The fruits of our labors

It's been nearly six months since we first embarked on our edible landscaping adventure. Our plum trees are now taller than we are, and covered in nice green (if slightly insect-damaged) leaves, but we still have a few years to go before we can expect to get any fruit off them. Our bush cherries, though still small, actually produced a few cherries this summer, but not very many, and the birds got most of them (we'll have to use some bird netting next year). However, our raspberries are a completely different story. As I mentioned when we bought them, raspberry bushes produce new canes each year, and these new canes produce fruit in the fall. And, if the bushes don't have any of last year's canes left on them, they put all of their energy into producing new ones, and you end up with a pretty heavy crop in the fall. So what this means is, the tiny little sticks that we planted at the end of March are now big, sprawling, thorny tendrils that have already reached their full production.

The first few berries started showing up in late July or early August—just one or two at a time. By late August, we were getting a steady trickle of berries, and by the beginning of September, the trickle had become a full stream. The berries are now ripening so fast that we have to go out and pick them every day or two to catch them before they turn overripe and drop right off the vine. What you see here is just what I harvested today: about half a cup of berries. Now, multiply half a cup by four pickings each week, and we're harvesting a pint of organically grown raspberries—about six dollars' worth—every week. And if they keep this up until the first frost, which usually comes around here in mid- to late October, then we'll get about fifty dollars' worth of raspberries off these canes just in their first year. The plants themselves only cost us $41.50, including shipping; even if you factor in the cost of the compost and mulch we used on them, we're making back our money and then some in just one year, and we can expect to get the same amount every year for as long as the plants live (which, according to this fact sheet from Oregon State University, could be "many years.")

In fact, it's possible that in future years we may get an even heavier crop than we're harvesting now: the OSU fact sheet says that raspberries typically produce only a "small crop" in their first year after planting. At full production, it says to expect 30 to 40 pounds per season for every 20 feet of row (about 10 plants, which is what we have). If our plants produce anything even close to that, we'll never be able to eat them fast enough; we'll have to start finding ways to "put up" our fall crop for later use. We might end up having to invest in a pressure canner and start giving away jars of homemade jam as holiday presents. But we can deal with that if it actually comes up; for now, I'm not counting my raspberries before they're hatched. Even if the crop never exceeds the pint a week we're getting now, it's still an incredible payoff for what we spent.

Forget the stock market; for an investment that's sure to grow fast and give you good returns year after year, invest in fruit.

Thrift-store streak

I seem to be on a streak as far as thrift store shopping goes. Remember how, last week, I considered buying a $40 flannel shirt on sale for $36, but then found one I liked even better for $17? And remember how, during that same online shopping trip, I also considered and rejected two pairs of pants on the grounds that I didn't really need them? Well, guess what I found at the thrift shop last Friday?

This actually came about through a serendipitous little string of impulse decisions. When I set out for my walk on Friday, I wasn't actually planning to go to the thrift shop; I just thought I'd stop by the farmers' market and maybe pick up some apples. I ended up deciding the apples there were all too expensive, but I thought while I was there, I might as well pop into the thrift shop and just take a quick peek at the racks. I didn't really expect to find anything, because as I've mentioned before, our local thrift shop has a pretty small selection that doesn't change much from week to week. Sure enough, I didn't see any tops on the racks that I hadn't seen before, but then I made my second impulse decision and went over to have a look at the jeans. I normally don't shop for pants at this store because there's no place to try them on, and the way I'm shaped makes holding them up to check the fit more or less useless. But when I actually found a pair in a size 12 petite, I made my third impulse decision: seeing that there was no one else in the room, I tucked myself behind the rack and hastily slipped out of the jeans I was wearing to try the new ones on. And lo and behold, they fit. I mean, like a glove. Given how hard it is for me to find pants that fit when I'm specifically looking for them, finding a pair by accident like this seemed little short of a miracle.

So, seeing as I was on such a lucky streak, I decided to check out the rest of the pants on the racks as well. And sure enough, there was a simple pair of black cotton canvas pants in a 12 petite. I did my quick-change routine again, and what do you know, these fit too. I actually hesitated for just a few seconds over them, remembering that I already had several pairs of black pants at home, but then reason reasserted itself; when you have as much trouble as I do finding pants that fit, you can't afford to look a gift pair in the mouth (or cuffs, or what have you). So, after slipping back into my own jeans again, I took the two pairs up to the desk and found that they were, not $2 a pair as I'd expected, but only $1 a pair. Two crisp dollar bills, and they were mine.

The whole thing was so easy that it actually seems kind of spooky. I mean, how did I do that? Could it be that I've got some kind of bargain-hunting mojo I didn't know about until now? I almost feel like I should try going to a bunch of other retail sites, putting several more expensive garments into my virtual shopping bag, removing them again, and seeing if their equivalents end up falling magically into my hands at bargain prices.

Veggie of the Month: Ventura Celery

Before you ask: yes, of course I've had celery before. But as I discovered last night, our home-grown Ventura celery is a completely different animal (er, vegetable).

It's actually kind of an accident that we ended up having any of this celery at all. Of the four plants I put in the garden itself, three withered away and died before they reached any kind of reasonable size, and the fourth remained kind of stunted. However, we ended up having some extra space in the new rhubarb bed that Brian put in just outside the fenced garden area, because the four new rhubarb plants I bought this spring didn't survive. (This turns out to be a good thing, because the old plants that we moved to this area not only survived but grew to mammoth proportions. Between the three that Brian transplanted to start with and the one straggler that he later found pushing its way up through the new raspberry canes and moved, they're giving us as much rhubarb as we can possibly hope to keep up with.) So, on a lark, Brian sowed some extra celery seeds in this area.

Well, apparently, a little more sun was all these plants needed, because they grew great guns in their new location. However, they never really grew into the size and shape that we've become accustomed to with supermarket celery. The individual stalks were shorter, narrower, and more widely spaced. They also had a much more vivid green color than the pale barely-green shade that goes by the name of "celery" in decorating catalogues. Brian asked around among his coworkers who garden and was told that the supermarket celery is generally "blanched" to help it keep better—not by quickly heating it, the way you blanch vegetables in your kitchen, but by shading the stems so that they get less sunlight. This also gives the celery a much milder flavor, so we were warned that we probably shouldn't use as much home-grown celery in our cooking as the recipe calls for.

Well, that turns out to be an understatement. This home-grown celery has a very strong, pungent flavor. I tried one bite of it raw and found that it was too bitter to even eat that way. Cooked, it was more manageable, but even so, we used only one small stalk of it in the potato-apple skillet we made last night, which normally uses two—and even then, the celery flavor in the dish was much more pronounced than it's ever been.

Now, it might seem that, from an ecofrugal standpoint, this is great. If just a little bit of this celery goes such a long way, then we should be able to get all the celery flavor we need from just one plant, right? And that would be true, if we treated celery primarily as a flavoring agent. But to me, celery isn't really an herb; it's a vegetable, and that means that one of its main purposes is to add bulk to a meal. But you can't really use this celery in that way, because its flavor would overwhelm the entire dish. And if you scale back the celery to the point where it balances with the other flavors, then you can't use enough of it to make up much volume in, say, a stir-fry.

So on the whole, I'm not enthusiastic about this celery, and I'm not particularly keen to grow it again. I'm sure we'll find some ways of using up what we have in the garden right now; Brian has talked about trying a homemade cream of celery soup to take the place of the canned variety we can no longer find at Aldi, and we can always use some as an herb (it might even be strong enough to take the place of celery seed in dishes that call for it). But for everyday use, I think we're actually better off with the milder-tasting supermarket celery, which we can get away with using in greater volumes.

The One Harvest challenge, part 2

As I noted in yesterday's post, figuring out how our regular grocery budget compares to a package deal from One Harvest Food Ministries turned out to be a lot more complicated than it looked at first blush. My first thought was just to take all the items in the organization's $36 Family Box and figure out how much we'd spend on the equivalents (including free-range versions of all the meats). But I quickly realized this wouldn't be an accurate comparison at all, because their Family Box contained far more meat than our two-person family would normally eat in a month. So figuring out how much we'd pay for that much meat wouldn't give a realistic picture of our actual grocery spending.

So instead, I decided it would make more sense to figure out what meals a hypothetical family would make from the food in this box, and then calculate how much we'd pay to make comparable but not identical meals. For example, if the family used its 1.5 pounds of boneless chicken breast to make two meals—stir-fry with chicken and chicken pot pie—then I'd figure out how much we'd spend to make a stir-fry with tofu and a chicken pot pie with free-range chicken legs. And since our family has only two people in it, I'd count each of the imaginary family's dinners as being equivalent to two dinners for the two of us, and double our recipes as necessary.

However, when I started trying to make menus out of the ingredients in the Family Box (reiterated below), I ran into a snag:

• 1.5 lb Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast
• 1.25 lb Homemade Style Salisbury Steaks
• 1.5 lb Flounder Fillets
• 1.3 lb Kielbasa Sausage
• 1 lb Premium Ground Beef
• 12 oz Ground Turkey
• 1 lb Lee Breakfast Sausage
• (2) 8” Deep Dish Pepperoni Pizzas
• 32 oz Crinkle Cut Fries
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Green Beans
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Stir Fry Veggies
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Shoe Peg Corn
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Sliced Carrots
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Sliced Peaches
• 8.5 oz Jiffy Cornbread Muffin Mix
• 1 Dessert Item

See the problem? There aren't nearly enough veggies in this box to balance out the amount of meat you're getting. Even if you served traditional American-style meals, with a big hunk of meat accompanied by smaller hunks of potato and vegetable, you wouldn't have enough veggies to go around, and there certainly aren't enough to stretch the meat out into a month's worth (or even half a month's worth) of meals. So I figured, to make this a more reasonable test, I'd add a Fresh Frozen Veggie box, for $25.50, into the mix. That gives us this much extra material to work with:

• 1lb FF Strawberries
• 12 ct Frozen Southern Biscuits
• 1lb FF Sliced Carrots
• 1lb FF Corn on the Cob
• 1lb FF Broccoli Florets
• 1lb FF Green Peas and Carrots
• 1lb FF Mixed Vegetables
• 1lb FF Vegetable Gumbo
• 1lb FF Sliced Yellow Squash
• 1lb FF Breaded Okra
• 1lb FF Speckled Butter Beans
• 1lb FF White Shoepeg Corn
• 1lb FF Field Peas with Snaps
• 1lb FF Stir-Fry Mixed Vegetables
• 1lb FF Green Peas
• 1 lb FF Green Beans

With this, we can begin to make some menus. I tried to stretch the meat out to about 3-4 ounces per person per meal, augmenting with at least twice that amount of veggies and other material, such as rice. (Since this wasn't included in either of the boxes, I tacked on a few bucks to my budget to cover it.) I also didn't bother to diversify the menu as much as I probably would in real life: I just came up with as many meals as needed to use up all the stuff in both boxes and didn't worry about repeating some of them.

So, in this corner, here is the Harvest Food Ministries menu:

1. Chicken-veggie stir fry: ¾ lb. chicken breast, 2 lbs. stir fry veggies, served with rice
2. Chicken pot pie: ¾ lb. chicken breast, 1 lb. mixed veggies, 1 lb. beans, biscuit crust
3. Salisbury steaks, served with carrots and corn (I figured this was a bit too much food for one dinner for four and not quite enough for two, so I counted it as one meal plus leftovers)
4. Fried fish, with fries, squash, and peas (enough for two dinners for four)
5. Broiled sausage, with carrots and corn (enough for two dinners for four)
6. Meat loaf, with corn and mixed carrots and peas (in real life I'd probably try to stretch the ground beef more by making chili, but that would have involved bringing in too many ingredients that weren't in the Harvest Food boxes)
7. Pasta with ground turkey and broccoli (I found the recipe for this online after a quick search on "ground turkey recipes")
8. Sausage with biscuits, gravy, and peas
9. Vegetable gumbo, served with rice
10. Pepperoni pizza, served with green beans
11. Butter beans and corn muffins, served with okra

In addition to these main meals, we have three desserts. I assumed that the "dessert item" in the Family Box was something like a pie or a cake that would serve eight (so it would stretch over two nights). I also used the frozen peaches and the frozen strawberries, which didn't fit into any of the dinner menus, to make two additional desserts: a peach cobbler and a strawberry shortcake. I figured the additional ingredients for these (flour, sugar, etc.), as well as the rice, pasta, and other ingredients added to the dinner menus, would cost between $4 and $5, so that brings the total cost of our two boxes' worth of meals up to $66. Now, can we do better cooking from scratch?

I came up with a menu that I thought was roughly equivalent to the one above, using recipes that Brian and I actually use at home. As I noted above, in most cases, I multiplied our usual recipes as needed to make an equivalent volume to the ones from the Harvest Food boxes. However, I made a couple of exceptions. For instance, kielbasa sausage is one meat that we do occasionally eat straight up, with potatoes and veggies on the side. However, there's no way we'd ever have this meal four times in a single month; the free-range sausages we buy at the Amish market are just too expensive for that. So instead of assuming we'd have this meal four times (four meals for two equals two meals for four), I figured we'd have it only twice and increased the volume of the next meal on the menu (chili) to compensate.

I assumed that we'd buy all the ingredients for our meals at the price we usually pay in the store, regardless of whether that's a regular price or the sale price at which we generally stock up. I also didn't include any of our own garden produce in our meals, since I figured that wouldn't really be a fair comparison. The Harvest Food boxes provided all the veggies for the first batch of meals, so I included all the veggies for the second batch in our grocery list. The one exception I made was for the dandelion greens included in the final meal on the list. These aren't usually sold in stores, and I think it's safe to assume that most people could manage to pick a bunch of them somewhere if they looked.

So, in this corner, here is the Ecofrugal Living menu. I've included the ingredients for each meal, along with their cost.

1. Stir fry: 18 oz. tofu $1, 1 lb. broccoli $1.50, 2 peppers $1, 1 jar sprouts $.20, 1 bunch scallions $.30, rice $.40: total $4.40
2. Chicken pot pie: ¾ lb. free range chicken legs $1.50, 1 lb. potatoes $.40, ½ lb. organic frozen peas $1, ½ lb. organic mushrooms $1.15, 1 large leek $1.50, 2 carrots $.20, milk/butter/flour/baking powder/salt $.50: total $6.25
3. Tuna potato cakes, with applesauce and peas (this was my equivalent to the Salisbury steak, so I made enough for three meals for the two of us): 2 cans tuna $2, 1 lb. potatoes $.40, 2 carrots $.20, 1/2 bunch scallions $.15, 4 free-range eggs $.80, 1 sm. jar applesauce $1, flour/mayo/oil/seasonings $1: total $5.55
4. Fish tacos with slaw (this was my equivalent to the fried fish above, so I made enough for four meals for the two of us): 1.5 lb. catfish nuggets $3.75, 1 pkg. corn tortillas $1, 3 lbs. cabbage $1.20, ½ lb. tomatoes $1, 1 bunch scallions $.30, other ingredients $.25: total $7.50
5. Broiled sausages, with baked potatoes and peas: ½ lb. sausage $3, 1 lb. potatoes $.40, 1 lb. organic peas $2: total $5.40
6. Chili and corn bread: 1 tube Gimme Lean beef $4, 2 peppers $1, 2 onions $.30, 1 lb. beans $1.60, 2 cans tomatoes $2, 1 c. corn meal $.45, 1 c. flour $.20, 1 egg $.20, 1 c. milk $.17, ¼ c. organic sugar $.21, garlic/spices/lime/baking powder $.30: total $10.43
7. Pasta with chick peas and spinach: 1 lb. pasta $.80, 1 lb. organic frozen spinach $2, ¼ lb. tomatoes $.50, 2 c. chick peas $.80, garlic/pepper/salt $.25: total $4.35
8. Casualty Eggs (this is my equivalent to the sausage and biscuits above: a recipe from the Small Potatoes Cookbook, containing eggs, bacon, potatoes, and veggies all fried up together): 4 oz. free-range bacon ends $1, 1 lb. potatoes $.40, 8 free-range eggs $1.60, 1 pepper $.50, 1 onions $.15, garlic $.10: total $2.95
9. Mushroom/barley soup with biscuits (this recipe I actually cut in half so it would make an equivalent volume to the vegetable gumbo above): ½ lb. organic mushrooms $1.15, ½ c. barley $.30, 2 onions $.30, 2 carrots $.20, celery/garlic/spices $.20, milk/butter/flour/baking powder/salt $.50: total $2.65
10. Veggie pizza: 2 c. flour $.40, 1 can tomato sauce $.40, 1 onion $.20, 1 pepper $.50, ½ lb. organic mushrooms $1.15, ½ lb. mozzarella cheese $1.25, yeast/spices $.10: total $4.00
11. Butter beans and cornbread, served with wilted dandelion greens: 1 lb. butter beans $1.50, 1 onion $.20, 1 bunch scallions $.30, 1 c. corn meal $.45, 1 c. flour $.20, 1 free-range egg $.20, 1 c. milk $.17, ¼ c. organic sugar $.21, 4 oz. free-range bacon ends $1, flour/butter/garlic/spices/baking powder/brown sugar/vinegar $.30: $4.53

For my three dessert items, I chose these three simple recipes we use often:

1. Wacky cake (an extremely simple, vegan chocolate cake that you can whip up in about five minutes): 1½ c. flour $.30, 1 c. organic sugar $.85, 5 Tbsp. cooking oil $.15, cocoa/baking soda/salt/vinegar/vanilla $.15: total $1.45
2. Apple crisp: 2 lbs. local apples $2.50, 1 c. oats $.20, ¾ c. flour $.15, ¾ c. organic sugar $.63, ½ c. butter $.50, lemon juice/cinnamon $.05, $4.03
3. Chocolate pudding (four batches of it, to make four nights' worth of dessert for the two of us): 4 c. milk $.68, 1 c. organic sugar $.85, 6 Tbsp. organic cocoa $.60, 4 free-range eggs $.80, oil/salt/corn starch/vanilla $.10: total $3.03

And the total for all these dinners and desserts together is...$67.32, virtually the same the price as the Harvest Food Ministries menu. And moreover, we spent the same amount while using only free-range meats and eggs, organic sugar and cocoa, and some organic and/or locally grown produce. So if you believe that organic foods are better for you (or, as I believe, better for the world as a whole and thus worth the extra money), then you're getting better value for about the same dollar amount—and if you don't, you could substitute conventional meats, eggs, and other ingredients and make the Ecofrugal Living menu for even less.

So I'd say the takeaway from part 2 of this challenge is this: Harvest Food ministries does, in fact, offer pretty good value for money, particularly for heavy meat-eaters. But it's certainly possible, and not even that difficult, to get just as many meals for the same amount by eating less meat and cooking everything from scratch. Moreover, by doing so, you can enjoy free-range meats and at least some organic ingredients on a limited budget. So for those who care about such things, the Ecofrugal Living menu is the better deal, hands down. (P.S.: If you'd like to know how to make any of the specific dishes I included in this menu, say so in a comment and I'll post either the recipe itself or a link.) 

The One Harvest challenge, part 1

The most recent print edition of the Dollar Stretcher newsletter featured an article (not yet available on the website) about a food program called One Harvest Food Ministries. Available in only a handful of states, this is like a cross between a food bank and a farm share. Rather than giving away food to the needy (and requiring proof of limited income), they sell food at below-average prices to anyone who wants it. The organization assembles large boxes, each containing an assortment of frozen and packaged foods, and distributes them through local churches. While it is a religious organization, you don't need to belong to any particular church or faith to buy from them.

Out of curiosity, I had a look at the program's menus for this month. There are several different packages available, including the "Family Box" (described as "perfect for a family of 4"), the "More than Enough Box" (similar to the Family Box, but with more of everything), the "Golden Cuisine Meals" assortment (10 individual frozen meals), and the "Fresh Frozen Veggie Box" (mostly veggies with a couple of other items). There were also meat-only boxes featuring chicken, roasts, and grilling meats, as well as "survival meals" in Mylar packets, presumably to be deployed in case of natural disaster or zombie apocalypse. However, it didn't take long to figure out that none of these options would really work for us. To see why, take a look at what's in this month's Family Box, which sells for $36:

• 1.5 lb Boneless Skinless Chicken Breast
• 1.25 lb Homemade Style Salisbury Steaks
• 1.5 lb Flounder Fillets
• 1.3 lb Kielbasa Sausage
• 1 lb Premium Ground Beef
• 12 oz Ground Turkey
• 1 lb Lee Breakfast Sausage
• (2) 8” Deep Dish Pepperoni Pizzas
• 32 oz Crinkle Cut Fries
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Green Beans
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Stir Fry Veggies
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Shoe Peg Corn
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Sliced Carrots
• 1 lb Fresh Frozen Sliced Peaches
• 8.5 oz Jiffy Cornbread Muffin Mix
• 1 Dessert Item

This selection really doesn't reflect the way we eat at all. It's really heavy on the meat, and the meats offered are (presumably) not free-range, with the possible exception of the flounder. Then, too, there's a lot of convenience food here, like frozen pizzas, fries, and muffin mix. These prepackaged items are probably a lot less healthful (and also more expensive) than the versions we could make from scratch. And while we do use frozen veggies, we don't really need them in September, when the garden is brimming with fresh produce.

However, looking at the list did raise two intriguing questions for us:

1. Is $36 for this box really a good deal? How does it compare to the amount we'd normally spend for the same number of meals?
2. If we were going to buy a box of food once a month, what could it contain that would actually be useful for us?

Answering question #1 actually turned out to involve a fair amount of research, so I'm leaving that one for a later post. However, question #2 was much more straightforward. I came up right away with several things that probably wouldn't be worth including. First, there would probably be no meat or eggs, since we only buy free-range versions of these, and a "food ministry" with a focus on low cost probably wouldn't be offering them. Second, there should be no convenience foods, since we generally prefer to cook from scratch for reasons of health as well as cost. And third, most produce should probably be left out. We don't have the freezer space to accommodate large amounts of frozen veggies, and when buying fresh ones, we prefer to go with whatever happens to be in season. If we wanted to have that delivered to us in a box, we'd join a CSA.

So basically, what would make a useful package for us would be mostly staples: rice and beans, oats and flour (but probably not sugar, since we buy that organic), and a few easy-to-store veggies like potatoes and onions. But the thing is, we get pretty good prices for these items right now. We buy most of them from Aldi, but we also rely on a couple of other local stores for specific items: the Whole Earth Center in Princeton has the best prices on mushrooms and bulk yeast, while the Shop-Rite generally has the lowest price for powdered milk. So just how little would a box of staple goods have to cost to make it a good deal for us?

To figure this out, I estimated what we use in a month, along with the price we pay from our preferred source. Our ideal staple box would look something like this:

• rice, 2 lbs. ($1 at our usual price)
• beans, 2 lbs. ($3.20)
• oats, 42 oz. ($2.20)
• flour, 5 lbs. ($2.35)
• yeast, 2 oz. ($.50)
• potatoes, 5 lbs. ($2)
• onions, 3 lbs. ($2)
• mushrooms, 2 lbs.  ($4.60)
• cheese, 3 lbs. ($10.50)
• powdered milk, 1 20-quart box ($13)
• breakfast cereal, 5 lbs. ($8)

All this totals up to $49.35, which you could round up to $50 to account for the gas we'd save by just picking up the whole box in one place instead of having to make side trips for particular errands. So basically, if One Harvest—or some organization like it—could offer us a box containing these particular items, without any of the stuff we can't use, for $50 or less, then it would be a deal worth considering. Even under these unlikely circumstances, however, it might not save us money in the long run, because the prices I've listed above are the prices we pay for each item on the list when it's not on sale. By stocking up at sale prices, we might easily end up paying well below $50 on average for this market basket of goods.

So, bottom line: it's unlikely that any food program will ever be able to offer us a good deal on the foods we actually use. (Sadly, this has proved to be the case for CSAs, too, every time we've tried doing the math on them.) But what about those folks who would actually use the foods One Harvest has to offer? Is the package deal a true bargain for them, or could they do better using shopping strategies like ours? Stay tuned to find out.

My new favorite store

As I mentioned last week, I'm not really into shopping. Shopping for clothes, in particular, doesn't excite me the way it supposedly does many women. I tend to have a really hard time finding anything I like, and even if I do, I have a hard time convincing myself to spend the money. For instance, when L.L. Bean sent me an e-mail last week advertising its Labor Day sale (10 percent off everything, and a $10 gift card if you spend $50 or more), I went to the website and found three items I knew I could use: a new pair of jeans, a pair of corduroys, and a flannel shirt. I even went so far as to add them all to my shopping cart—and then, one by one, I removed them all again. Sure, I could always use a new pair of jeans, but I don't really need them yet if my old pair is less than a year old (and last year's pair, which is wearing out, could always be patched). And I already have four pairs of winter slacks in good condition, so I can certainly manage without another. And while the flannel shirt came in a nice colorful plaid that would go with practically everything in my winter wardrobe, and would enable me to combine those items into at least a dozen new outfits, they only had it in men's sizes; was it really worth spending $40 on something that might not even fit? Yes, it was returnable, but I'd be out 7 bucks for the return shipping. Why risk it?

Even as I did this, a part of me acknowledged that my tightwad instincts were straying perilously close to, if not across, the line between practical and obsessive. After all, it's not as if $40 for a new shirt is exactly going to break our budget. Considering that the average American spends about $120 a month on clothing and footwear, while we spend about $400 a year for both of us, it could hardly be considered an extravagance. And yet, somehow, I just couldn't make myself hit that button marked "pay now." Forty bucks—or even $36 on sale—was just more than I could bring myself to spend on a shirt I couldn't even try on first.

So today, with the sale over, I wasn't sure whether to feel smart or stupid about my shopping decision. And that's when it occurred to me to check Bonanza.

I first discovered this site through an article at the Budget Babe blog. Bonanza wasn't actually one of the five online consignment shops touted in the article itself, but one of the comments mentioned it, and on impulse, I checked it out. My immediate reaction was, "Whoa, this place is like eBay without all the junk!" True, it doesn't have nearly as many categories as eBay; the emphasis seems to be primarily on clothing and home accessories. But within these categories, the selection is much more impressive. On my very first search there, I immediately found a little floral dress in a simple, versatile style I'd been looking everywhere for, from Goodwill to Macy's, without finding anything even close for less than $200. This one was selling for $22 including shipping. After months of futile searching, even I didn't hesitate to pounce on a deal like that. (I did end up paying $20 to get the shoulder straps altered, but still, $42 is a heck of a lot better than $200.)

After that first success, however, I didn't immediately come upon any other unbeatable bargains on this site. I ran a couple of searches for other garments I'd been looking for (including a plaid shirt like the one I nearly bought from Bean), but nothing really jumped out at me. So, without being able to reproduce my results, I had no way to be sure my good luck with the dress wasn't just a fluke. However, after I realized that the plaids I liked at L.L. Bean all came only in men's sizes, I decided to broaden my search on Bonanza. Instead of searching for "flannel shirt" just under women's clothing, I searched under clothing in general and then started combing through the hits I got looking for anything that might fit me. And that's where I found this beauty. A men's small, which should fit me okay; a pattern of deep greens, blues, and reds that should go with most of my winter wardrobe; and a total price of $17 with tax and shipping. (I don't know why the site charged me tax, exactly, since I gave it an address in New Jersey, where clothing isn't supposed to be taxable. But for this price, I'm not going to complain too much.)

So as of today, Bonanza is my official first stop for all clothes shopping. It's a lot less crowded than the mall, it's much easier to park, and it's a lot likelier to have something I actually like at a reasonable price.

Landscaping dilemma

As I mentioned back in June, it's become clear to us that one of the biggest time-sinks in our current yard is that massive forsythia hedge on the north side of the back yard. The bushes are too big and too close together, and they seem to require constant pruning to keep them from ensnaring our clothesline. If we don't want to spend every weekend out there with the pruning shears, we're going to need to replace them with something smaller and more manageable. However, Brian definitely wants to have some sort of hedge there to shield us from our neighbor's yard (which is somewhat untidy and often noisy). So we're looking for something that gets about three feet tall, doesn't spread too far, grows well in clay soil (so that we don't have to amend the dickens out of it before planting), and also looks reasonably nice. Ideally, we'd also like to plant something on the surface of the slope to keep the weeds down, so that Brian doesn't have to beat them back periodically with the string trimmer.

Now, one shrub that shows up consistently on lists of the best plants for clay soil is Potentilla fruticosa—also known as shrubby or bush cinquefoil. It grows to about 3 feet tall and correspondingly wide, it's suited to our climate, it can grow in full sun or partial shade, it grows fine in clay soil, and it produces nice flowers that attract butterflies. Most varieties have yellow flowers, but I've also seen pink and white versions. I'd actually considered planting some of these as foundation shrubs in the front yard, to replace some of the massive evergreen bushes we have now, but I hesitated because I wondered whether we'd be better off with something that stayed green through the winter or otherwise could perk up the drab winter landscape. Now I'm thinking perhaps this spot in the back yard is a better place for them.

Then, for the slope itself, I was thinking of some sort of cotoneaster. It stays low to the ground, yet spreads out to about six feet wide, and it requires very little maintenance—in fact, the site I linked to says it looks best if you don't prune it at all, except to remove dead or damaged branches. They can also handle clay soil and are often recommended specifically for controlling erosion on slopes. One particular variety that looks nice is bearberry cotoneaster, which is semi-evergreen, has nice fall color, and produces cheery red berries that will linger into the winter. These are also said to make good food for birds.

So, it sounds like these two plants should make a nice pairing for this problem spot, right? So what's the problem?

Well, the problem is that I've been working, bit by bit, on transforming our yard into an edible landscape—and so I hesitate to add anything new to the landscape that isn't edible. Yes, the bush cinquefoil and bearberry cotoneaster would provide other benefits—flowers throughout the spring and summer, bright berries in fall and winter, food for the birds—but even so, replacing one non-edible plant with another just feels like a missed opportunity. It seems like there must be something I could put on this slope that would serve as a privacy screen and an erosion control and provide food at the same time. But is there?

I posed this question in a thread about edible landscaping on the Dollar Stretcher forums, and I got a variety of suggestions, including gooseberries, black currants, honeyberry (a variety of honeysuckle with edible berries), sweet potatoes, "dwarf fruit trees," and elderberries. However, looking into these options, it seemed that most of them were too tall for the site. Since we'd be planting on top of a slope that's already three or four feet high, anything much taller than three feet would be impossible to harvest without the aid of a ladder. The honeyberries were an intriguing idea, one that I'd never actually heard of before, but there don't seem to be any varieties shorter than 4-5 feet tall. Elderberries, likewise, are at least 5 feet high and spread even wider, so we'd have the same trouble keeping them trimmed back as we have now with the forsythias. Gooseberry and black currant bushes appear to be only a little bit too large (3 to 6 feet), but they require selective pruning—keeping track of how old each individual cane is, and cutting out the oldest ones each spring—which sounds like a huge hassle. Also, The Weekend Garden Guide by Susan Roth, my personal landscaping bible, warns that these species can harbor a disease called white pine blister rust, which can threaten native pine trees (like the huge ones outside the apartment complex just down the block from us).

Searching for other ides, I consulted a handy site I discovered called Temperate Climate Permaculture. There were several plants I hadn't heard of before listed under "shrub layer" and "groundcover layer," including salal ("an evergreen understory shrub" with "sweet, great-tasting berries that are reminiscent of blueberries"), creeping blueberry, and relatives of the blueberry such as huckleberry and bilberry, but upon investigation, none of these appeared to be a practical choice for this particular site. The only option on his list was a low-growing variety of juniper, and these plants are only "edible" by the broadest possible definition (the berries are used as a flavoring agent). There are also groundcover roses that produce edible hips, but frankly, I look on these as more of a novelty than a viable food crop.

So there's my dilemma: should I just go with the two plants that fit the site, even though they won't expand our edible landscape? Or should I continue looking for edible options? Fortunately, we probably won't be able to buy new plants for this site until spring, so I have several months to think it over. But I don't want to spend the whole winter scouring the Internet for an ideal edible plant that may not actually exist.