Shelter from the cold

Somehow, in less than a month, we've gone from summer to winter. Two or three weeks ago, it was so warm out that I was too hot in just a single layer of clothing; this week, I've been piling on four layers, including my winter coat and long johns, and still feeling like the wind is blowing right through me. It's the kind of weather that you can best enjoy by observing it from indoors, snuggled up on the couch with a blanket and a hot drink.

But there are other creatures in our yard that don't have a cozy indoor space to retreat to. Such as, for instance, the family of stray cats, a mother and two kittens, that Brian and I have been feeding throughout the year. (Yes, I know you're not supposed to feed strays because they kill birds, but the way I figure it, they won't kill as many birds if they have something else to eat.) As far back as last summer, Brian and I were discussing whether we wanted to try to provide "our" outdoor cats with some sort of shelter during the winter. But when Brian looked into what kind of shelter would be appropriate, it started to seem kind of complicated. Ideally, it would have at least two sets of walls, inner and outer, with a space between them for insulation. It would need two separate entrances, since cats don't like to be trapped in a place with only one exit. And the entrances would either need to be covered with some sort of door or else turn a corner to keep the wind from blowing in. It wouldn't be simple to construct, and unless we could find a corner of the yard where it would stay tucked away all year, we'd have to store it once spring came.

I was thinking about this one day while I was out on the patio, moving around the outdoor furniture and wondering how long we should wait before storing it away in the shed for winter. I wasn't looking forward to this task, since it's a bit of a hassle to cram it in there, and once it's in you have basically no access to anything else behind it. And it occurred to me that maybe if we just covered the table and chairs up with tarps, not only could they stay out all winter, but they could also serve as a sort of tent shelter for the outdoor cats. It wouldn't be as warm as a properly insulated shelter, but it would be a lot better than nothing.

Originally, I thought we wouldn't even need to buy anything for this project, since we already had a couple of old plastic drop cloths stashed away in the shed. But when Brian pulled them out, he found that the outdoor conditions had taken their toll on the plastic, which tore like tissue paper at the slightest pressure. Fortunately, the sale flier for the nearby Ocean State Job Lot was advertising outdoor tarps at fairly low prices. They were sold out of the 8x10 size, and Brian thought 5x7 would be too small, so we ended up buying one "basic" tarp in size 10x12 and one "tear-resistant" 12x16 one for a total of $32.

Assembling the shelter was a bit of a puzzle. First, we pushed the table up against the side of the house to take advantage of its thermal mass. (The wall warms up in the sun during the day and radiates that heat away at night, so it's a little warmer right next to it than it is out in the open.) Next, we took all the cushions off the chairs and stacked them under the table to provide a layer of padding and insulation from the cold ground. 

Then we covered the entire table with the smaller of the two tarps. It was bigger than we actually needed, so we doubled part of it over and still had enough to reach down to the ground on all sides. We tucked it under the feet of the table and added a couple of bricks to help weigh it down. On my end, I simply tucked up a fold of the fabric to make a tent-flap kind of entrance, but Brian decided to create a more defined entrance on the other side by tucking up part of the fabric and holding it in place with a clamp. 

After that came the trickiest part: piling all the chairs on top. Brian thought maybe we should just settle for two chairs and leave the other two loose, but I thought it we were going to cover the furniture we should try to cover all of it. So after some maneuvering, we found a way to interlock the chairs so that they'd all fit with only the legs of two of them hanging off the edge. We attached them together with some small bungee cords to keep the pile stable.

Then we took the larger and sturdier tarp and put it over this entire pile. Once again, we had way more fabric than we needed and ended up partly doubling it over before securing it under the table legs and adding a row of bricks to hold it down. And even then, there was still a lot of loose fabric overhanging at one end. We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to tuck all this excess material out of the way before I had the idea to incorporate the metal trash can we'd already put out on the patio, lying on its side, to keep the cats' food dish from getting wet when it rained. So we sort of wrapped all the extra tarp material around this to make a sort of vestibule. This had the added advantage that next time the cats came looking for their food, they'd be sure to find and investigate the entrance to the tent. And indeed, the next day, I spotted one of the kittens emerging from it, so now we know that the cats have found the shelter and feel comfortable using it.

This, along with a restock of the bird feeder, took care of the animals in our yard. But we still had the plants to consider. Our parsley, which never minds the cold, is still looking green and healthy, so we haven't touched that, but we harvested what was left of the arugula, along with all the winter squash from the volunteer vine in the side yard. We got half a dozen of varying sizes, but some weren't fully ripe yet, and a couple of them had split open in the cold. So we're not counting this squash as part of our official harvest until we figure out how much of it will turn out to be edible.

Brian also went out and dug up the horseradish roots that he planted last spring. These were a bit of a disappointment; although at least one of the plants had been large and flourishing, the actual roots were only about twice the size they'd been when we planted them. After spending $12 and putting in all the effort required to plant and harvest them, we only ended up with a few ounces of horseradish — and we're not even sure how much of that will be usable. So while growing these was an interesting experiment, it's not one we're planning to repeat.

Lastly, we decided to make some effort to winter-proof our outdoor rosemary plant. Where we live, in USDA Zone 7, growing rosemary year-round is a dicey proposition; according to most gardening sites, you can't reasonably expect it to survive the winter unless you dig it up, put it in a pot, and bring it indoors. But ours was too big for that, and we'd occasionally had rosemary plants make it through the winter before, so we decided we'd at least take a crack at keeping it alive. 

Rather than trimming it back to three inches and burying it in compost, as most gardening sites recommend for growers in Zone 8 and higher, we decided to try a tip from Gardeners' Path: covering it with plastic. We didn't have any "floating row covers," but Brian happened to have a large plastic bag stashed away that he thought would be big enough to enclose it. He poked some holes around the edge of this and threaded through a piece of thick string to make a drawstring top, and then we sort of wrestled the plant into it and pulled the string snug to hold the bag in place. Then we piled leaves around the base for insulation, and we'll hope that keeps the plant warm enough to keep it alive until spring.

And with that, we are fully prepared for winter, indoors and out. When the wind kicks up and it's just too unpleasant to venture outside, we can snuggle up with our blankets and hot drinks without guilt, knowing that we've done our best to keep all the other critters on our property comfortable too.

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.

Air cooling for the win

Two weeks ago, I decided it was time to give in and get a window air conditioner for our bedroom. We'd been relying on a window fan to keep us cool at night, but with the outside air still around 80 degrees at bedtime, it could only do so much. So I found a GE Profile air conditioner with a "saddle" design that could occupy our one bedroom window without obstructing it completely. I figured this would allow us to have A/C on those nights we absolutely needed it, and the rest of the time it would run in fan mode. It would do the same job as our old window fan, except that we wouldn't have to switch it off to keep out light in the morning or water if it started to rain. A win-win, right?

One hundred percent wrong. This thing was a complete horror show, from the moment we took it out of the box until we returned it less than 24 hours later.

The first problem with it was its sheer weight. It took both of us just to drag the box inside and lift the unit onto the bed (which Brian had prepared by laying a sheet of plywood on top, covered with an old quilt). So before attempting to manhandle it into the window, we took the precaution of plugging it in and turning it on to make sure that it actually produced cool air. It did, so we moved on to the massive job of installing it. 

We had checked before buying this air conditioner to make sure that our window had the 13 inches of clearance required to fit it through, and it did, with a tiny bit to spare. But what we didn't realize was that the unit couldn't just go straight into the window. If its full weight came down on the vinyl window frame, it would crush it. So GE had provided two foam spacers with sticky backing that were supposed to sit inside the window frame and create a secure base for it. The problem was, the two pieces were both the same size: roughly 18 inches long, a little under an inch wide, and half an inch thick. A single one wasn't quite tall enough to support the unit, but stacking one on top of the other would make the window opening too small to fit it through.

So we came up with a jury-rigged solution: stacking the two strips together and installing them sideways. Since the width of the strips was a little less than their combined height, our measurements indicated that this would leave us just enough space to squeeze the unit through the window. Since this meant we couldn't use the sticky backing to hold them in place, Brian put down a line of hot glue on the window frame and quickly pressed the joined spacers on top of it. It wasn't super secure, but we figured it only had to hold long enough for us to get the unit through the window.

The next problem we encountered was with the "chase," the top part of the machine. This was, in theory, adjustable to accommodate walls of varying thickness. But when we opened it up to the desired width and then tried to put the screws back in, the screw holes didn't line up. Once again, we had to brute-force a solution, squeezing the tip of each screw into the tiny amount of overlap between the holes and then applying massive torque on the screwdriver to force the screw into place.

After that, we were finally ready to lift the thing into the window. This was the hardest part yet, because the bottom of the A/C unit kept snagging on the spacer strips. This had nothing to do with the unconventional way we'd installed them; the problem was that the unit had two little feet on the bottom, heaven knows what for, that apparently weren't counted as part of its 13-inch height. No matter which way we turned the thing, we could not get both feet around the spacer strips, so in the end we just shoved and shoved until they dug their way across the foam and popped out the other side. After that, it took several minutes to adjust the supports and get the thing snugged up against the outside wall, but compared what we'd already gone through, that was nothing.

However, our problems were not over. The side panels that came with the air conditioner were sized to align with the top of the unit when it was sitting on top of the two stacked spacers. This meant that with our slightly shorter spacer, they extended past the top of the unit. Brian had to shave the tops of them off with a utility knife to get them roughly aligned with the top of the chase before adding a foam weather strip across the top. It still didn't line up perfectly, but the foam was squishy enough that we were able to get the window closed.

At last, we had the thing in place and were ready to turn it on. Since it was fairly cool outside, we decided to run it in fan mode, figuring that it should manage to get the bedroom down to a comfortable temperature in the few hours before bedtime.

This did not happen. I first began to have misgivings an hour or so after we installed it, when I went into the bedroom and found that it was significantly warmer than the rest of the house, where we had the windows open and fans running. But Brian argued that it was just taking some time to disperse all the body heat we'd put into the room while getting the thing installed.

By bedtime, though, the room had not cooled down at all. Brian suggested we turn the air conditioner to cooling mode, but I hated the idea of running A/C when it wasn't actually that hot outside and the rest of the house felt perfectly comfortable without it. I knew I didn't want to rely on it every night, so I figured I'd have to get used to this thing's pathetic excuse for a fan sooner or later

I finally managed to get to sleep by snuggling up to an ice pack. When I woke up the next morning, the pack had turned into a hot-water bottle, the room felt even stuffier than before, and Brian wasn't there. I emerged to find that he had already started up the big fan in the kitchen window and the rest of the house now felt much, much cooler than the bedroom. He had slept even worse than I had. He'd eventually turned the cooling on briefly just to get the room down to a bearable temperature, but when he woke up a few hours later, it was so stifling that he gave up and spent the rest of the night on the sofa. 

Based on this experience, Brian was now convinced that the air conditioner's so-called fan mode didn't actually exchange air with the outdoors. All it did was blow it around the room, creating a little bit of airflow but providing no actual cooling whatsoever. We didn't know whether our unit was defective or it was actually designed this way for some idiotic reason, but one thing was clear: If we wanted to cool our bedroom with outside air for most of the summer and use A/C only in emergencies, this machine wasn't going to do it.

So we spent a good part of that morning wrestling the unit out of the window we'd worked so hard to wrestle it into the day before. This was even harder, since our jury-rigged foam support kept pulling loose and snagging on the machine, but eventually we managed to get it out of the window and back into its box. And even before taking it back to Best Buy (which, fortunately, accepted our return with no difficulties), I had already ordered its replacement: the TRANSOM window fan from Vornado.

Compared to the nightmare of dealing with the air conditioner, installing this was almost ludicrously easy. Lifting it into the window was no problem, since it weighs less than nine pounds. The foam pieces that fit around the edges to block out light came in an assortment of sizes, so we didn't have to do any carving or shoving or squeezing to get a reasonably close fit. (There is a slight gap, but Brian thinks he can fill it with some more of that foam weather-stripping.) And when we plugged it in and turned it on, lo and behold, cool air came into the room.

I can't honestly claim that this fan keeps us every bit as cool and comfortable as an air conditioner would. In fact, in terms of airflow, I'm not really sure it's superior to our old window fan. But it is much more user-friendly. Thanks to its lower profile and weatherproof case, we can simply leave it in the window all summer long, rather than having to move it into the window at night and back out in the morning. It also doesn't admit nearly as much light into the room, so we don't have to make a tradeoff between keeping the room dark and keeping it cool. It even comes with a cute little remote control, in case we want to switch it off or adjust its speed in the middle of the night.

Bottom line: If what you want is a fan 98% of the time and an air conditioner 2% of the time, do not, repeat not, spend $500 on this air conditioner. You're much better off spending $100 on a good window fan and migrating into a room with air conditioning on those rare occasions when you really need it.

Household hacks: How we're keeping cool(er)

I've lived in New Jersey pretty much all my life, and so I'm used to hot, humid summers. Daytime temperatures over 90 degrees F are so common that they're not even worthy of comment, and there have always been summer heat waves when it gets into the upper 90s for a few days at a time. But nothing in all my years of New Jersey summers prepared me for the kind of heat we've been having this past week. 

Most of the state has been under a heat advisory for the last seven days, with the daytime heat index reaching 100 to 105 degrees. It's not too bad in the evening and early morning, but between 10am and 8pm, the outdoors is pretty much unbearable. Brian has been unable to ride his bike to work all week for fear that he'd just keel over from the heat on his ride home. And it's going to get worse before it gets better; tonight, it's unlikely to drop below 80 degrees all night long.

Most New Jerseyans, I imagine, are dealing with this by staying in their air-conditioned homes, cars, and workplaces for most of the day. But our house only has A/C in two rooms: a built-in wall unit in the living room and a window unit in the office. They can't do a thing to help us with cooking or eating in the kitchen or sleeping in the bedroom. And even in the rooms where we have A/C available, we prefer not to deploy it unless it's a true emergency, which I define as over 90 degrees indoors during the day or 85 at night. As we've learned from past experience, running the A/C all day is hugely expensive; one summer when we had guests staying with us for just one week and put an air conditioner in their room to keep them comfortable, our electric bill for the month more than doubled. And of course, for those who aren't getting their electricity from clean energy sources like we do, using more power also contributes to climate change, which means heat waves like this will only get more frequent and more severe in the future.

So, just as we do to stay warm in the winter, we're relying on a variety of household hacks to keep us at least tolerably cool until the heat wave breaks. Here's a roundup of our best cooling tips:

Summer Strategy #1: Use windows selectively

As soon as it cools down in the evening, we open windows throughout the house to to let in the cooler air. In the morning, as soon as the outdoor temperature gets higher than the indoor temperature, we close them all down to a crack. (We leave just a little gap for ventilation, because otherwise the house gets too stuffy.) We also lower the shades to block out solar radiation. During this latest heat wave, we've taken it a step further and started keeping the door to our guest room closed, since that room has south- and east-facing windows with blinds that don't fully block out the sun.

Summer Strategy #2: Use fans everywhere

We have an Eco Breeze fan in our office that I received as part of my payment for writing some ad copy for the company. It has a built-in thermostat that automatically switches it on as soon as the outdoor air gets cooler than the indoor air, and back off when the indoor air gets down to a preset temperature (or when the outdoor air heats up again). It also has the advantage that, unlike other window fans, it can run even in rainy weather. It's basically like a window A/C unit with all the cooling parts taken out. I probably would never have bought one if it hadn't been given to me, but now I consider it indispensable. The only reason I haven't bought more of them is that, like a window A/C, it permanently occupies a window all summer long.

For the rest of the house, we rely on lower-tech cooling. At night, we keep a window fan running in our bedroom's one window. When Brian gets up in the early morning, he usually shuts off the fan and closes the curtains to keep the room dark, but during this heat wave he's been compromising by turning off only one of its twin fans and closing just one curtain. He also sets up our huge exhaust fan in a kitchen window to vent hot air out of the house, replacing it with cooler air that flows in through the windows.

Once the outdoor air gets warmer than the indoors (which has been happening pretty early this week), we stow all the window fans and spend the rest of the day relying on stationary fans. We keep the ceiling fan in the kitchen running whenever we're in there, and in every other room, we have desk fans pointed at us wherever we happen to be. There's a little one that sits on my desk, one in the living room next to the couch (which Brian moves to his desk if he's working from home), and one in our bedroom that we keep pointed at the bed to keep air moving directly over us as we sleep.

Summer Strategy #3: Sip cold drinks

In weather like this, it's important to stay hydrated, so we both chug plenty of cold water all day long. You may have heard that hot drinks are actually more cooling, but that's only because they stimulate sweating; in New Jersey's humid climate, where the sweat never evaporates properly, they're counterproductive.

Summer Strategy #4: Minimize stove and oven use

In the wintertime, we use the oven as much as possible to keep the kitchen warm. In summer, quite the other way, we try to keep oven use and even stove use to a minimum. We rely on a combination of cooking on the grill (if it's not too broiling hot to be outdoors), using the pressure cooker to minimize stovetop time, quick-cooking dishes such as pasta, and cold salads that require no cooking at all. And if we absolutely have to bake something (such as our traditional anniversary cake), we do it either at night or early in the morning, with the exhaust fan running continuously to vent out the heat.

Summer Strategy #5: Chill out in the basement

Even with a fan pointed directly at us, there have been nights this week when our living room futon felt uncomfortably warm. The soft surface traps body heat, so it feels a bit like sitting in a hot bath. So, a few times this week, we have abandoned the living room and retreated to the basement, where it's as much as 10 degrees cooler, to play games or watch TV on Brian's laptop.

Summer Strategy #6: Apply ice

Another way I try to mitigate the heat when lying in bed or sitting on the couch is to grab a gel ice pack (the kind used for icing an injury) out of the freezer. I apply it directly to my pulse points (neck, wrists, thighs) for a quick burst of cold. I've tried other strategies for cooling the pulse points, such as a cooling neck band and wristbands that you soak in cold water, but I haven't found them all that helpful. With the humidity this high, the moisture can't evaporate, and the coolness of the water is offset by the damp material clinging to my skin and impeding airflow. And before long, they warm up to body temperature and provide no benefit at all.

By combining these six strategies, we manage to stay reasonably comfortable for most of the day, but things get challenging at bedtime. We've stripped down the bed to the minimum, with just the sheets and the duvet cover minus duvet, and stripped down ourselves to the minimum of clothing as well, but the mattress itself still traps body heat, so every part that's in contact with it feels overheated. In weather like this, I would happily run an air conditioner in the bedroom if we had had one, but we don't, and we've had trouble figuring out how to add without blocking off the room's only window for the whole summer.

On the very hottest nights, we sometimes sleep on the futon in the office, which has A/C, or in the basement, where it's naturally cooler. But this doesn't necessarily lead to a better night's sleep, because if we shut the cats into the room with us, they pounce on our feet, and if we shut them out, they scratch and meow at the door all night. So throughout this heat wave, I've been trying to tough it out in the bedroom with fans and ice packs, but with limited success.

I recently saw a suggestion in Consumer Reports that a cooling mattress topper can help. However, they're not talking about the "passive" kind of cooling with heat-absorbing gel, which they say doesn't work very well; they're recommending "active" systems with a little water cooler under the bed and a pump to circulate cool water through a network of tubes in the pad. These devices cost over $700 for a full-sized mattress, they include a bulky unit that needs to be stored under the bed, they use electricity (though not as much as an air conditioner), and they require regular maintenance to fill, drain, and clean the water tank. I've looked into some less expensive bed-cooling devices from the Cooling Store , such as the water-filled "Chillow" and a gel cooling pad, but I just don't know how well they would work.

One thing that definitely won't work is this alleged "portable AC" that I've been seeing ads for all over the Internet. From the description, it's pretty obvious that this is not an air conditioner at all, but an evaporative cooler, also known as a swamp cooler, which is supposed to cool you down simply by blowing air over water to evaporate it. In the first place, there's no reason to pay $90 for one of these when you can get something similar for less than half the price at Target or Walmart (and those models are honest about what they are, rather than misleading customers by claiming to be air conditioners). You can even make your own with less than $20 worth of parts. But we have no reason to do any of these things, because swamp coolers are pretty much useless in high humidity.

So, having weighed all the options, we've decided it's time to bite the bullet and add an actual air conditioner to the bedroom. I managed to find a small over-the-sill model that can fit in our bedroom window without obstructing it too much, so it can still admit light. At $430, it's significantly cheaper than the mattress cooler, and a lot more likely to be effective. It also has a fan-only mode, so it can also take the place of our old window fan (which would probably have needed replacing soon anyway) on summer nights when it isn't overpoweringly hot. And since it's Energy Star-certified, it won't completely destroy our ecofrugal cred to run it on the few nights a year when it is.

Besides, according to Hallmark, appliances are the traditional 18th-anniversary gift, so it's only fitting.

Thrift Week 2021, Day 2: Flowers

By now, I have my ecofrugal holiday decorating routine pretty much down to a science. I just trim off some branches from all the evergreen trees in (and overhanging) our yard, fill up all the vases in the house with them, bind some onto the front porch railings, and eke it all out with curls of red ribbon and strings of little white lights. I've been using the same lights and ribbons for years, so I can make the house look appropriately festive without spending any money at all.

The problem comes when the holidays are over and it's time to take those decorations down. Refilling the vases with more evergreens doesn't feel right, because I associate those with Christmas time — but there's nothing else in the garden to fill them with, and even the earliest spring flowers are still months away. And simply leaving the vases empty makes the room feel sort of bare and bleak, right at the very time when the world outside is barest and bleakest and the indoors could really use something to brighten it up.

So when I decided to do this local shopping challenge for Thrift Week, I figured it would be a perfect occasion to throw a little business to an establishment I rarely patronize: our local florist. I usually avoid buying cut flowers, not just because of the price but also the pesticides and carbon footprint — but since I'm trying to help local businesses here, I decided that would take the curse off it some. And I hoped that perhaps the florist could recommend something that was sort of winter-appropriate — maybe grown in a local greenhouse rather than shipped from Argentina.

And that's what I got, more or less. He initially pointed me at some mixed bouquets in the front of the shop, but they looked a little too bright and summery, so I inquired about some white flowers in a bucket, which turned out to be freesias sold by the stem. Not wanting to go too overboard, I just bought five of them. When I got home, I clipped some sage off our not-quite-dormant plant to fill out the vase, and now I have a nice, not too un-seasonal display of flowers and greenery to brighten up our living room. (I guess if I'd been thinking, I'd have accepted the florist's offer of some greens to go with the flowers, since the whole point of the exercise was to give them some business. But my frugal habits were kind of working on autopilot, so I said no to this "extra" expense without thinking about it.)

Now, since this purchase is one I normally wouldn't make at all, I could say the entire $15 that I spent on it is a cost incurred by shopping locally. But on the other hand, I had more or less decided already to splurge on some cut flowers to brighten up the bleak midwinter, so if I hadn't bought them here I would probably have picked up a bunch at Trader Joe's or someplace. On our last trip there, the closest thing I saw to a seasonal bunch of blooms was tulips at $10 a bunch, so my decision to shop local only cost me an extra $5. So far, I'm actually ahead for the week.

3 new(ish) Money Crashers articles

I've got a bit of a backlog of new Money Crashers articles to tell you about here, since for some reason my work e-mail stopped sending me messages for nearly two weeks. This afternoon, I suddenly found over 40 "new" messages dating back to October 15, including several notifications about newly published pieces. They are:

1) An article on reducing winter heating costs. This is something I've struggled with personally, as I'm such a weather wimp that just turning down the thermostat from 68 to 67 left me shivering. But with winter tips and tricks like weather stripping, wearing a blanket over my clothes, using fleece sheets, drinking hot tea, doing lots of baking, and keeping a pressure-cooker space heater next to my desk, I'm managing to get by. This article can help you do the same.

How to Lower Your Heating Bills & Save Money on Winter Energy Costs

2) A piece on money-making schemes that won't make you any money. Some of them are outright scams, some are illegal, and some just don't pay diddly, but they all have one thing in common: they promise a big payoff for practically no work. In other words, they sound too good to be true, and they are.  

10 Money Making Schemes That You Should Probably Avoid

3) And lastly, a guide to digital cameras. This isn't exactly my area of expertise, since I've been using the same cheapo camera for the past ten years (except that I've somewhat switched over to my phone camera since I bought one that was reasonably easy to use), but hey, if my years at ConsumerSearch taught me anything, it was how to research a purchase. So if you're in the market for a camera, you can gain the benefit of all my skill in this area. You're welcome.

9 Best Digital Cameras to Buy for Photography in 2020

 

Gardeners' Holidays 2020: Renewal

Although I'm not putting too much stock in Punxsutawney Phil's prognostications of an early spring, I can definitely say that the first Gardeners' Holiday of 2020 was much warmer than it was in 2018 or 2019. Even in the morning, the temperature was well up into the 40s, and we didn't even get chilly as we headed out into the yard to kick off our gardening year by pruning the plum trees.

As I predicted, this job has become much easier than it was the first time we attempted it in 2018. Many of the most problematic branches on the trees have already been cleared away, so it was mostly smaller offshoots that we had to lop off this year, not whole limbs. We cleared out the ones that were overhanging the sidewalk and the flagstone path, then pruned away any that were in direct contact with other branches and any that were pointing inward toward the center of the trees. In the end, we cleared away enough branches to make three small bundles for burning in our backyard fire pit once the weather warms up...

...and to make an indoor display to tide us over until we have flowers to gather in the spring.

And not a moment too soon, it appears, because our backyard trees look like they're ready to jump the gun on spring any time. When we went out in the back to put away our tools and the bundled sticks, I saw that our cherry bushes are already starting to bud. Which leads me to hope that the marmot soothsayer was right after all, because otherwise, these poor little tender buds are going to get nipped as soon as winter reasserts itself.

Pruning the plums was only the first of many spring chores we have to do this year. We also plan to take the trimmer to the big hedge in the front yard and cut it down to a size that won't obstruct our path to and from the house. (If taking that much off the bushes turns out to be fatal, just as well; we'll pull them out completely and replace them with a nice little low fence that doesn't need nearly as much maintenance.)

And we have to pull out some garden soil and bake it to start our seeds in — not just our vegetable seeds, but also the flower seeds for the new flower garden I'm planning to put in this spring. Since our various attempts to plant a wildflower bed (first with a mixture of annual and perennial seeds that caused the plot to be overrun with bachelor's buttons, then with an all-perennial mixture that produced only scattered blossoms that quickly gave way to weeds) have been unsuccessful, I've decided to clear the entire bed and plant larger clumps of specific plants that I know are well adapted to clay soil. I've selected five plants:

• Confetti Cake hellebore (Lenten rose), which will produce white-and-purple blossoms starting as early as February;
• Early Sunrise coreopsis, with 18" tall yellow blossoms from April through July;
• Summer Pastel yarrow, with 1-to-2-foot blooms in yellow, pink, and red from June through September;
• Purple confeflower (echinacea), which will produce tall 2-to-4-foot purple blossoms from July through September and can go to seed after that, becoming an attraction for goldfinches;
• Autumn Joy sedum (stonecrop), with 2-foot-tall pink-and-copper blossoms through the end of October;
• And, to fill in the gaps, little clumps of  6-inch, yellow-and-purple Johnny-Jump-Ups (violas).

If this works, it will give us continuous blooms from February through October, so our garden will only be bare from November through January. We've ordered the hellebore and sedum plants from Wit's End Gardens (the only place I could find both of them), to be delivered in the spring, and we bought seeds for the rest along with our yearly order from Fedco. We'll start a couple of seeds for each plant, and when the others arrives, plant them in large clusters throughout the bed and fill in the spaces between with mulch to combat weeds. And if that doesn't work, we'll at least be able to tell where the actual flower clumps are, so we can identify the weeds and pull them out without taking the flowers with them.

All in all, we have our work cut out for us going into the 2020 garden season. There's more to be done than usual, but if it works out, we should have better results this year and every year going forward.

Grow-your-own decor

For several years now, I've followed the same routine when it comes to seasonal decorations. In the fall, as soon as Jack-be-little pumpkins become available at the farmers' market, I buy three of them for $2 and deploy them on the steps of my front stoop. Those stay up until Thanksgiving weekend, when I stop by the Christmas tree vendors in the Sears parking lot and pick up a big bundle of trimmed-off branches for another buck or two. I bind the longest pieces to the railings of the front stoop with red-and-silver holiday ribbon, add a string of white LED lights, and use what's left of the greenery to make indoor arrangements in flowerpots. I've made some modifications to the indoor decorations in the past few years to make them cat-safe, but the basic decorating scheme has stayed the same. And in a typical year, I don't have to spend more than $5 on it.

But this year, this system ran into a snag. Two snags, actually. First the farmers' market didn't have any Jack-be-littles, so I had to buy them at the supermarket. That cost an extra dollar, but that was no big deal; the bigger problem was that the supermarket pumpkins, exposed to the elements, started to rot within a couple of weeks. I've never encountered that problem with the ones from the farmers' market; sometimes they'd be starting to look a little iffy by the time Thanksgiving rolled around, but I was always able to make them last until it was time to put up the Yuletide greenery. This year, I had to discard two of the three pumpkins well before Thanksgiving, and by that time the store was no longer selling them, so I couldn't replace them.

Then, over Thanksgiving weekend, when we stopped by the Sears parking lot to pick up our evergreens, we discovered that the Christmas tree vendors were no longer there. Even though our Sears store is one of the few in the country that's still in business, the vendors had apparently decided the traffic there wasn't good enough, so they'd left a sign saying that they'd moved to the parking lot of a Staples in Woodbridge, eight miles away. Eight extremely traffic-heavy miles in a direction we never travel normally.

We were reluctant to go that far out of our way solely for the evergreens, so instead, we decided to do a little hunting around the shopping centers in our area to see if we could find anyone else selling trees closer by. While shopping last Wednesday, we cruised through about half a dozen shopping center parking lots and found nothing. We also checked the prices of greenery at the Home Depot and Lowe's, thinking it might be worth paying a bit more for our evergreens if it saved us a stressful trip. They had some, but they were charging $10 for a small bunch less than half the size of the bundle we usually buy from the tree vendors, and probably not enough to decorate more than one of our railings.

So at that point, we decided to go to Plan C. Instead of finding a new tree vendor, we'd see how much greenery we could manage to trim off our own trees and bushes.

Now, since we cut down all the big bushes in front of our house, the only evergreen we have actually on our property is a largish cypress in the back yard, squished up between the garden fence, the back fence, and the shed. However, there's also a cypress in our next-door neighbor's yard that hangs over the fence into our driveway, which puts us within our rights to trim the bits that are encroaching on our property. We were also able to trim off some branches of their yew bushes that were sticking through the fence.

So, between those two and the one in the back, we were able to amass a fairly reasonable collection of greenery, using our recycling bin as a container. The only problem was that it didn't have many of the longer branches that are most useful for attaching to the railings. I could have used a whole bunch of the shorter ones, but it would have been a lot more difficult to tie them on securely. So I opted to decorate only the front railings this year and skip the side porch.

On the plus side, the yew and cypress branches were much less prickly than the spruce and fir we tend to acquire from the tree vendors, so the process of securing them to the railings was much more comfortable than it usually is. I even snipped off some long branches from our rosemary plants to twist through through the lights and cover up the bare wire.

And there was plenty of greenery left over to fill all the vases in the house and make my little flower-pot arrangements for the tops of bookcases. I was even able to make more dramatic displays for the downstairs rooms, with the help of a couple of extra rolls of ribbon I bought last year.

The moral of this little story, I would say, is "Use what you have." Many people, finding themselves unable to buy cheap greenery from the Christmas tree vendors, would have assumed their only option was to pay the inflated prices for it at Home Depot and other home stores. (For that matter, many people would never have thought to get greenery from the tree vendors in the first place; they would have just shelled out $18 for a roll of fresh pine garland every year.)

But for us ecofrugal folks, it makes much more sense to follow the "buyerarchy" outlined in a recent post in the Frugal forum on Reddit. If you need something, instead of running out to the store, first check to see if you can make do with what you have. If you can't, work your way through other options such as borrowing, swapping, thrifting, or making your own. Only if all else fails should you actually have to shell out cash for something new.

Gardeners' Holidays 2019: Late Harvest

When I checked the weather report this morning, I discovered a warning from the National Weather Service about the first frost of the year hitting in the wee hours of last night. (Why the NWS didn't warn me about this when I checked my phone last night, instead of warning me about tornadoes that had already hit the area the night before, I'm not quite sure.) Fortunately, it seems to have mostly spared our immediate area; one of our peppers looks a bit frostbitten, but the rest of the peppers and tomatoes still on the vines, and what's left of the basil and beans, look unharmed.

Still, this was a timely reminder to us that it's about time to start getting our nest ready for winter. So today, we've been taking care of various little errands like replacing the windshield wipers on the car (including the rear one, which was long overdue), stocking it with an ice scraper and mini shovel, checking the condition of our roof gutters, and draining the rain barrel. Brian also went through the garlic we'd harvested this summer (and already eaten some of) to see how much we had left to plant. Unfortunately, the answer turned out to be less than he thought, as some of the heads had rotted, despite being cured with their stalks on in the approved manner. So even though he planted everything we had left, it looks like our garlic crop next year will be no bigger than this year's. Next year, perhaps we'll try picking them a little earlier and making sure we get all the dirt off before curing them.

He then decided, since frost is apparently a potential threat at this point, to go ahead and pick all the remaining peppers and squash. (There are only three squash here, but he'd already brought in about nine others.) He also harvested what was left of the basil, which he will grind up and freeze (the best method we've found for preserving home-grown basil). However, he didn't touch the green tomatoes left on the plants, since none of them were beginning to blush yet. We figure we have a better chance of gleaning a few more ripe tomatoes by leaving them on the vines a bit longer, taking our chances with future frosts, than we do by picking them now and trying to ripen them in a box, which hasn't worked altogether successfully for us in the past.

One other crop he harvested is most of our remaining Climbing French beans. He made a point of letting some of these beans go dry on the vine so that he would have a supply of seed for next year, since we can't buy these at Fedco. As a result, we didn't get as many of these beans for eating this year as I'd hoped for, but we have a whole bunch for planting. So he picked and shelled most of those, and we'll set them aside for next year's garden.

Now the only question is, what shall we do with all this lovely produce? Since this is the last harvest of our 2019 garden (unless we manage to get a few more tomatoes), it deserves a little something special to commemorate it. I would have liked to make the stuffed acorn squash that my new favorite vegan blog (the one where I found the vegan mozzarella recipe we've been using for the past couple of months) served up a recipe for today, but I didn't know how well it would work with butternut squash. And we'd need to acquire some dried cranberries for it, anyway. So we'll have to try that one some other time, possibly as our Recipe of the Month for November.

For tonight, the plan is to make a simple fried rice using some of our freshly harvested Carmen peppers and Thai basil. It'll be a last taste of summer to bid farewell to the warmer days and welcome the cold winter in. And we'll most likely follow that up with a batch of chocolate pudding and a bit of the vegan coconut whipped cream that we were delighted to discover is back in stock at Trader Joe's. We're hoping this will work for us better than the coconut-based Reddi Wip we tried, which got stuck in the bottle and wouldn't dispense. If it's good, it might be the final piece of the puzzle—or at least the biggest remaining piece—in our attempts to go dairy-free.

Then it's off to snuggle up on the couch with a blanket, some Critical Role, and the cats (if they cooperate), before turning back the clocks and tucking ourselves in for a long winter's nap.

How lucky am I?

Yesterday, Earth Day, was windy and wet—not a particularly great environment for getting in touch with the earth. I did manage to get out for a walk in the afternoon and try out my new reusable cup at the Dunkin' Donuts, but I had to wrestle with the wind for control of my umbrella the whole way. It didn't leave me feeling very planet-friendly.

Today, however, made up for it by being balmy and beautiful—almost unreasonably warm for April. I set out for my usual walk around 2:30 in the afternoon, and the farther I went, the more overwhelmed I felt by just how lucky I was. I kept thinking of all the different things I had to be thankful for:

• It's a beautiful spring day - sunny and warm, but not overpoweringly hot, with no rain or harsh wind.
• I have a job that allows me to take an hour off in the middle of the day to take a walk and enjoy this beautiful weather.
• I live in a place where I can safely take a walk in the middle of the day, with sidewalks to keep me apart from the traffic and no roving bands of muggers.
• Not only is my neighborhood safe, it's full of beautiful springtime blossoms—redbuds, dogwoods, ornamental cherries, the last of the daffodils and magnolias, and the first of the lilacs.
• My health is good enough to allow me to walk three miles through this beautiful landscape without straining my heart, coming home limping in pain, or just suffering miserably from hay fever.
• I was able to take a route home that led me right past a new local business selling bubble tea.
• I have no dietary restrictions to prevent me from enjoying a bubble tea, and no financial restrictions to make the four bucks it costs a strain on my budget. (And if I feel any guilt about the "unnecessary" expense, I can just consider it part of my local shopping budget.)

That's seven different strokes of good fortune just in the space of a single hour. And, most fortunate of all, I was actually able to realize how lucky I was, and to appreciate it, where so many other people in my enviable position would simply take it for granted.

Gardeners' Holidays 2019: First Sowing

This year, for a change, we did not have snow on the alleged first day of spring. In fact, it was quite pleasant out, though not really warm enough to ditch our winter coats altogether. So this weekend, we were able to get started in earnest on our garden.

We've started all our seedlings at this point. The parsley and leeks are pretty tall already, and the tomato and pepper plants are just starting to poke their wee leaves out of the dirt. (The scallions you see in the front of the picture weren't started from seed; they're the chopped off ends of some scallions we bought at the store that Brian put in a cup of water to regenerate. When the weather's warm enough, they'll go in the ground with the ones we're growing from seed.) The first crop to get planted directly in the ground, the snap peas, wasn't technically scheduled to go in until Tuesday, but with the weather warming up, we thought it would do no harm to get them started a couple of days early.

Before we could put the seeds in, however, we had to prepare the bed for planting, pulling out all the junk from last year and all the weeds that got a head start on our crops. And before we could do that, I had to figure out exactly which bed to prepare, because I hadn't actually gotten around yet to laying out the plots for this year's garden.

Fortunately, my new crop rotation method made this process much easier than it has been in the past. I simply rotated all the beds one place counterclockwise, moving the heavy-feeding tomatoes into the place occupied last year by the nitrogen-fixing peas, while the peas went into the slot where the cucumbers used to be, and so on. Then I also flipped the beds horizontally, so the pepper and zucchini plants wouldn't be at the same end this year as last year, minimizing the risk of disease. Actually, even after rotating and flipping, one of the pepper plants ended up in a spot that also held a pepper plant last year, so this method isn't perfect—but it's much faster than my old approach of treating all the different crops like jigsaw puzzle pieces and trying to fit them into the optimal configuration.

So, having determined that the peas were to go in the right front bed this year, we got to work getting them in the ground. Brian went out and cleared the bed while I was still fiddling with the layout, and then I went out and actually poked the peas into the dirt. We gave the seeds some water, but no fertilizer, since we were a little too pressed for time today to deal with opening up our big compost bin and shoveling out the finished stuff. But we can always add a top-dressing of it later.

We did, however, take one extra precaution to protect our peas as they grow. The last couple of years, we've had some problems with losing our peas to ambitious birds that yank them right out of the soil, either before or right after they've sent up their first shoots. So, to deter them, Brian covered up the spot where the seeds are planted with some row covers he made last year to protect our bean plants from some mysterious critter that kept chomping on them. They're just big arches of chicken wire with bamboo stakes at the bottom to stiffen them, and he was just able to squeeze the two of them into place along the back of the bed where the peas are planted. I imagine this wouldn't stop a really determined bird, but I figure it's kind of like putting The Club on your car when you park it; it makes your car enough extra work to steal that maybe the thieves will pass it over in favor of easier pickings.

Also, as you can see in this picture, Brian didn't clear absolutely everything out of the bed before the peas went in. Those two little blotches of green are a couple of tufts of last year's winter lettuce crop that appear to have successfully overwintered, so unless we get a hard freeze, we should be able to enjoy a couple of early salads this spring. We'll just have to make sure to eat it all up by May 8, when we'll need those spots in the garden to plant beans in. But with luck, by that time we'll have some of this year's spring lettuce crop ready to eat.

We're also keeping a close eye on our plum trees. The branches have buds on them, but so far, the tips of the blossoms aren't visible. As soon as they appear, we'll know it's time to spring into action with our new sprayer and see if we can manage to ward off the brown rot that's destroyed most of our crop the last two years running. Even if it works, we're not out of the woods yet, since we'll still have those thieving squirrels to contend with. But at least we'll have a fighting chance of getting some plums for ourselves.

So what with peas in the ground, seedlings in the southwest window, plum trees and cherry bushes just starting to bud, rhubarb plants just starting to reemerge, and a couple of teeny heads of lettuce peeping out of the ground, I'd say our gardening year is off to a good start. Of course, I'm not about to start counting our tomatoes before they're hatched. But so far, at least, everything looks promising.

Recipe of the Month: Asparagus-Mushroom Risotto

According to the calendar (and the weather report, which is predicting snow flurries later today), spring isn't officially here yet. But signs of it are everywhere. Yesterday, for the first time this year, I was able to hang out a load of laundry...

...and pick a bunch of wildflowers (even if they're supposedly weeds) for the vase in the kitchen.

And on a recent trip to Aldi, we spotted asparagus on sale for just $1.49 a pound. Normally, I like to enjoy each food in its proper season, but I just couldn't pass up a bargain like that. Maybe if I'd felt confident that our asparagus patch would provide us with a good supply of the green stuff in just a month or two, I'd have held out for that, but its performance last year was so disappointing that I can't be sure we'll even get a single meal's worth out of it this year.

After we got it home, Brian started hunting online for asparagus recipes, and he hit on one at Life's Ambrosia for asparagus and mushroom risotto. This was kind of similar to another dish we'd already made several times, the polenta with mushrooms and asparagus from Better Homes and Gardens' Easy Vegetarian Dinners, so he knew this flavor combo worked for us. And since we'd also happened to pick up some mushrooms on sale on that same trip to Aldi, we had nearly everything we needed.

As usual, Brian made a few alterations to the recipe. First, he halved it, so we could save half of our pound of asparagus for later. We didn't have any arborio rice, so he decided to try it with plain old long-grain white rice, and he substituted a quarter-cup of chopped red onion for half a shallot. In addition to the cup and a half of plain sliced button mushrooms, he added a quarter-cup of dried shiitake mushrooms, soaking them in warm water until they softened and then dicing them. (This is what he usually does for the polenta recipe, which calls for a mixture of exotic mushrooms that we're not generally prepared to splurge on.) And rather than waste the cup of water the mushrooms were soaked in, he substituted it for half the vegetable broth the recipe called for. So his version of the recipe ended up looking like this:

Asparagus-Mushroom Risotto

1 tablespoon olive oil, divided

½ pound asparagus, snapped into 1-to-2- inch pieces

1 ½ cups sliced mushrooms

¼ cup dried shiitake mushrooms, soaked in warm water until soft, then diced

1 cup water in which the shiitake mushrooms were soaked

1 cup vegetable broth

1/4 teaspoon salt

pinch black pepper

1/2 tablespoon (vegan) butter

1/4 c. red onion, finely chopped

1/2 cup rice (arborio preferred)

1/2 cup dry sherry (or white wine)

1. In a pan or Dutch oven, heat a half tablespoon of olive oil over medium heat. Add mushrooms and saute until they begin to release moisture, then add asparagus and saute until the stems turn bright green. Remove vegetables to a bowl and keep warm.
2. In a separate saucepan, heat broth over medium heat with the mushroom water. Keep hot while preparing risotto.
3. In the same vessel used to cook the mushrooms and asparagus, heat butter and remaining olive oil over medium heat. Once butter melts, stir in onion and cook just until softened. Stir in rice just until it is coated in the butter. Do not brown. Pour in sherry and cook until it is absorbed. Add the hot broth mixture gradually to the rice, one ladle-full at a time, until all of the liquid has been absorbed. 
4. It may be necessary to heat up additional water to add if the broth mixture is not sufficient make the rice soft and creamy. Add salt and pepper to taste.
5. Stir in asparagus and mushrooms. Serve immediately.

This experiment was reasonably successful. Making risotto is a bit of a lengthy process under the best of circumstances, and Brian found that the long-grain rice took up even more liquid than the recipe said the arborio rice would (hence the addition of step 4 in the recipe above). All in all, it took about half an hour to cook. But by the time it was done, it had more or less achieved the tender, creamy texture risotto is supposed to have. And between the asparagus, mushrooms, red onion, and sherry, it was loaded with umami.

 

I suggested that perhaps if we make this dish again, he could try it in the pressure cooker. I've heard this is a great tool for making risotto, because the liquid can't boil off, so it all soaks into the rice like it's supposed to. The rice takes less time to cook, and it's a lot less work, because you don't have to stand there over it constantly ladling more liquid on.

So maybe next time, we could do the rice according to this recipe at Hip Pressure Cooking. We might even spring for some real arborio or short-grain rice to make sure it comes out properly. With this change, the recipe should only take about twenty minutes to make, so it will be a light, savory, and quick meal for spring.

Gardeners' Holidays: Renewal

I'm starting to think I should change the name of the first Gardeners' Holiday of the year to Polar Vortex Day. This is the second year in a row we've suffered subzero temperatures around the end of February and only just managed to emerge from our cocoon to get the plum trees pruned.

But that would be focusing on the negative, and Gardeners' Holidays are supposed to highlight the positive. This first holiday, in particular, is not about the bitterness of the winter cold, but about the idea that we're finally starting to emerge from the cold and start pushing our way toward spring. Despite the frigid weather of the past week, the first faint signs of new life are there if you look: tiny buds on the branches of the plum trees and, on the rosebush, even hints of tender leaves ready to uncurl. Winter isn't over, not by a long shot, but we've made it to the middle of the cold season and we're now on our way out.

So as cold as it is right now, and as far as it may feel from planting weather, it's still the start of a new gardening season, and we need to start putting our garden in order for it. To that end, we've started our first seeds of the year, the parsley, in some tubes full of baked garden soil (which Brian dug up a few weeks ago and baked in the oven last weekend to kill germs - running the vent fan on high all the while to get rid of the awful smell that accompanies this process) topped with a layer of commercial seed-starting mix. (The upright cartons you can see in the background are filled with plain soil in which he's attempting to start some pawpaw seeds, in the hope that he can grow one or two of these curious native fruit trees in the rear corner of our yard. He's promised me that the full-grown trees won't shade the garden significantly, and also that he won't expect me to eat any of the fruit.)

And this afternoon, once it got warm enough to venture outdoors, we went out and pruned our plum trees in the hope of combating the brown rot that's been destroying most of our crop. We didn't have to take off as much this year as we did last year, but we still ended up lopping off several largish branches and a whole mess of little twigs to eliminate all the points of overlap between branches—both on the same tree and between the Opal and Mount Royal trees. I tried to get some shots of the actual pruning, but a picture of a single branch being cut doesn't really convey what a long, fiddly process it was, with Brian wielding the clippers and me walking around the trees to identify spots that needed clipping, armed with a long pruned-off stick as a pointer so I could reach the high-up branches. But I did manage to get a picture of the carnage afterward—or perhaps, since it's wood and not flesh, I should say "lignage."

We're not relying on pruning alone to protect the plums from damage, however. The anti-fungal spray we tried last year didn't do much, possibly because Brian had nothing more effective to apply it with than a squirt bottle, so this year we've decided to pull out some bigger guns. We went to the Belle Mead Co-Op about a month ago and bought a bottle of a spray called Serenade, which I'd seen listed in the Fedco Seeds catalogue and which got high marks from users online. It's in a concentrated form, so this 1-quart bottle, which cost us $19, should make about 16 gallons of spray. We also spent about $10 for a sprayer that can be hooked up directly to the garden hose, allowing us (well, Brian really, since he's taller) to dispense it more effectively over the entire tree. The third product you see in the picture is Tree Tanglefoot, which we're planning to deploy once the plums start developing in hopes that it will deter the squirrels from climbing the trees and pilfering them all. Even if it only cuts down on their depredations and doesn't stop them, we can hope to get some plums that way, which is more than we got last year.

I have one more task to do to get ready for this upcoming gardening season: plotting out the beds to decide where each crop will go. This process should be a little easier than it's been in the past, because I've come up with a new system of rotating and flipping entire beds instead of trying to move around individual crops. So, for instance, if last year the tomatoes were in the left rear bed with the basil, marigolds, other herbs, and one pepper plant, then all those crops will still be together this year in the left front bed. However, I will also flip the bed along the y-axis so that the pepper is at the opposite end from where it was last year, so I'm not growing pepper plants in exactly the same spot two years in a row. (Ideally, I wouldn't grow them in the same spot more than once in four years, but this is the best I can do with my limited garden space.) So laying that out shouldn't take more than a few minutes.

And once that's done, all we have to do is sit back and wait for the weather to warm up—as we can trust it will—so we can start planting.