Seed starting, part 1

Today I put my new gardening strategy—using advanced tools only when they offer obvious benefits in terms of time and money savings—into effect. I've just started my first batch of seeds for this year's garden (parsley and coriander), using a system developed by my dad, with a few modifications. The components are:

• A bag of Jiffy organic seed-starting mix, which we just picked up for $3.50 at Home Despot. (My dad recommended Pro-Mix, but no stores in the area seem to carry it. Interestingly, a search for it online led to the websites of a lot of amateur marijuana growers.)
• An empty juice carton with one side cut off.
• Eight four-inch lengths of PVC pipe, which fit neatly into the carton, four on each side. (Ten feet of the pipe—which should be enough to handle all the seedlings for our small garden—cost us $4.50 at the Home Despot, and Brian cut it to length at home.)
• A tool made from a chunk of dowel slightly smaller than the pipe, which can serve as both a tamper (to tamp down the potting mix before putting in the seeds) and a pusher (to extricate the seedlings from the tubes when they're ready to go into the garden).
• A narrow trowel, originally bought at a discount store for a buck.
• An old dollar-store funnel with the tube sawed off so that it's just slightly narrower than the top of the PVC tubes, which helps keep the potting mix contained as I scoop it into the tubes.
• A large tub, which started life as a cat litter box, to contain the dirt during the potting process.
• A tiny watering can that cost a buck at IKEA.

So, all told, that's about ten bucks' worth of supplies so far. The one item we haven't acquired yet is a light fixture to supplement the light from our south-facing window. We checked out fluorescent tube lights at the Home Despot, but Brian wasn't sure yet how he'd be setting it up. His current plan is to construct a wooden frame that can sit on top of the table, with the seedling trays on the bottom and the light fixture mounted to the top (on a chain so that the height can be adjusted up or down). Then we'll hook it up to a timer (which we already have) to give the seedlings light from around 4pm until midnight. We're hoping that the combination of proper potting mix and extra light will give us sturdier seedlings than we got last year without a lot of extra money or effort. Watch this space for updates.

Putting nature back in gardening

In keeping with one of my ecofrugal New Year's resolutions, I've been spending a good part of this week planning next year's garden: choosing crops, ordering seeds, and trying to get together the supplies needed to start my first seedlings. I started flipping through our various gardening books (Square Foot Gardening, Jeff Ball's 60-Minute Vegetable Garden) for advice, and I found myself getting really annoyed with their suggestions. Mel Bartholomew, for instance, says you should first run your seeding containers through the dishwasher to sterilize them, and then plant your seeds in vermiculite—not soil, not potting mix, but pure vermiculite, a mica-based mineral that's an entirely nonrenewable resource. Then, he wants you to put them in a "thermostatically controlled seed starter" and check them every day, and the minute they sprout, move the container into strong light—a greenhouse or a "heated sun box" or, at minimum, a table kept under fluorescent light for 12 to 16 hours each day. Jeff Ball agrees that artificial light is essential and recommends building a special seedling bench, setting it in an area where the temperature stays between 60 and 70 degrees year-round, and rigging up an adjustable light fixture that you can move up or down to keep it at the optimum distance from the tops of the seedlings.

At first, I thought this was annoying me because it all seems like so much work, or because it's so expensive. But I finally figured out that my real problem was the insistence on doing everything scientifically—in other words, not naturally. And the problem isn't limited to seed starting; gardening "systems" like these seem built around the idea that if you want to grow your own vegetables, then the first thing you have to do is stop relying on the inadequate resources provided by nature. Don't try to till your own garden soil to turn it into a decent growing medium; instead, build raised boxes and fill them with a mixture of vermiculite, peat moss (another nonrenewable resource), and compost (which you can make yourself, but you have to sift and sterilize it before use). Don't let the rain water your plants; instead, install a drip irrigation system that you can run underneath a layer of black plastic mulch. Don't rely on what nature provides; instead, invest time and money in a system that you can control absolutely. Whatever happened to "all it takes is a rake and a hoe and a piece of fertile ground"?

At its most basic level, gardening is an almost magical process. You take seeds (which you can often harvest from last year's plants), put them in the dirt (which is all around), expose them to the sun and rain (which come down from the sky with no effort on your part), and eventually, you end up with edible plants. You get something for nothing—proof that there actually is such a thing as a free lunch. And now these "experts" come along and say that the right way to garden is to replace these free, abundant natural resources with heat-controlled boxes and fluorescent lights and a drip irrigation system that also dispenses liquid fertilizer. Yes, I understand that they're just trying to take some of the uncertainty out of the process—to produce more reliable, consistent results and better yields. And when you balance the long-term cost of all the equipment they want you to buy against the value of all the fresh vegetables you could grow using their methods, it probably is cost-effective to do it this way. But it still seems wasteful to me to let the sun and rain and soil that I can get for nothing go unused so that I can substitute something that's easier to control. Spending money and time on something that I could get for free, with no effort at all, seems to me the exact opposite of ecofrugality.

So I've decided I'm going to seek a middle ground. Since we haven't had much luck with our seedlings in the past, and since starting seeds is still more ecofrugal than buying plants, I'm planning to go ahead and invest some time and money in a proper seed-starting mix and some artificial light to supplement the sunlight. But aside from that, I'm going to stick to sustainable growing practices, such as

• choosing crops that are well-adapted to our climate
• using homemade compost, supplementing with bagged compost only as needed
• letting Mother Nature do the watering, and watering by hand during dry spells
• growing plants close together to keep the weeds down, and pulling those that do come through by hand
• saving seeds for future use (storing them in the basement to keep them nice and cool)

And for future years, I'm going to look into more sustainable ways of starting my seeds, such as using renewable coir, or coconut fiber, instead of a peat-based mix. I'm also planning to try winter sowing techniques to avoid the hardening-off process, reduce water use, make better use of natural light, and possibly eliminate the need for a seed-starting mix altogether. I tried this method on a limited basis last year, and I got mixed results, but it seems like such a perfect example of ecofrugality (saving time, money, and natural resources all at once) that I think it's definitely worth exploring further.

Thrift Week Day Seven: Use Community Resources Day

Well, it looks like Thrift Week is ending not with a bang, but with a whimper. I was going to call this final day Visit Your Library Day, but I decided to expand it to Use Community Resources Day to cover more of the bases. Unfortunately, that didn't actually increase my options all that much. Since it was a rainy day in January, visiting the park wasn't particularly appealing, and local festivals usually take place on weekends (or occasionally on Thursday nights, when we can't usually make it). I did stop by the library, but there wasn't anything going on there except story hour for the kiddies. Since we're still in the middle of our Netflix trial, I didn't want to pick up a movie, and I'd already checked out the one book I particularly wanted to read last Friday. (I would have waited until today to get it, just to make Use Community Resources Day more useful, but it had just been checked in and I wanted to snatch it up before someone else got it.) So I just hung out for a little while, paging through magazines, so I could at least say I'd done something. Not very impressive, I must admit.

Sadly, the follow-up to my Shop Secondhand Day purchase isn't very inspiring either. I took the jacket to the local tailor shop this afternoon to get the sleeves shortened. At first she said she could do it, but once she turned up the sleeves and took a look at the lining, she claimed that in order to do the sleeves, she'd have to replace the lining as well—for $85—and she didn't think it was worth it. (This is the same tailor who told me last fall that it would be impossible to reset the sleeves in my lightweight coat. Honestly, you'd think this woman was going out of her way to avoid paying jobs.) So I'm going to have to see if I can manage to piece the lining together myself somehow, using my extremely rudimentary sewing skills. And after that, I'll see if I can find someone who's willing to shorten the sleeves for me—I suspect that job is beyond my abilities. Sigh. This $2 secondhand jacket is turning out to be a costly purchase. And I'm growing disenchanted with my local businesses....

Thrift Week Day Six: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Repair Day

I wasn't really sure what I was going to do to for Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Repair Day. I'd done plenty of things along these lines earlier in the month, as it happens: we reduced waste on our last several shopping trips by using the nifty new mesh produce bags that we got in our stockings last Christmas, and we reused by disposing of a lot of unwanted items on Freecycle. The items we've unloaded so far include a box of Sweet 'N' Low packets left behind by a visiting friend, a copy of Your Money or Your Life that I picked up off the "free" table at the last library book sale, and an old IKEA microwave cart that we hadn't used since we moved to this house. (To date, I haven't found anyone who wants the two books of British crosswords, the 2012 "American Landscapes" calendar from my insurance company, or the giant "super liter" plastic mug I got as a souvenir at my senior prom.)

Then, last weekend, I discovered a way to recycle something I'd previously thought was fit only for the trash-bin: textiles. There are plenty of outlets for disposing of clothing in usable condition, of course, including the local thrift shop I visited on Friday—but Brian and I tend to wear clothes until they're no longer wearable, and therefore no longer suitable for donation. Yet in many cases, there's still plenty of decent fabric left on them, stuff that someone with better sewing skills than mine could probably put to good use. My approach up until now has been to stuff all these items into a couple of drawers down in the basement in the hope that the fabric will come in handy for something (though I'm not sure what) one day (though I'm not sure when) when my sewing skills have improved (though I'm not sure how). But I finally admitted that this was an unrealistic hope and decided to find a way to unload them. So I did a little research and discovered that there's actually a recycling bin for textiles in the parking lot of the Edison public library, not two miles from our house. I pulled out most of the contents of one of the drawers, bagged it up, and stuffed it in this bin, from which—according to Repurpose New Jersey, the company that operates the bins—"All textiles are resold to a distributor with proceeds going directly to well-established local 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations."

But since I'd already done those things, I couldn't do them again, and I wasn't sure what kind of waste-reducing activity I could take part in on the day itself. And then, this morning, one of the window blinds in our office neatly answered the question by breaking when Brian tried to open it. Actually, it was just a tiny part of the shade that broke—the little plastic ring that holds the pull cord—but it's a crucial part, one without which the blind can't be raised or lowered. And as Brian noted with some irritation, the way the shade is designed, it's impossible to pull out the broken ring and replace it with an identical one, because both the ring and the loop it fits through are single, solid pieces. Clearly whoever designed this shade didn't really have long-term reparability in mind. (This seems to be a common problem with modern machinery—there's even a song about it by Martin Swinger, called "Little Plastic Part.")

So our best hope of fixing the thing was to patch the broken ring up with a bit of epoxy glue and then hope that it doesn't promptly snap again as soon as it's reinstalled. The epoxy join itself almost certainly won't break, of course, as the epoxy, once dried, will be stronger than the original plastic, but the ring could easily break on the other side. If that happens, we'll have to try and MacGyver a replacement for the ring out of a paper clip or a safety pin or some such device that can be split open, slipped through the fabric loop, and re-fastened. This will make our makeshift replacement device superior to the original, but if manufacturers insist on making these things so shoddily, what do they expect?


Postscript: After we got home from our dinner out, we reinstalled the shade, and it seems to be holding up for now. And, before going to bed, I did squeeze in one more celebration of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and Repair Day. Since I ended up not spending anything for the home energy audit I'd requested as a birthday present, I decided that my new birthday gift to myself would be a Maggie Bag tote, something I'd had my eye on ever since my current handbag (a cheapo Merona purse from Target) started to fall apart piece by piece. Available in a wide range of styles and colors, these "eco-chic" purses are made from recycled seat belts, making them super durable as well as green. They cost considerably more than I'd normally spend on a purse (I don't believe I've ever paid more than $35 for one before), but on the other hand, my cheap bags usually wear out within a couple of years. These Maggie Bags, by contrast, come with a lifetime warranty. (It doesn't cover damage from accidents or spills, but the site faithfully promises that "defective or missing hardware, faulty zippers, and loose stitching of the webbing or lining of the bag will be repaired or replaced.") And since I found the bag I wanted on sale at Target, it only cost me around $70 total (including tax, with free shipping). Paying twice as much for a bag that will last ten times as long certainly seems like a good value to me—not to mention all the resources to be saved by buying one bag instead of ten. So with this purchase, I'm actually reducing as well as recycling—and treating myself as well. Happy Thrift Week to me!

Thrift Week Day Five: Leave the Car at Home Day

This morning we woke up to three inches of snow on the ground, with another inch or so of "wintry mix" expected. At first blush, that made today an ideal choice for the Thrift Week event I'm calling Leave the Car at Home Day. After all, there's no place we urgently need to go today, and why would we make an unnecessary trip in this weather? But then I remembered that my parents were planning to meet us here this evening and take us out to dinner for my birthday. I could, of course, choose a local restaurant; we have plenty of choices here in town, from Greek to Thai to Peruvian. But would we really want to traipse through the snow to get there?

Then I started to wonder: would my parents even want to drive up here in this weather? The snow had stopped by noon, but they were still predicting slippery roads until around 5pm. So we discussed it and agreed to reschedule for tomorrow. Now, it may seem like a cop out to take credit for leaving the car at home when all we did was postpone a trip until tomorrow. But we're already taking the car to the dentist's office tomorrow, which will put us about halfway to my parents' house already—so by heading directly over from there, we'll cut the total miles driven in half.

True, it would be a lot more interesting if we'd chosen a day when we had lots of errands to run and then found creative ways to take care of them all without getting in the car, such as taking a bus or choosing local businesses so we could go on foot. But when you come right down to it, leaving the car at home by leaving yourself at home—finding ways to feed and entertain yourself that don't involve leaving the house—is just as effective, and can be just as satisfying. (Especially when your home-cooked meal is one of my husband's delicious homemade chicken pot pies—made with organic veggies and the leftovers from my birthday chicken—and your home entertainment includes anything available through a free trial of Netflix.)

Thrift Week Day Four: Buy Secondhand Day

I must confess, I initially didn't have high hopes for today's Thrift Week event, Buy Secondhand Day. Our town's only used-book store just closed down (which, sadly, isn't that much of a loss, because the place was nice as a hangout but terrible as a place to find books). We do have a couple of secondhand clothing stores, but both have serious drawbacks. One is a high-end consignment shop that charges more for secondhand clothes than the cheaper chains do for new, and also carries hardly anything in my size. The other is a thrift shop run out of a dim and cluttered church basement, which has great prices (suit jackets for $2, shirts for $1, shoes for $2 a pair) but a limited and seldom-changing selection. It's also open only about 11 hours per week: Friday during the day and a couple of hours on Thursday and Saturday mornings. So I knew if I was going to make an attempt at secondhand shopping in my home town, it was going to have to be today, but I wasn't terribly optimistic.

Well, when I got there, I was pleasantly surprised. Apparently the staff had been at work tidying the place up, because I found that the whole space was much cleaner, brighter and better organized than I'd ever seen it before. There was plenty of room to move around, and I could see all the items at a glance instead of having to squeeze between the racks to paw through them. I glanced over the shirts and trousers and then decided, just for the heck of it, to have another look at the women's blazers. This is an item I haven't worn on a regular basis in years (when you work at home, every day is Casual Friday), but it has often occurred to me that it would be a useful thing to have for emergencies, and right now the only one I own is an ill-fitting black thing that I picked up for five bucks at a discount store. I'd looked through the jackets before with no luck, so I wasn't expecting much—but to my surprise, I found a black, two-button jacket, originally from Ann Taylor, in a reasonable size, which I was sure I'd never seen before. It fit beautifully except for the sleeves, but I figured those could always be shortened if necessary; it'll just be a follow-up to Tuesday's Support Local Business event. And even if it costs me $20 to alter a jacket that I only paid $2 for, that'll still be only $22 total for a jacket that probably cost $150 or more when it was new.

So, for two dollars, I've acquired both a new-to-me jacket and a useful lesson: never give up on a local business, even one that's been in bad shape for years. So long as it's still in business, it always has the chance to improve. (Too bad it's too late for the bookstore.)

Thrift Week Day Three: Conserve Energy Day

I've decided that the third day of Thrift Week is to be Conserve Energy Day, since this is such a perfect example of ecofrugality: you can cut your utility bills and your carbon footprint at the same time. You can visit any site devoted to energy use and see dozens of suggestions for simple, easy ways to conserve energy without a big up-front investment, such as

• replacing all your incandescent bulbs with CFLs
• installing a low-flow showerhead to save hot water
• weather-stripping around doors
• turning down the heat at night (or installing a programmable thermostat that will turn it down automatically)
• washing your lightly soiled clothes in cold water only

...and so on. The problem is, since steps like these are clear no-brainers, we've already taken them all. And having gathered all the obvious low-hanging fruit, I was left uncertain as to what to do next to give me the biggest bang, in terms of energy savings, for my buck. Which is why I decided that my birthday present to myself this year was going to be a home energy audit. Up until this point, the high price tag (a few hundred bucks) had deterred me, because I wasn't sure whether the audit itself would identify enough potential savings to pay for itself. But I finally decided that it was worth it to me to know for sure.

So, today I bit the proverbial bullet and called up New Jersey Home Energy Solutions, a vendor that had been passing out coupons at our local "Earth and Health Fair" last spring. I talked to the proprietor, who informed me that yes, my half-price coupon was still good—but then he added that perhaps I might not want to use it. He explained that if I opted for a full-scale home energy audit, he'd be legally obligated to carry out a whole bunch of tests, most of which wouldn't actually tell us anything likely to bear fruit in terms of energy savings. So he suggested that I let him come over first and do a free "walk-through," examining the various parts and systems in the house to see which areas might be most likely to benefit from improvements—and then, based on the results of that, I could choose to have further tests if they were likely to be helpful. (I'm still not sure why he told me this, since it seems like he had nothing to gain by it—in fact, he'd just cost himself 200 bucks—but maybe he just finds the energy audits to be a time-consuming and not very profitable part of his job.)

So, realizing that my energy evaluation might turn out to be an even better bargain than I bargained for, I said sure, come on over. Within ten minutes he showed up and started off the walk-through by asking to see last January's utility bill, to get an idea of what we currently pay for heating. (Not a lot compared to most people in our area, apparently.) Then he proceeded to examine our ancient boiler, inspect the windows, admire the Shepard Fairey print hanging in our downstairs room, praise the job we'd done insulating the attic four years back, and finally offer the following conclusions:

• If we hadn't already added insulation to the attic, his first suggestion would be to go up there and seal up all the cracks in that area to stop air infiltration before adding more insulation on top. But to do that now, he said, would require removing all the insulation we'd already installed, which wouldn't be cost-effective.
• Likewise, if the downstairs room weren't finished, we could try to stop air leaks from the bottom rather than the top by sealing up cracks around the ceiling joists. But taking out the ceiling to do that, once again, wouldn't be worth it. The unfinished portion of the basement could benefit from a bit of sealing, but he quite candidly admitted that that was a job we could pretty easily do ourselves with a tube of that foam-in stuff from Home Depot. (Side note: Not Lowe's. We're currently boycotting Lowe's over their decision to cave in to pressure from right-wing groups and pull their ads from a TV show about a Muslim family in America. Other sponsors have also announced that they won't be renewing their ads, but their stated reason was because the show, frankly, isn't very good. That, I have no problem with. But Lowe's admits that the reason they dropped their sponsorship is that the show as a "lightning rod" for anti-Muslim sentiments, and they didn't want to get singed. Well, if they're worried about losing business, they can worry about losing mine.)
• Although our boiler is ancient—probably original to the house, which we think was built around 1970—we're unlikely to benefit from replacing it because our heating bills are so low as it is. He notes that since it's a gas boiler, not an oil one, as long as it's kept tuned up there's no reason it can't run as efficiently as a basic gas boiler of modern vintage. Newer high-efficiency boilers, which include condensing units to recover lost heat, can do better—but because they're more complex, they're also more repair-prone. So he said there was no reason not to keep this boiler running until it reaches the end of its natural life, by which point (a) some of the bugs in the new high-efficiency models might be worked out, and (b) they might be the only available replacements, due to tightening federal efficiency standards. So actually, the longer we can keep this old boiler running, the better our chances of being able to replace it with a reliable high-efficiency one when it finally dies.
• As it turns out, we did the right thing when replacing our water heater a couple of years back by going with an old-fashioned, but reasonably efficient, tank heater rather than an on-demand heater. With hard water like we have here, he explained, the on-demand heaters need to be flushed yearly with acid to keep running at peak efficiency—a procedure that costs about $150, which, he pointed out, is more than we probably spend on all the hot water we use in a year right now.
• There's no good reason to replace our windows, which he said were in good shape and snugly installed. In fact, he noted, replacing windows is almost never cost-effective unless the old windows are totally shot.
• While we can't block air coming into our house from the bottom or escaping out the top, we can do a bit to keep it from leaking into the living areas by sealing off gaps around the baseboards (for which he recommended a water-based caulk) and insulating our electrical outlets. So those are two fairly cheap fixes that might help a bit with our day-to-day comfort, even if they don't make a big dent in the fuel bill. (He noted that most of the small do-it-yourself projects that home energy auditors recommend, such as weather-stripping around doors, are recommended because they're easy to do and have a low up-front cost—not because they make a big difference in fuel bills. They can make a big difference in comfort, he added, because they stop the drafts that are easy to feel—but the bulk of heat loss is through the multitude of smaller air leaks that are harder to feel and more costly to eliminate.)

So, all in all, I think this free walk-through was a highly informative experience, and more than worth what I paid for it. :-) It's a little disappointing to know that there's not much we can actually do to lower our heating bills any further, but on the flip side, it's comforting to know that we're already doing just about everything right. And it's also nice to see that there are some honest contractors out there who will tell you candidly when you don't need their services. The guy from Home Energy Solutions concluded his visit by advising me to save my money and pass the coupon on to someone else in the area who might have more energy leaks to plug. (Note to readers in the central Jersey area: Anyone want it?)