. Both contain a mix of vegetable oils that includes palm and palm kernel oils. As far as I can tell, the only plant-based spread that doesn't is the highly regarded, but also highly priced Miyoko's.
  

We're probably on the low end of the bell curve for use of palm-oil products. Many foods that use this ingredient, such as chips, crackers, frozen meals, ice cream, instant noodles, microwave popcorn, and bottled salad dressing, simply aren't part of our diet at all. Yet even with our mostly whole-food diet and our generally eco-conscious shopping habits, we still have a handful of products in our home that definitely contain palm oil or palm oil derivatives, and a few more that we can't be sure about.

Now, I'm not prepared to shell out extra for a soap or a shampoo that I can be absolutely certain is palm-oil-free. I'm also not willing to make my own detergent, an endeavor that as far as I can tell offers minimal savings, if any. (Besides, most recipes for homemade detergent start with soap, which usually contains palm oil anyway.) And so far, all my attempts to make my own hair conditioner have been flops. (The one recipe that seemed to work initially did not hold up well as the week went on.)

But there is one palm oil product on this list I thought we might be able to replace with a homemade version: the vegetable oil spread. Doing this could also save us money, since the Country Crock Plant Butter is pretty pricey (usually around $5 a pound, which is more than we pay for real butter on the rare occasions we buy it). And it would eliminate the need to keep separate products on hand for baking and for spreading.

I've seen several recipes for vegan plant butters online, some simpler than others. One, at Fork and Beans, called for liquid lecithin, an ingredient we don't have and can't easily buy; another, from A Virtual Vegan, seemed a bit too fiddly. But the recipe from The Loopy Whisk looked pretty straightforward and called only for ingredients we had on hand: refined coconut oil, a neutral-tasting cooking oil (we used canola), non-dairy milk (we used unsweetened almond milk), and salt, with an optional pinch of turmeric for color. (We declined the option, since we prefer a white spread to one that tastes of turmeric.) The cost of all these ingredients, by my calculations, is about $1.30 for 2 cups—on a par with our Blue Bonnet, and significantly cheaper than the Country Crock.

The process of making the plant butter is simple enough: just whisk these ingredients together, then chill them until they start to firm up, then whip them again for about two minutes. The recipe said the chilling step would take only 10 to 15 minutes, but it took us 20, even with only a quarter-sized batch. But eventually we got something thick enough to beat up (whisking it by hand, since the container we used was too small to accommodate our mixer's whisk attachment) until "super pale and fluffy." Then we chilled it overnight as instructed.

When I tried it on my toast this morning, I found that it was definitely harder than Blue Bonnet, though not as hard as real butter chilled to refrigerator temperature. This made it a little harder to spread, but I eventually figured out that all I had to do was scrape my knife blade along the surface to remove a thin curl of the "butter." This actually melted into the surface of my hot toast more readily than the Blue Bonnet usually does. And once it was melted in, I could barely taste the difference. It was a little less salty, maybe, but that wasn't a problem in the least.

So we have now determined that this DIY plant butter makes a perfectly good substitute for Blue Bonnet on toast. However, the real acid test will be to see how it does in baking. Brian was already planning to make a pot pie at some point this week, so he'll just use the new plant butter in the crust. If it works as well for that purpose as our Country Crock, then we can just cross this pricey product—and with it, the main source of palm oil in our diet—off our shopping list entirely.

 

Postscript: Success! Brian's plant-butter pie crust came out crisp, flaky, and delicious. He noted that it had a less complex flavor than a crust made with real butter, but the texture was just as good, and actually superior to the results we used to get with the plant butter. It was also better than either straight coconut oil or straight palm oil, both of which we've tried in the past. The coconut-oil crust was tender but limp, while the palm-oil one was very crisp and brittle. This was the perfect golden-brown mean. He now thinks we don't even need to buy butter for this Thanksgiving's pies, which means that our rhubarb pie will actually be vegan. (The pumpkin pie, made with eggs and evaporated milk, will remain vegetarian only.)

We still need to test the new plant butter in cookies and fruit crisp, but we have every reason to believe it will perform just as well for those applications. If it can handle shortcrust, it can handle anything.

[UPDATE, 6/19/24: Since writing this, I've learned that palm oil isn't so bad as I thought. It has been responsible for some tropical deforestation, but not all that much: according to Our World in Data, only about 2% of global forests have been lost to palm plantations. And it's gotten much better in recent years: over 270,000 hectares of land in Indonesia were cleared for oil palm in 2009, but fewer than 48,000 in 2015. So it's not as if our insatiable lust for palm oil is the main reason we're losing the rainforests.

Granted, even a little deforestation is bad, especially in the tropics. But the real catch is that most other oilseed crops require more land to grow than oil palms. If we replaced all the world's palm oil with coconut oil, the closest plant-based substitute, we'd need more than ten times as much land to grow it—all of it in tropical regions. Granted, it's a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison, since the two crops are farmed very differently. Coconut palms produce more than just oil, and they're also often grown alongside other crops. But it's by no means clear that my coconut-oil-based plant butter is better for the planet than the commercial stuff containing palm oil.

The bottom line: boycotting palm oil isn't really a good idea. It makes more sense to look for products containing palm oil that's sustainably grown. The main sustainable certification for this crop comes from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO). If you can't find RSPO-certified products where you shop, try writing to the store and asking for them.]

The ecofrugal way to make a bed (without fitted sheets)

Yesterday, I decided that the weather had become chilly enough to make it worth putting our warm comforter on the bed. (In the summer, we leave it off and use only the empty duvet cover.) Before doing this, I decided to wash the duvet cover and then, since I already had the bed stripped down partway, to change the sheets. I stripped off the plain cotton ones we'd been using for summer and prepared to replace them with the middle-weight flannel ones we use for fall before upgrading to extra-warm fleece in the winter. And then I remembered: we no longer have a complete set of flannel sheets. We still have the flat sheet and the pillowcases, but we had to discard the fitted sheet because the elastic wore out and it wouldn't stay on the bed anymore.

Thinking about it, I realized we've run into this problem with a lot of our sheet sets. One way or another, the fitted sheet goes kaput while the flat sheet and pillowcases are still good. Usually it's the elastic that fails, but sometimes the fabric just wears through. And even when the fitted sheet is still in good condition, it's sometimes unusable because it doesn't fit our mattress. Either it's too loose (because it's designed for one of those huge "pillow top" mattresses) and it shifts around, or it's too tight and can barely stretch over the mattress in the first place. Either way, it ends up popping off one corner—often in the middle of the night, leaving us lying on top of the bare mattress. Which kind of defeats the purpose of having a bottom sheet in the first place.

All this kind of makes you wonder why it's worth having fitted sheets at all. They didn't always exist; my dad recalls from back in his Army days that a standard "set" of sheets was three flat sheets, plus the pillowcase or cases. One flat sheet went on the bottom, one on the top, and the third was a spare. When it was time to change the sheets, you moved the top sheet to the bottom, put the clean sheet on top, and sent the dirty bottom sheet to the laundry. This is an eminently sensible system, since all three sheets get an equal amount of wear and you never have to wash more than one at a time. But with modern sheet sets—fitted sheet, flat sheet, and pillowcases—it's no longer possible.

I could accept this drawback as an acceptable trade-off if fitted bottom sheets were obviously superior to flat ones. But as I've already observed, they're just the reverse. They don't always fit, they wear out faster, and they're harder to repair. As Vice points out, sheets are most prone to wear out in the middle, a problem you can fix with a flat sheet by cutting it down the middle and sewing the two good edges together. The worn-out middle section becomes the edge and can be tucked under the mattress, letting you get a few more years of use out of the sheet. I admit most people nowadays probably wouldn't bother to do this, but with a fitted sheet, they don't even have the option.

In short, fitted bottom sheets are the exact opposite of ecofrugal (and hard to fold, to boot). And yet somehow, these clearly inferior sheets have become so ubiquitous that hardly anyone remembers it's possible to make a bed without one. And even those who know it's possible, like me, don't necessarily know how to do it. My mom taught me how to make a bed years ago, but the lesson started with putting on the fitted sheet, and I've never learned any other way of doing it.

Even the Internet provides little guidance on this matter. I've tried repeatedly to search for "How to make a bed with two flat sheets," but I all I could find was explanations of how to make a bed with two flat sheets on top of a fitted sheet. Even searches for "How to make a bed without a fitted sheet" kept giving me hits on how to make a bed with a fitted sheet, or even how to turn a flat sheet into a fitted one—exactly the opposite of what I asked for.

But yesterday, driven by my growing frustration with the failures of fitted sheets, I dug deeper into the results, knowing there must be a solution somewhere. And when I finally found one, it turned out to be something I already knew perfectly well: use hospital corners. 

My mom showed me how to do this as part of that long-ago lesson, but she did it with the top sheet, over top of the fitted sheet. She lined up the top edge of the sheet with the top of the mattress, tucked in the bottom edge, and then used hospital corners to hold it in place. And apparently, this is how most people even today use hospital corners, since most explanations of how to make them show them being placed over top of a fitted sheet. So it simply never occurred to me that if you put hospital corners on all four corners, top and bottom, it would hold a flat sheet down just as if it were a fitted one. 

Armed with this new knowledge, I decided to try making up our bed this time using two flat sheets: our orphaned flannel one and another orphaned one from one of our percale sheet sets. This proved to be a bit tricky, as apparently modern full-size sheets aren't really sized to cover an entire full-sized mattress from top to bottom. By centering the sheet very, very precisely on the mattress, I was able to give myself just enough material to tuck in the top and bottom edges, but there wasn't an inch to spare.

I then went around my precariously tucked sheet and made hospital corners on all four corners, top and bottom. I did this using a diagonal fold, the way my mom taught me all those years ago. But if you prefer a vertical pleat, this other YouTube video shows you to do it that way. The ever-so-posh British woman in the video says she makes a vertical pleat because she thinks a diagonal one "looks messy"; it's not clear whether it stays put any better on the mattress.

With the bottom sheet in place, I placed the flannel sheet on top. Since it only had to reach as far as the top of the mattress, I had a lot more fabric to tuck in at the foot of the mattress than I had with the bottom sheet. I did hospital corners on this one too, but at the bottom corners only; I'm hoping this well-tucked top sheet will help hold the bottom one in place.

We've now slept one night with the bed made up this way, and so far, the precariously tucked bottom sheet is staying put. If it can make it through a whole week, it'll be doing better than our fitted ones usually do. But even if it doesn't, I don't think it'll be an indication that this system of making a bed is faulty; the problem will more likely be that the sheet I used just wasn't big enough. I believe I've got a queen-size flat sheet (six inches longer than a double) tucked away in our cedar chest downstairs, so I'll try it again with that one before giving up on the technique.

Sadly, even if it works, I don't think I can switch over to using flat sheets exclusively. It's all right for summer, spring, and fall, but the fleece sheets we love so for wintertime appear to be available only as sets, with one flat sheet, two pillowcases, and a so-called fitted sheet that doesn't. But at least this method will allow us to keep using the orphaned top sheets from our existing sets when the fitted ones inevitably, prematurely give out.

Perch Energy: Community Solar Explained

Ecofrugality is about two things: saving money and helping the environment. In my book, doing either one of those things is good, but doing both at once is even better. And community solar, the subject of my latest piece for the Perch Energy blog, fits that category perfectly. 

When most people think about solar power, they think about individual homes with solar panels on their roofs. But rooftop solar isn't an option if you rent, or live in a condo, or have a roof that doesn't get enough sun — or, as we discovered, if your household energy usage is too low. If you live in a state with electricity deregulation, you can purchase electricity from a green power supplier instead, but you have to pay extra for it. Which seems unfair, since solar power is actually cheaper to produce than electricity from fossil fuels and most other sources, and it seems only right for those savings to go to the consumer.

Well, with community solar, they can. Basically, you buy shares in a big solar farm that's being built in your area and get your electricity from them. You can either buy an ownership share (which is like having our own solar array, except it's not on your own house) or a subscription share (which is like buying electricity from a green power supplier, except at a lower cost). So you get clean power and lower energy bills, all without the big up-front cost of installing a solar setup.

The only downside, as far as I can see, is that it's not available to everyone. There has to be a solar farm in your area that's accepting new subscribers, and you have to meet the operators' criteria (such as credit rating or total power use). But if there is a solar farm near you, it seems like a no-brainer to at least submit an application and see what happens. 

And in the course of writing this piece, I discovered that this is in fact the case for me. There's one community solar project near us with 615 kW of power still available. So I submitted an application, and according to the contract, they can sell us solar energy for up to 90% of our total power use at a 15% discount over PSE&G's prices. (For the remaining 10%, I guess we'll continue paying a slightly higher rate to North American Power. But we'll come out ahead overall.)

Want to learn more about how it works and how to get the same perks yourself? Check out the article.

Community Solar Explained: Ultimate Guide to How Community Solar Works

A new crop for 2022

This weekend we decided, pretty much on the spur of the moment, to add a new crop to our 2022 garden. And it all started with a batch of sushi.

Brian and I seldom go out for sushi these days. Instead, Brian makes his own, which is still not cheap, but significantly cheaper. He's learned to make sushi rice using plain old white rice, and he buys the nori sheets and chunks of sushi-grade salmon at the local H-Mart. (All the sushi-grade fish used to be stored in a case with the amusing label "Roll Your Own," but I guess corporate decided that joke wasn't funny.) However, H-mart doesn't sell the little tubs of wasabi paste that normally come with the sushi; you can only get those if you're buying your sushi ready-made. So, as a substitute, he bought a little tin of wasabi powder that he could mix up with water to make his own wasabi paste. 

This time, however, when he mixed the wasabi, he found that it had completely lost its bite. Even I, a complete spice wimp, could lick the powder right off my finger with no ill effects. A quick search on Still Tasty revealed that wasabi powder, properly stored, should last three to four years — but on reflection, we realized that we'd probably had this tin for about that long. We just didn't eat sushi often enough to use it up. So the remaining powder went into the compost bin (or, since it was a somewhat windy day, the area immediately around it).

This got me wondering about whether there might be some way to acquire wasabi (or horseradish, which is what most sushi restaurants actually serve) in smaller quantities, so that we wouldn't waste so much of it. The way we usually do this with herbs, such as rosemary or oregano, is to grow our own and snip off a bit as needed. So I got to wondering: would it be possible to do the same thing with horseradish root?

A quick search revealed that horseradish is, in fact, easy to grow. Almost too easy, in fact, as it has a tendency to take over any area of the garden where it's planted. Good Housekeeping warns against tilling the ground where you've planted it or putting any bit of the root in your compost bin, as that's a good way to spread it all over the yard. Fortunately, it's easy to grow in containers as well, provided they have good drainage and a sunny spot to sit in. And we just happened to have several large buckets that we'd used for our largely unsuccessful potato experiment. Since we never actually got around to putting in a potato crop last year, we decided to repurpose the buckets and see, just for a lark, if we could manage to grow some horseradish.

The first challenge was to find horseradish root. That was easy; a quick call to the Belle Mead Co-Op, where we'd bought our seed potatoes, confirmed that they had some in stock. And since we needed to go there at some point anyway to buy more copper fungicide for our plum trees and some netting to replace the worn-out sections on our garden trellises, it wouldn't even cost us an extra trip. The price was a little steeper than we expected — $12 for a bag of three roots packed in wood shavings — but if the experiment works, this could supply us with all the horseradish we need for a lifetime to come, so what the hey. We decided to start two of the three roots, even though one horseradish plant would probably be plenty to meet our needs, since that would give us a backup in case one of them didn't grow well.

Fortunately, we didn't need to buy anything else. We already had the buckets and a supply of small rocks to create a drainage layer on the bottom. On top of that, we added some ordinary garden soil, amended with a scoop each of compost from our bin and rotted manure from Home Depot (which we've already tested for safety). Then we planted the roots (a few inches deep and at a forty-five degree angle, according to the instructions) and covered them with some wood mulch, which we scavenged from the area around our honeyberries. (We'll need to buy a load of mulch for them this year anyway, so replacing a little bit more won't matter much.)

Our new plants are now tucked into the sunniest corner of the garden, and by all accounts, they'll pretty much take care of themselves from here on out. All we'll need to do is give them a little water during dry spells and prune off any stray suckers. By the end of the year, we should be able to dig out the roots, cut off as much as we need, and replant the rest. The harvested portion should keep for up to three months in the fridge, up to six months if grated and frozen, or up to a year if we can figure out a way to dehydrate it. Storing the root in damp sand in a cold, dark cellar, apparently, is also an option. Or perhaps we could harvest one plant in late fall and the other in early spring to keep us going throughout the summer.

Of course, we'll have to be extra careful when preparing the horseradish, because the chemicals in this stuff are an incredibly potent irritant. Recommendations range from "prepare in a well-ventilated area" to "prepare outdoors" to "wear a ventilator mask and safety goggles." But I guess that's a problem we'll worry about when the time comes. No use counting our radishes before they're dug.

New articles from Money Crashers and Perch Energy

A quick update here to let you know about three new articles of mine that have gone live at Money Crashers, as well as one new one from Perch Energy.

The first Money Crashers piece has split off from my earlier piece on flooring. That one covered the different flooring options available and their pros and cons, particularly with regard to cost; this one is about how to save money on the materials and installation for whatever type of flooring you want.

How to Save Money on Flooring - 9 Steps to Get What You Want For Less

Continuing in the home renovation vein, here's a piece about remodeling your basement on a budget. In it, I cite as examples several of the techniques we used in renovating our already-kind-of-finished basement to turn it into a real room.

How to Save Money on a Basement Remodel - 10 Useful Tips

Next, a simple little piece about community banks. I explain what sets them apart from big banks and the pros and cons of choosing one for your banking needs. (In the process of writing this, I learned that our bank, Provident, was a community bank when we joined it, but apparently is no longer. As of last October, it has too many branches to qualify. So we're now using a regional bank instead, but we're okay with that.)

What Are Community Banks?

And lastly, my new piece for Perch is about tidal energy. I explain how this renewable energy source works and why it isn't used more (spoiler alert: it's mostly about cost).

Tidal Power Explained: What is Tidal Energy & Is It Renewable?

Not-so-Green Mountain Energy

For as long as I can remember, I've been buying my electricity through a third-party supplier. Obviously, this doesn't mean that I have a direct line from my home to this company and they're feeding in only the particular stream of electrons that they generate; rather, it means that I pay a fee for that provider to feed a certain amount of power into our local electric grid. On my electric bill, there are two separate charges: one to the third-party supplier for generating the power, and one to my local utility, PSE&G, for delivering it via the grid.

Unlike most people, I don't do this to save money. I do it because it's the easiest way to power my home with renewable energy. (We've considered installing solar panels, but at first we hesitated due to the price, and eventually we learned that we don't qualify for solar because our power usage is too small.) 

For many years, I used a supplier I chose through the NJ Clean Power Choice program. Then, a few years back, the state of New Jersey canceled that program and required anyone who wanted to switch providers to do it through NJ Powerswitch instead. This was much more complicated, because there were a lot of providers to choose from and no indication as to which ones used renewable energy, but eventually I managed to find a supplier called Ambit Energy that offered plan with 100 percent renewable-generated electricity for only about a penny more per kilowatt-hour than we'd have paid through PSE&G.

But last year, I received a notice from Ambit informing me that they would be switching me over to their new regional power plan. They included an environmental disclosure showing what energy sources went into producing the power for this plan — and lo and behold, it was mostly fossil fuels. It actually had a larger carbon footprint than the power sold directly by PSE&G, which is mainly nuclear.

So I went back to the drawing board again and found a new power supplier: Green Mountain Energy, which I'd used before in the old Clean Power Choice days. It offered a plan with 100 percent wind energy for just a little more than we'd been paying with Ambit. So, problem solved.

Or rather, so I thought. Because last month, I received an Environmental Information Disclosure (EID) from Green Mountain, informing me that their power mix was more than half fossil fuels: 22 percent coal and 38 percent natural gas. Less than 5 percent of it came from renewable sources.

Hoping this was a mistake, I called up Green Mountain Energy to ask for an explanation. The person I got didn't seem to know what was going on and put me on hold several times, but eventually she came back with an explanation: that EID didn't apply to me, because the plan I was on included the purchase of RECs, or Renewable Energy Certificates. These are tools a power provider can use to buy its energy from a green energy supplier — which is exactly what I thought I was doing directly by using Green Mountain. But it turned out Green Mountain was not itself generating power from wind, as it had specifically claimed; it was merely paying some other provider (not necessarily in New Jersey) to do so.

When I expressed some frustration over this, the person on the phone tried to explain to me that, well, look, RECs are the only way you actually can buy renewable energy, because it's all going into the same grid. When I replied that yes, I knew what RECs were, but I thought I was buying my clean energy directly from the supplier, and not from a middleman who was paying money to the supplier, she had to admit that, well, no, that was not the case.

So for the third time, I had to go through the incredibly cumbersome process of trying to compare power suppliers on the NJ Powerswitch site, clicking through to each supplier's website and hunting until I found information about both its rates and its energy sources. It took me about an hour of work to figure out that the best available price for a plan with 100 percent renewable energy was 13.24 cents per kWh from North American Power — just a fraction of a cent more than we'd been paying with Green Mountain. 

But when I clicked on "more details," I found this little tidbit of info:

NAP purchases and retires renewable energy certificates (“RECs”) to match the applicable percent of your electricity usage, above and beyond any state renewable portfolio standard requirements. Your energy consumption for this product is offset by RECs from eligible sources including, but not limited to a mix of hydro and wind.

In other words, if we switched to NAP, we'd be getting essentially the same deal we were getting from Green Mountain. Rather than paying the supplier to put green energy into the grid directly, we'd be paying a broker to buy RECs from other renewable energy suppliers. So logically, it made no sense to switch. If we simply stuck with Green Mountain, we'd be doing the environment exactly as much good as we would with NAP, and we'd pay a little less per kWh.

But I decided to switch anyway, and for one very simple reason: NAP told us the truth about what they were doing. They disclosed right up front that they were not generating clean power themselves, but paying someone else to do it. Green Mountain, by contrast, gave us a contract promising that our energy would come from 100 percent renewable sources, then sent us an EID saying that, well, actually, it came mostly from fossil fuels, and only after I called them up and spent half an hour on hold admitted that they were just buying green energy from someone else.

Maybe it's irrational to be willing to pay an extra three-quarters of a cent per kWh to a company just for being honest with us upfront. But it's a kind of irrational I can live with.

How to recycle textiles (or try to)

Over the past year, I've been making more of an effort to get rid of things that I'm just not happy about using any more. Many of these items were textiles of various sorts: a baggy sweatshirt that I never liked the way I looked in; some towels that were frayed, threadbare, or stained beyond my ability to clean; old pairs of underpants that had lost all the elasticity in their leg elastics. Rather than forcing myself to keep using these things because they were "still good," I gave myself permission to discard and replace them with things I'd actually be happy with.

However, being an ecofrugal person, I couldn't simply toss these unwanted items in the trash. Instead, I've been accumulating a pile of them on the floor of the closet, saving them up for a run to the nearest textile recycling site. Over the years, we've disposed of old clothing and textiles in a variety of ways. Clothing in good condition, of course, can be donated to our local thrift shop, but many of our items are far too worn out for anyone to use, so I've had to seek out sources of true textile recycling — places that would turn the old fabric into new products.

Back in 2013, I was able to just drop my unwanted textiles in the collection boxes of an organization called Repurpose NJ, but that organization no longer exists; we once took a bag of stuff to a local drop-off center, but it's shut down too. Our most recent batch went to a collection bin at the nearest H&M, but not only is that site a bit of a pain to get to — being located in a mall we never visit if we can avoid it — but we've also learned that much of what gets collected there is never actually recycled. In 2017, WGBH reported that only 5 to 10 percent of the material goes into new clothing, while the rest is "downcycled" into lower-value products like insulation. A CBC Marketplace story from 2018 reported that while "most" of the material collected by  I:Collect, the firm used by H&M and several other retailers, goes to secondhand clothing markets overseas, a lot of it doesn't get used even there; in Kenya, for example, one used-clothing dealer says he "just dumps" vast amounts of unwanted clothing into piles and bonfires.

So, this time around, I decided to do some research to see if I could find a place that I could be confident would actually put our old textiles to good use. And this turned out to be a much taller order than I expected.

The first place I looked was Middlesex County's official division of solid waste management. This site says that "Every resident and business in Middlesex County is required to recycle their textiles" — but the county doesn't actually provide any facilities to do so. Instead, the website lists six private companies you can turn to for help recycling your unwanted fabric. Of these six, four (Turnkey, ATRS, Catholic Charities, and USAgain) only accept clothing in good condition, and  one (Planet Aid) no longer operates any bins in New Jersey. And the sixth was apparently having problems with its website, so I couldn't get through.

So I broadened my search a little, Googling "how to recycle textiles." On a site called (amusingly) Trash is for Tossers, I found an article purporting to explain how to recycle all old clothes, "even ratty ass old underwear," but it didn't really deliver on its promises. It first suggested reselling (only practical for pricey clothes in pristine condition), donating (only good for clothes in usable condition), or "upcycling" your old clothes into rags (of which we already have plenty, and anyway, isn't that downcycling?), before getting to what I was really looking for, recycling. It claimed there were "tons of amazing sustainable resources and organizations" that would take textiles for recycling, and it listed a dozen of them, but most of them had one of the following problems: (1) they don't operate in our area, (2) they actually only accept clothing in good condition, (3) they only want specific items we don't have, (4) their websites don't work at all, or (5) they're too expensive. (This objection applied only to the first site on the list, Terracycle, from which you can "Purchase a box to fill with clothing and fabric to ship to Terracycle to be repurposed"... for $103. Asking consumers to spend that amount to get rid of clothes they could put in the landfill for free is not what I call a sustainable system.) The closest thing to a useful suggestion on the Trash is for Tossers list was H&M, which was what we were trying to avoid in the first place.

Other sites I found with my search were equally unhelpful. Most of them just repeated the usual advice — donate clothes in usable condition, and turn worn-out clothes into cleaning rags — which I already knew and have already done for years. I remembered hearing that animal shelters can often use worn-out towels, so I checked out our local shelter to see if they could use any, but their FAQ said they were fully stocked at the moment and suggested "donating them to another organization" without naming any that would actually take them.

Fortunately, this story does have a happy ending. Today, I was able to get through to the last website on the Middlesex County list, Helpsy, and found that it genuinely does reuse or recycle about 95 percent of what it collects, with 75 percent being resold to thrift stores in North America or abroad and the rest getting turned into rags (for people who actually need them, unlike us). And it had two outdoor donation bins within a 7-mile radius of our house, which would be both easier to get to and less hazardous to our health than the mall where H&M is. One of the items I wanted to discard (an old pillow that had frayed to the point I could no longer repair it) was not on their list of acceptable items, but the rest were, and we even added some extra clothes out of our rag bin and a pair of worn-out shoes. We took it all to the donation bin outside the Bottle King liquor store in Hillsborough, and Brian took advantage of the opportunity to pop in and pick up a bottle of an inexpensive tawny port. And we even stopped off at a Starbucks for me.

So, in the end, our recycling mission was a success — at least this time around. But I confess, given that all the other organizations we've used over the years to recycle textiles have simply disappeared, I have my concerns that this one will also be gone by the next time we have a batch to recycle. Which makes me wonder: Just why it so hard to find a textile recycler? If they really are useful as a material, why doesn't anyone want them?

I realize recycling them into new clothing isn't that easy. According to the CBC Marketplace article, most clothes now are made from blended fibers, which can't easily be separated out into new fibers for making new cloth. (Maybe those Levites weren't so crazy for making this kind of fabric illegal.) So pretty much all fabric that gets recycled is downcycled — turned into rags (as Helpsy does with non-usable garments) or into insulation or carpet padding (as I:Collect does).

What I don't understand, though, is why no one these days is upcycling rags into paper. Back in the old days, paper was typically made from rags rather than virgin wood pulp, and even today "rag bond," which contains a high percentage of cotton, is considered to be the best-quality paper you can buy. But it's generally made with cotton linters — virgin cotton fibers that cling to the seeds after the cotton goes through the gin — rather than rags, while rags rot in landfills for want of use. What kind of sense does that make? Is the problem that making paper from rags is much more labor-intensive than making it from virgin cotton? If so, why? Is it not cost-effective to develop machines that can make it from rags — even when the material itself is basically free?

Is this just one of those mysteries of capitalism that's beyond my ken, or is there a simple explanation that I'm overlooking?

How to (maybe) repair a vinyl window shade

This week, the repair or replace dilemma reared its ugly head once again. This time, the culprit was the vinyl window shade in our bathroom. The only window in the bathroom is right in the tub, where it's regularly exposed to high levels of heat and moisture from the shower, which have apparently caused its vinyl material to pucker and warp slightly. This, in turn, resulted in a couple of small tears along the bottom seam, one of which has grown gradually bigger because I occasionally snagged it while squeegeeing the walls. Last week, after discovering that mildew was proliferating along these torn edges, I finally decided the problem had reached the point that we had to either repair the shade somehow or replace it. But which?

On the one hand, a new shade wouldn't be all that expensive. This one only cost around $10, but it also hadn't held up very well — so spending $10 another one just like it would probably mean resigning ourselves to spending another $10 on a replacement every year or so. Sure, we could easily afford that, but it seemed wasteful, particularly when the only part of the shade that's damaged is the bottom seam. There was still more than enough good material on the roller to cover the window, and it seemed ridiculous to just throw it away.

However, to get our money's worth out of this this still-useful material, we'd have to find some way to mend that tear, and that wasn't as simple a job as it sounded. When we encountered this same problem with our old bedroom window shade, we fixed it by applying a long strip of duct tape along the entire bottom seam, which enabled us to get another year or two of use out of the shade before the roller mechanism went kaput. But that was a blackout shade, so the duct tape applied to the back of the shade didn't actually show on the inside. This one is a translucent "light filtering" shade, so the duct tape would definitely be visible through the material. Plus, duct tape doesn't really hold up that well to moisture, so this would only be a short-term fix at best.

We've also tried fixing this problem on a bathroom shade with our hot glue gun. We cut off the damaged bottom portion of the shade, then put a dowel along the bottom edge to weigh it down, rolled up the vinyl material around it, and used hot glue to create a new seam. That repair held for a little while, but it didn't take long for heat and moisture to loosen the glue's hold on the vinyl, and we eventually had to scrap the shade entirely and replace it with this one. So that, once again, was at best a short-term solution.

Thinking that there must surely be some kind of adhesive that could hold up in wet conditions, I started searching around online, and I discovered Tear-Aid Vinyl Repair. The manufacturer claims, and reviewers confirm, that this stuff can make a torn inflatable raft seaworthy again, so it seemed it should certainly be able to hold up on a vinyl shade that's only getting splashed with water, not submerged. And it was available at Dick's Sporting Goods, which is within striking distance of other stores where we shop regularly. The only catch: it was $10 for a kit that contained just one large patch (3" by 12"), one medium (1 3/8" square), and one small (7/8"). It would be good for maybe two or three repairs — if it worked at all. Was it worth the investment when we could just spend $10 on a new shade and be done with it?

Applying the guidelines I learned from Jeff Yeager, I decided that the answer was probably yes. For a tear this small, I reasoned, the $10 kit should be good for at least two repairs, which meant that the cost of the repair was only half the cost of the replacement. Spending $10 to replace both this shade and the next one that developed a tear would be cheaper than spending $20 to replace them both, not to mention less wasteful. So during our Saturday round of grocery shopping, we swung by Dick's and picked up a box of the Tear-Aid to attempt the repair.

However, when we opened the box, we realized there was an additional problem. According to the package, the kit was supposed to contain three patches, a 12" "reinforcement filament" for repairing tears on edges (like the one we had), two alcohol prep pads, and a set of instructions. That didn't sound like a very good value for $10, but we hadn't gotten even that much. Our kit contained only the large patch, the small patch, and the instructions — no medium patch, no reinforcement, no alcohol prep pads. It would still be enough to complete this one repair, but it might not be enough for even one more.

Our first instinct was to go back to Dick's and return it. But there were two problems with that: first, we'd already cut the small patch in two (to repair the smaller tear) before realizing the other parts were missing, so technically, we'd already used the kit at this point. And second, if we did go all the way back to Dick's the next day to return the kit, then what? Exchange it for another one that might also be defective? Or go back to the drawing board looking for something else we could use? I did manage to track down another product, Gear Aid Repair Tape, that might work, but it was only available at REI. The nearest store was in Princeton, which meant we'd probably have to wait until Thursday to pick it up. Faced with the choice of making a second trip to return the Tear-Aid, then yet another to pick up the alternative product (if it was available) and having to wait at least a week before we could attempt the repair again, or simply moving forward with the bird in the hand and getting the stupid thing fixed today, Brian decided to treat the $10 we'd spent as a sunk cost and forge ahead.

Even with the product in hand, however, it took us two attempts to actually make the repair. The first time we tried it, even though we'd allowed the shade to dry for a full 24 hours and it felt completely dry to the touch, the minute Brian tried to apply the patch to it, water squeezed out of the seam. He kept wiping it off and then trying again, and each time, water continued to squeeze out. Eventually, the small patch he'd cut (from half of the small one we'd been provided) was completely useless, and he just had to throw it out. So he hung the shade back up and gave it another 24 hours to dry, then tested the seam thoroughly to make sure there was no water left in it before attempting the repair again.

This time, fortunately, it went off without a hitch. First, after wiping the shade down with alcohol, he carefully applied the other half of the small patch to the small tear on the right side. This tear was small enough that even this tiny patch was big enough to wrap around to the back of the shade, sealing it on both sides. He also used scissors to round off the corners on the patch before applying it, so there would be no sharp edges for a squeegee or a fingernail to snag on and pull them loose.

Then, he cut a strip off the large patch that was just big enough to cover the larger tear — on one side, not both. Once again, he rounded off the corners before applying this patch to the front of the shade. Then he cut another one the same size, rounded it off similarly, and applied it to the back. This was less fiddly than trying to wrap the material around, and it seems about as secure. The repair isn't flawless — if you look carefully, you can still see the tear — but as long as it holds up, we won't complain. (We're giving it the rest of the day to dry before getting it wet, though, just to give it as good a chance as possible.)

So did we make the right choice? I guess it's too soon to say. We'll need to see how well this repair holds up, and compare it with how long the new shade took to get damaged in the first place. But one thing I can say for sure is that if I had to try it again, I wouldn't buy Tear-Aid. I'd wait until we could hit an REI and try the Gear Aid tape. It might not work as well, but it gives you nearly twice as much material (20" by 3") for half as much money — and since there's only one roll in the box, you know you're actually getting everything you pay for.

Recipe of the Month: Pasta Romesco With Spinach

Last month, I got an e-mail from my dad with the subject line, "Delicious vegan recipe." This is not a phrase my dad utters often, so it caught my attention. He said he had signed up for an email newsletter from the Washington Post that delivers "vegetarian or near-vegetarian recipes" to your inbox, and this was the latest one. He found it not only very tasty, but "surprisingly satisfying, for a meal with no meat, fish, or cheese."

The attached recipe was Pasta Romesco With Spinach: a pasta dish with an interesting sauce made from roasted red peppers, roasted almonds, tomato paste, salt, and smoked Spanish paprika. All this gets whirred together in the blender and tossed with pasta (the recipe calls for fusilli, but says spaghetti is also acceptable), spinach sauteed with garlic (it calls for baby spinach, but my dad said chopped adult spinach worked just fine), and fresh basil. My dad also modified the Washington Post recipe by cutting the olive oil, as he is wont to do; he used just one tablespoon to cook the spinach and didn't add any to the sauce, instead thinning it with the reserved liquid from the red peppers.

Well, as luck would have it, the most exotic ingredient in this dish, the smoked Spanish paprika, was something we happened to have on hand. Brian had picked some up on a whim on our latest visit to Penzeys, and he still hadn't really thought of a good way to use it, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity. And, since we're well into the harvest season now, we had plenty of fresh basil in the garden. The only ingredients we had to buy were the roasted red peppers, which we found at Trader Joe's, and the spinach, which we picked up for a buck at Shop Rite.

Since my dad recommended the recipe based on his own modified version, we decided to go with that for our first rendition of it. We substituted linguine, the only long pasta we had in the house, for the fusilli and thinned the sauce with the juice from the peppers. Despite this addition, the sauce was still rather thick, and it took a bit of work to get it to coat the noodles. Brian thinks it would probably work better with the full amount of olive oil, so he's inclined to try it that way next time.

And there will certainly be a next time, because this pasta, as advertised, was very good. The smoked Spanish paprika is a key ingredient; there's only a teaspoon of it in there, but it lends a distinct, smoky undertone to the entire dish, complementing the mellow flavor of the roasted peppers and the earthiness of the almonds. Although the recipe says it only makes three servings, we were able to get dinner for both of us out of it, plus a lunch each from the leftovers. And despite the shrill injunction in the last line of the recipe to "serve immediately," it was just as good the next day.

So this little baby is definitely going into our regular repertoire. In fact, we're going to make a point of keeping a jar of roasted peppers on hand in the pantry from now on, so that we can make it whenever we feel inclined. So we'll add that to our list of things to pick up whenever we hit a Trader Joe's, along with almond milk and toilet paper.

Brian versus Big Cereal

For most of the years we've lived together, Brian has had a cutoff price of 10 cents per ounce for breakfast cereal. Any more than that, and he just won't buy it. We set this limit back when we were first married, based on the estimated cost of our main alternative, homemade granola. I worked out that a batch of granola made according to the recipe from The Tightwad Gazette weighed about a pound and cost about $1.60 to make, so we concluded that if the boxed cereals from the store could beat that price, they were a good deal.

Although prices have risen in the years since, we've never adjusted our benchmark price, because it made the math so easy. Unfortunately, what's not so easy anymore is staying within this price limit. For the past six years or so, Brian has relied almost exclusively on the raisin bran from Aldi, the only cereal that reliably met his target price—and last year, the price of that finally rose above the limit. Since we'd joined Costco by that time, we were able to make do for a while by stocking up on Kellogg's Raisin Bran whenever Costco happened to have it for $1.52 a pound. But the last few times we've gone there, that hasn't been available either. We were able to find a bargain once on Life and once on Honey Bunches of Oats, but neither of those is as healthy as Brian's usual breakfast—and on our last trip, they weren't available at our required price either.

So, at this point, Brian had three choices:

1. Accept that prices have gone up and raise his benchmark price;
2. Find something other than cereal to eat for breakfast; or
3. Attempt to come up with a homemade cereal recipe that would be cheaper than the boxed stuff.

Now, the only kind of cold cereal it's reasonably easy to make at home is granola. However, most homemade granola recipes, including the one from The Tightwad Gazette that we based our benchmark on in the first place, are pretty heavily loaded with sugar and oil. Brian has attempted to make a healthier granola before, but even that recipe, though it doesn't taste particularly sweet, still has more sugar in it than he wants to consume every morning at the breakfast table.

This time, however, Brian had a new idea. Based on his experiments with using a flaxseed-water mixture as an egg substitute, he thought he might be able to use this same mixture as a binder to hold the granola together without a lot of oil or sugary syrup. And this worked...sort of. The granola did in fact stay together, but it was awfully tough and chewy. Also, the two tablespoons of sugar he'd included in his mini test batch weren't enough to give it any discernible sweetness, and he was reluctant to increase the sugar much beyond this point.

So, after a couple of unsuccessful attempts at this flaxseed-based recipe, he decided to try a different tack. He'd use a more standard granola recipe, but then he'd cut that with plain oats when eating it, the way he currently does with his raisin bran. This way, the total amount of sugar in one bowlful of cereal would stay the same, but the sweetness would be more concentrated in the granola chunks instead of spread across the entire bowl, so it would be easier to taste. And this would also allow him to ditch the flaxseed mixture and go with a more standard sugar-oil base.

So he whipped up a small batch like this, and found that it was indeed much tastier than the flaxseed stuff. In fact, it was so tasty that he feared he would be tempted to snack on it, which would (a) not be very healthy and (b) not leave him any for breakfast. I suggested fixing this problem by cutting the granola with plain oats immediately, as soon as it was cool, rather than doing it by the bowl every morning. This would also save him time in the morning. Brian liked this idea, since even if he did snack on the cereal, in this form it would be healthier than most other things he might be inclined to snack on (such as his current favorite indulgence, peanuts with chocolate chips).

After a little more tinkering with the recipe to adjust the sugar and oil as low as possible, Brian came up with his current version, which I'm calling

BRIAN'S LOW-SUGAR COCONUT GRANOLA, VERSION 3.0

Combine in a bowl:

• 4 c. rolled oats
• 1/2 c. chopped walnuts
• 1/4 c. wheat bran
• 1/4 c. flaxseeds
• 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
• 1/4 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. vanilla
• 1/2 c. honey
• 1/4 c. melted coconut oil

Spread the mixture out in a baking pan and and bake at 350°F for 10 minutes. Take it out, stir it around, then bake another 5 minutes. (Remove promptly, or it will burn.)
Stir in:

• 1 c. raisins
• 5 c. rolled oats

Store in an airtight container.

This recipe is both tasty enough and healthy enough to make a reasonable substitute for Brian's usual breakfast mixture of raisin bran, oats, and flaxseeds. The question is, how does it compare price-wise?

According to my calculations, at the prices we currently pay, an entire batch of this contains $1.26 worth of oats, $.62 worth of walnuts, $.20 worth of flaxseeds, $.90 worth of honey, and $.70 worth of coconut oil. That's $3.68, which we can round up to $3.75 to account for the cinnamon, salt, and vanilla. And Brian reckons it's enough for eight bowls, so that works out to about 47 cents per bowl.

His current breakfast is: $0.39 worth of raisin bran (at its new, higher price), about $0.05 worth of oats, and about $0.03 worth of flaxseeds. (This doesn't include the cost of his homemade walnut milk, since he'll use an equal amount of that with either breakfast.) So the raisin bran breakfast comes to...47 cents per bowl, exactly the same as the homemade granola.

So, cost-wise, the two breakfasts are equal. It's all a question of which Brian finds more tiresome: going to Aldi for raisin bran, or baking granola. For now, he's enjoying the homemade granola, so he plans to stick with it for a while. But if he ever gets tired of making granola every week, he can go back to the Aldi raisin bran at its current price of 11.7 cents per ounce and not feel like he's getting ripped off. And, moving forward, any time we find an interesting-looking cereal at Costco for under 12 cents per ounce, we can go ahead and snap it up, knowing it compares reasonably well to what we're eating now.

Freecycle etiquette

Early this month, Brian took advantage of the time off he had for the holiday weekend to do a little cleanup in the laundry room/workshop. Though you may not be able to tell it from the picture, he actually got rid of quite a lot of stuff, sending some to the trash and some upstairs for me to list on Freecycle.

So over the past few weeks, I've made several Freecycle posts and dealt with several different Freecyclers, and the experience has reminded me of something I've thought for a while: there really ought to be a code of etiquette for dealing with people on Freecycle. It might seem like the rules of polite behavior on Freecycle are pretty much the same as they are anywhere else and shouldn't need explaining—but apparently they do, since so many people violate them all the time.

Since it appears that Miss Manners has somehow managed to overlook this particular area, I guess it falls to me to fill in the gap. So here are my proposed Rules of Freecycle Etiquette.

Rule 1: Provide a clear description.
When you offer an item on Freecycle, describe it as clearly and specifically as possible. Include a picture for any item that people might choose based partly on looks, or any item that's hard to describe clearly in writing. Also, provide as much detail you can in the item description, such as dimensions, color, material, and brand and model number. Providing all this information up front saves people the trouble of e-mailing you to ask for details—and it helps you by eliminating the risk for you that someone will request an item, show up, decide they don't like the looks of it, and back out.

Rule 2: Respond to messages.
If someone contacts you about a Freecycle post—either to request an item you've posted, or to offer something you've requested—you have an obligation to respond. Even if the item they're requesting is no longer available, simple courtesy demands that you tell them so.

Yet apparently, most Freecyclers don't bother to extend this common courtesy to others. Many times I've asked for an item and simply been left waiting for an answer, and it's incredibly annoying. I have no way of knowing whether I should be trying to plan my schedule around picking up the item or not. Whenever someone contacts me to ask for an item that I've already promised to someone else, I always reply to tell them so, and they usually respond with something along the lines of, "OK, thank you for letting me know." This shows that (1) they appreciate getting a reply, and (2) they're surprised to get it, because most people don't bother.

Rule 3: Express your intentions.
When you first contact someone about a Freecycle post, your message should state specifically what you want from them. If your message simply says, "Hi, is the bureau still available?" the other person has to e-mail you back to ask, "Yes, do you want it?" and then wait for your reply before you can start the process of making arrangements for a pickup. If you had simply said, "I am interested in the bureau, if it is still available," you could have started making arrangements right away.

Now, you might argue that this isn't really necessary, because obviously, anyone asking about the bureau must be interested in it. So in theory, you could simply respond to "Hi, is the bureau still available?" with "Yes, when would you like to pick it up?" But unfortunately, experience has taught me that this isn't a reasonable assumption. Often, my reply of "Yes, do you want it?" meets with no response—which suggests the answer is "No, not really." If I had instead replied with, "Yes, when would you like to pick it up?" I would have been left waiting for a reply that would never come, and being forced in the meantime to turn down other people who are requesting the same thing because I've already promised it to someone else.

In fact, it's better still if you go one step further and state in that first message not just that you are interested in the item, but when you would be able to pick it up: "I am interested in the bureau, if it is still available. I could pick it up Monday evening, if that's convenient." Including this information in your first message saves another round of back-and-forth messages. I have taken to putting in my posts, "If you are interested, please state in your first message when you can pick it up," in the hopes that this will save time—yet even then, most people ignore the request.

Rule 4: Be specific as to place and time.
This is kind of an extension of rule 3: when you offer to pick up an item, be as specific as possible about when you will be there. If you say, "I will come by some time on Saturday," or worse yet, "some time next weekend," then I have no idea when to expect you. If the item is too big for porch pickup, I'll be effectively held captive in my house all weekend waiting for you with no idea when you'll show up. If I'm leaving it out for porch pickup, this is less of a big deal, but it's still a minor inconvenience not to know how long the item will be out there.

By the same token, if you're the person offering the item, provide clear information about where your house is and what they must do to retrieve the item. I give not only my address, but a description of the house and a couple of landmarks they can use to help them find it. I also tell them if I want them to ring the bell or if I will leave the item out for porch pickup, and if it's the latter, exactly where the item will be: "I'll put it in a bag labeled 'Freecycle' and tie it to the railings of the side stoop." This may seem like overkill, but even with these detailed directions, some people still have trouble finding an item I've left out for them, and they either ring the bell or e-mail me later to say they came by and couldn't find it. But I can at least minimize the problem by being as specific as possible.

4. Honor your obligations.
If you have promised an item to someone, make sure that item is in the stated place at the stated time. If you said you would leave it out for porch pickup, make sure it's out there by the time the person is supposed to arrive; if they're coming to the door, then make sure you're home at the time they said they'd be there. And, obviously, if you have promised something to one person, don't give it to someone else instead just because they could come pick it up earlier. If you're not willing to wait until Tuesday, then don't promise the item to someone who can't come until Tuesday.

Likewise, if you have promised to pick something up at a given time, be there at that time. Don't assume that, just because the item is free, it doesn't really matter if you keep your promise. Even though there's no money at stake, you are still creating inconvenience for the person who posted it and has been forced to stay home waiting for you, or else gone to the trouble of hauling the item out to the porch only to see it sit there unclaimed.

Of course, emergencies do happen that can prevent you from showing up as scheduled. Your car breaks down; you have to stay home with a sick child; you're forced to work late. If something like this happens and you can't be there when you promised you would, SAY SO. It only takes a minute to send an e-mail to say you can't make it and attempt to reschedule. That way, the person can at least leave the house instead of sitting there waiting and wondering if you're ever going to show up. And if you can't arrange another suitable time for the pickup, they at least have a chance to withdraw their offer and give the item to someone else, instead of being stuck in limbo with an item they can't get rid of and can't give to anyone else because it's already promised to you.

5. Post a "taken" message.
After your item has been picked up, remember to go back to Freecycle and post a new message to say the item is now taken. Otherwise, it will still appear as an available item, and people will waste their time and yours asking you about it.


If everyone could just follow these five simple rules when using Freecycle, I think it would be a much more pleasant experience for everyone—givers and receivers alike. If you think there are any other important rules of Freecycle etiquette that I've left out, let me know in the comments. 

[EDIT, 7/9/26: Since posting this, I've learned of one additional rule that's useful if your group allows it: If you've promised an item to someone who can't pick it up right away, amend your post to read "Pending pickup" in the heading. That way other people won't waste time reaching out to you about an item that's already spoken for. (I wouldn't recommend marking the item as "Taken," because the person might turn out to be a no-show, and some groups won't let you immediately re-post the same item if that happens.)]