Flower flop, part 2

Back in March, when everything a finally thawing out after that long winter, Brian and I installed a grid of stakes and string in our flower bed. The goal was to prevent a repeat of last year's flower flop, in which the tallest flowers in the bed all bent over forwards in the first high wind, burying the shorter ones under their stems.

As it turns out, this didn't completely work. There were three problems with the new setup:

1. Some of last year's annuals, particularly the bachelor buttons, reseeded themselves—but because of the way they all flopped over last year, the new plants ended up outside the borders of the flowerbed with its twine grid. So we had a bunch of really tall flowers right in the front, concealing everything behind them.
2. The arrangement we contrived with the twine and string wasn't quite as secure as we would have liked. The strings didn't stay put very well on the smooth stakes; once the flowers started to bend and put their weight on them, they pushed the string down instead of being held upright by it.
3. The grid we'd made was very loose, so although it helped a bit to hold the flowers up, it did nothing to keep them from falling over sideways. Thus, instead of a bunch of flowers all flopped forward, we ended up with a tangled mess of blooms pointing every which way.

The one interesting and unexpected perk of the new arrangement is that we discovered a morning glory vine, which certainly wasn't part of our wildflower seed mix, twining itself quite happily up one

of the bamboo stakes. But that's not quite a good enough reason to stick with a system that in other respects isn't doing its job.

So what we've planned for next year is something a bit more rigid, with smaller gaps. A coarse wire mesh, rather like the stuff our groundhog fence is made from, would have openings wide enough to let the flowers grow through, but narrow enough to keep them from bending too much in any direction. Brian says he'd prefer something made of plastic rather than wire, but I'm afraid it might look too obtrusive. We'll have to see what's available at our local home centers.

Of course, that still leaves the question of what to attach the mesh to, and how. We need to mount a horizontal sheet of it at a height of maybe two feet, and possibly even a second sheet above that to hold up the really tall flowers, and the bamboo stakes probably won't be suitable for that purpose. So we may need to buy some metal posts as well to secure everything in place. Brian is convinced we can just figure it out as we go, but I'd feel better about the plan if it were a little more concrete. (If I can't make a list with items that I can cross off as I finish them, I always feel a bit lost.)

Money Crashers: What Is a Community Garden

Of all the topics I cover on this blog, none comes up more often than gardening. That's partly because there's just so much to learn about it—Thomas Jefferson remarked near the end of his life that he was "but a young gardener"—and partly because it's such a perfect fit for the ecofrugal lifestyle. Growing your own local, organic produce for a fraction of what you'd pay at the supermarket? That's definitely something that green people like.

But what about all those apartment dwellers who don't have a yard to garden in? Well, for them, there are community gardens—shared spaces, usually in a city, where each member can have a plot to tend. And this is, if anything, even more ecofrugal than gardening in general, because it not only yields fresh, local produce, it also turns vacant lots—land that was otherwise going to waste—into thriving urban green space.

My latest article for Money Crashers is all about community gardens: their benefits, an in-depth look at one such garden in New York City, and how to go about starting your own if you don't already have one in your area. Read the full article here: What Is a Community Garden – Benefits & How to Start Your Own.

Savings Challenge, Weeks 17-18: Saving at work

Before I tackle the two latest challenges from the Bankrate 52-week savings challenge, I'd like to report on the final results of the Week 15 challenge, which was to eat only local, seasonal produce. As I noted last Sunday, this challenge ended up being a bit complicated, because the week during which we ate local didn't run neatly from Sunday to Sunday. In fact, even after I shifted the timing of the local-produce week to start and end on Tuesday evening, we didn't synch up with it perfectly, because Brian ended up eating a banana on Tuesday. So while we certainly ate exclusively local produce for at least seven days, they weren't seven consecutive days.

Even if we didn't stick to the letter of the challenge, however, we certainly managed to adhere to the spirit of it. We ate, during the course of the week, the entire contents of the CSA box we picked up on Sunday, plus about three pints of blueberries from the local farmers' market, plus a wide variety of produce from our own garden. In addition to our new kasha salad recipe, we made:

• A stir-fry using our home-grown snap peas, scallions, and garlic, plus some local organic mushrooms from the Whole Earth Center.

• Skillet chicken and rhubarb with our own home-grown rhubarb, scallions, and oregano and garlic scapes from the CSA box, accompanied by a salad of CSA lettuce. 

• Brian's classic rhubarb pie, for a party we attended that weekend...so we enjoyed our home-grown rhubarb in both sweet and savory fashion.

• An omelette of local organic mushrooms, with a salad of home-grown lettuce.

• For the other potluck party we attended over the weekend, the cold sesame noodles from The Clueless Vegetarian, with home-grown scallions, local carrots from the farmers' market, and, in the dressing, one of our new walking onions (a gift from a fellow gardener who had more than she needed) that Brian dug up specially for the occasion.

So, what with the CSA box, our garden, and a few extras from the farmers' market, we managed to put together enough meals for not only a week's worth of dinners, but also sufficient leftovers for a week's worth of lunches...even if, as I say, the week wasn't exactly seven days in a row.

And that brings me quite neatly to the next Bankrate savings challenge:

Week 17: Take your lunch to work

The Bankrate reporter covering this challenge, Mark Hamrick, leads off his story with a pardonable boast (disguised as a "confession") about how he likes to cook, and how he always prepares his own lunch to take to work. Yet on the second page of the article, he posts his grocery list for the week, and it turns out that his "homemade" lunches actually consist of a salad plus a "frozen food entree," such as Amy's or Lean Cuisine, costing anywhere from $2 to $3.79. This, plus the salad veggies, works out to somewhere between $3 and $5 per day.

If you compare this to a cost of a restaurant meal, I guess it's pretty good, but Brian and I—as we learned from last year's Reverse SNAP Challenge—eat on a budget of about $7.66 a day for all our meals. For both of us. The cost of his "frugal" lunch, all by itself, would feed one of us for a whole day.

Hamrick notes that "some days," he can "save a couple of bucks or so more by eating leftovers (from a previous dinner) for lunch." But what Hamrick does once in a while as an extra cost-saving measure is pretty much our normal M.O., as I noted in this earlier Bankrate challenge about using up leftovers. So not only do Brian and I take our lunch to work nearly every day (or in my case, since I work from home, take myself to the lunch that's is waiting in the fridge), we also don't have to do any additional cooking or shopping for said lunch. All we have to do is dish out some leftovers into a microwaveable container and add a piece of fruit on the side. In the unusual event that we don't have any dinner leftovers, we usually go with a peanut-butter sandwich (remember those?) for Brian, and maybe a scrambled egg or a can of soup for me.

Week 18: Ride your bike to work

The folks at Bankrate apparently thought that while they were on the topic of saving money at work, they might as well discuss another way to save on the cost of getting to and from work. Reporter Claes Bell says that making the shift from driving to biking to work has been "a game changer" for him (or possibly her...I can't quite tell from the name), saving about $129 a month. However, that's because the switch to biking meant that he and his wife could downsize from two cars to one, saving on gas, insurance, and maintenance. Most of the savings came from eliminating the second car, not from driving fewer miles.

For me and Brian, since we were already a one-car family before Brian took up biking to work, the savings are a lot smaller. I calculated last year that Brian's bicycle commute probably saved us about $89 a year—less than the Bells saved in just one month. However, it would still be well worth doing even if the savings came to nothing at all, because (a) it's good exercise, enabling Brian to maintain his boyish figure—or more accurately, to acquire the boyish figure he never had as a boy—and (b) he finds riding his bike through the park a much, much less stressful start to the day than driving in New Jersey traffic.

So that's two more weekly challenges that are actually no challenge for us, because ha ha, we're doing them already. Admittedly, we're not saving nearly as much with the bicycle commute as Claes Bell, but then, we're doing a lot better with the brown-bag lunches than Mark Hamrick, so I guess it balances out.

Money Crashers: Meet "The Compact"

As I've mentioned before here, I'm oddly fascinated by frugal lifestyle challenges. I've spent a week each eating on a SNAP (food stamps) budget, living on a minimum wage budget, and subjecting myself to WWII-style rationing, and I've posed myself not one but two local shopping challenges. And, while I haven't done these things myself, I've devoured books by families that have spent a year eating only local food, or refusing to buy anything made in China, or refusing to buy anything at all except necessities.

So for my latest Money Crashers post, it seemed like a natural choice to write about The Compact, a group of people who have pledged to do all their shopping secondhand (with certain obvious exceptions, like food and fuel). After all, buying secondhand is one of the linchpins of the ecofrugal lifestyle: it keeps waste out of landfills, saves the natural resources and energy that would be used to make new goods, reduces pollution (including greenhouse gases), and as the icing on the cake, it saves money. So I went into the assignment fully expecting to come out of it with a profound admiration for the "Compacters," and possibly even be inspired to try their secondhand-only lifestyle for myself.

To my surprise, my reaction ended up being just the opposite. The more I read about The Compact and its members, the more they started to annoy me. I first started to feel irritated when I read the basic rules for the Compact on its official blog. Along with such reasonable rules as "charitable donations are allowed," blogger Rachel Kesel offered such stern admonitions as:

• New socks and underwear are okay, but they must be "utilitarian--non-couture or ornamental."
• It's okay to spend money on services as long as they're "utilitarian services," like calling a plumber to unclog your drain. "Recreational services," such as movies and massages, are fine for gifts, but "should not be over-indulged in for personal gratification."
• Plants and cut flowers are acceptable to buy "in extreme moderation," and only from local businesses.

What was that all about? I thought the point of The Compact was to reduce clutter and protect the environment. A new pair of undies takes up the same amount of space and uses the same amount of resources whether it's "utilitarian" or "ornamental," so why insist that only plain panties are acceptable? Kesel's preachy pronouncements against excessive "personal gratification" seemed to smack of puritanism.

I might have thought it was just Kesel, but I seemed to encounter this same emphasis on self-deprivation in other members of the group as well. A story about The Compact in the Washington Post, for instance, told how during its first year, members would petition the group for permission to buy things they deemed necessary, and a member who asked to buy a new toilet brush on the grounds that it was a "health issue" was turned down. A new toilet brush? This is their idea of hedonism?

Now, admittedly, all these stories were about the ten members of the original The Compact group in San Francisco back in 2006. The group today has over 1,800 members who connect on Yahoo!, and some of them presumably are less strict than others. In fact, I joined the Yahoo! Group as part of my research for the article, and I saw a recent question in the discussion area from a woman who wanted help finding new shoes to fit her husband's extra-wide feet. So she was clearly willing to buy new in a case where her husband's health (at least the health of his feet) was at stake. Still, the whole experience kind of left a sour taste in my mouth, and it left me with no desire at all to take on the challenge of living under The Compact for myself, even on a temporary basis.

I didn't mention my personal reactions in the article itself, which you can read here: "Meet 'The Compact,' a Frugal Group Dedicated to Buying Secondhand Only." But I'd be curious to hear from all you readers whether the group's attitude strikes you at all the same way it did me.

Salad of the Month: Kasha Salad

The local produce challenge we undertook last week turned out to be a little complicated. My original idea was that all the produce we ate during the week should be locally and sustainably grown, but that didn't quite work, because when we picked up the CSA box on Sunday, we still had a couple of items left over from the previous week—an avocado, a nectarine, and a banana or two—that still needed to be eaten.

So then I thought, well, maybe all the produce we buy during the week can be locally grown. The problem there was that we made a trip to Trader Joe's yesterday, and they had their usual $3.49-a-pound deal on fresh Brussels sprouts. Now, roasted Brussels sprouts are one of my very favorite dishes—possibly my absolute favorite vegetable dish—and our own plants, although they're big and healthy, haven't even begun to form recognizable sprouts yet, let alone ones big enough to harvest. So even though the sprouts were plainly labeled "product of Mexico," I just couldn't pass them up.

So my current plan is to count our week of eating local produce not from Sunday to Sunday, but from Tuesday evening to Tuesday evening. That takes us past the point at which we'd disposed of all the leftover non-local produce, but it still allows us to roast up some Brussels sprouts on Tuesday or Wednesday. Thus, I can't report on the final results of the challenge yet.

To complicate matters further, we were right in the middle of this week of local eating when I realized that time was running out for us to try a new Soup or Salad of the Month for June. Between the CSA box and the plants in our garden, we had everything we needed to make a Couscous Salad, one of our perennial favorites from The Clueless Vegetarian, but that wasn't a new recipe, and my New Year's resolution specifically called for trying a new soup or salad each month to expand our repertoire. But as it happened, I'd been toying for a while with the idea of trying this recipe with kasha (otherwise known as buckwheat groats) in place of couscous to make a version we could serve to our gluten-free friends. So I decided that this was a significant enough modification to the existing recipe for it to qualify as a "new" salad for the month of June.

The original version of this recipe calls for 4 scallions, 2 medium cucumbers, 2 medium green peppers, 1/2 cup fresh parsley, and "whatever else you like" in terms of veggies. The CSA box contained two cucumbers—not really big enough to be called "medium," but enough to supply the necessary cucumber presence in the salad—and our own pepper plants supplied one very large frying pepper, big enough to fill in for the two medium green peppers the recipe called for. To make up the extra volume, we also threw in a bunch of sugar snap peas (the Cascadia variety we tried this year has proved to be very productive indeed) and a small bunch of broccolini, one of the completely new crops in our 2015 garden.

Brian prepared the kasha in the usual way, mixing the kernels with a beaten egg and browning the coated grains in the pan to seal them before adding the water to cook them with, which means that this version of the salad is gluten-free but not vegan. Once the kasha was cooked, he simply tossed it together with all the copped-up veggies and a simple dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, and ground cumin.

This variant worked out better than either of us had expected. The nutty flavor of the buckwheat was not only compatible with the other flavors, it actually made a more interesting contrast to the cool, crisp veggies and the light, lemony dressing than the couscous does. Brian said he liked it better than the original Couscous Salad, and I thought it was at least as good. So I don't know whether we'll be making this recipe with kasha in place of couscous by default from now on, but it's at least an alternative that we'll be keeping in our salad collection for the future.

Money Crashers: What Is a Tool-Lending Library

While working on my article for Money Crashers about when to DIY as opposed to hiring a contractor, I stumbled across an interesting idea for saving money on home-repair tools: a tool library. This is basically what it sounds like: a library that lends out tools instead of books. I dug a little deeper and found that Money Crashers had never covered this topic before, so I decided it was time to remedy that oversight.

Tool lending libraries are a great example of ecofrugality. They save money, because you don't have to shell out for new tools for every home repair. They save resources, because a single circular saw or extension ladder can serve the needs of a dozen families, instead of every household having its own. And they provide a place to get together with other like-minded individuals and share knowledge, possibly forming the core of a new ecofrugal community. Read all about them here:

What Is a Tool-Lending Library - Benefits & How to Start Your Own

Money Crashers: Living on Minimum Wage - Is It Possible?

My latest Money Crashers article covers the Live the Wage Challenge, which I took last summer. In the article, I compare my experience taking the challenge with the experiences of the various politicians and other bloggers who tried it (spoiler alert: I made it through the week on minimum wage, but most others didn't). I also discuss the various flaws in the challenge that I identified while taking it, and I link to the New York Times interactive calculator that I think is a much better tool for figuring out how well you could manage on minimum wage.

Here's the full article: Living on Minimum Wage - Is It Possible? (Live the Wage Challenge)