Where does the water go?

When I see articles in the Dollar Stretcher, or any other newsletter, about how to save on your water bill, I usually ignore them. For one thing, the advice in them is generally stuff that I've known pretty much all my life, like "don't run the water while brushing your teeth," or "don't water your lawn every day." I wouldn't dream of doing these things in any case; in fact, as far as the lawn goes, I'd be hard pressed to think of a reason for watering it on any day. (Why encourage the grass to grow faster if we'll just have to cut it more often?) But also, I've generally assumed that even if I did, by chance, come across a tip I hadn't seen before, I couldn't possibly save a dime by it, because in Highland Park, we don't pay for our water by the gallon. Instead, the quarterly water bill is in one of three "tiers": $48.73 for usage under 800 cubic feet, $62.96 for 800 to 999 cubic feet, and $77.70 for 1000 cubic feet or more. And when we first started paying water bills, our water use tended to stay firmly in the bottom tier--between 500 and 700 gallons. So cutting our water use wouldn't save us any money, and saving water for the sake of the environment in general isn't usually an issue in high-rainfall New Jersey.

In the past few years, however, our water usage has somehow started to creep up. In 2010, we had one water bill that was in the second tier rather than the bottom tier. In 2011, two of our four bills were in the second tier. And now our last three water bills in a row—the last two of 2012 and the first for 2013—have all been in that middle tier. Now, I realize the difference between the two isn't huge—$14.23 for three months—and maybe it isn't really worth worrying about, but what really bothers me is that I can't figure out why our water usage has gone up. It's not as if we'd added a lot of thirsty plants to our landscape, or started bathing a lot more frequently, or acquired a swimming pool. And yet, by crunching some numbers on the water bills, I find that our average daily water use hovered around 50 gallons until early 2010, then jumped suddenly to about 57 gallons, and from there has slowly crept up to nearly 69 gallons.

So where are we putting it all? Is it my fault for lingering too long in the shower? No, I don't see how that can be it—at 2.5 gallons per minute, I'd have had to extend my shower by 17 minutes every single day to account for that kind of increase. (Also, the rise in our water bill hasn't been attended by a corresponding rise in our gas bill, so I think that it's probably cold water that we're using more of.) More loads of laundry? Well, if a large load of laundry uses 40 gallons of water, then one extra load per week could account for an extra 5.7 gallons per day—but that's still only about half of the difference, and anyway, I've generally been doing more frequent smaller loads, so that should work out to fewer gallons per load. And I don't think it can be the garden that's to blame, because then why would our water usage remain so high in the wintertime, when nothing's growing out there?

Ultimately, I guess, the real question is not so much why our water bill has gone up, but what we can do to get it back down again. But that just brings me back to my original problem: when I Google "save water at home," I get a bunch of "no kidding" advice that I've been following for years. We don't have any leaky faucets; we already have low-flow showerheads in both bathrooms, and a water-saving toilet in one of them, and a water-saving valve on the other toilet; we don't leave water running when brushing teeth or washing dishes or any of those other "well, duh" things. In other words, we've already harvested all the low-hanging fruit.

We could, of course, go for some harder-to-reach fruit, like upgrading to a front-loading washer—but spending $800 or more to save less than $5 a month on our water bill doesn't seem like the best possible investment. We could, much more cheaply, build a rain barrel for the garden—but even if we fill it up to its 55-gallon capacity before the growing season starts, and then use the entire amount over the course of one dry month, that 55-gallon savings isn't going to be enough to bump us back down to the bottom tier. It seems to me like the only way we're ever going to get our water usage back down to where it used to be—or at least down to a level that keeps us consistently below the 800-cubic-foot cutoff—is to figure out what caused it to rise above that level in the first place, and then stop doing it. Anyone have any ideas I've overlooked?

Finding the best thrift shops

A few weeks ago, the bloggers at Young House Love issued their Macklemore Thrift Shop Challenge, based on the rap song "Thrift Shop," by Macklemore and Ryan Lewis. (You can view a cleaned-up version of the video on this page, or go to YouTube for the unexpurgated version.) I'd never heard the song before, and I was completely tickled by the fact that a rap song about thrift shops exists. Even if it's mostly tongue-in-cheek, I still think it's awesome that this guy is challenging the way rap music in general glorifies throwing money around (describing spending $50 on a T-shirt as "getting swindled" and deriding the idea that you can "get girls from a brand"). So I was really psyched to take the challenge, which was to go to a thrift shop—any thrift shop—with "$20 in your pocket" and show what you get for it. (You also get points for finding and photographing any of the items specifically mentioned in the song, such as clothing with fringe, sneakers with Velcro, and pajamas with feet).

Unfortunately, however, there are no thrift shops in our area that even approach the one depicted in the video for selection and price. Here in Highland Park, there are exactly two stores that sell secondhand goods. The Tower Thrift Shop in the basement of the Reformed Church is cleaner and better organized than it used to be, but it's still got a small and seldom-changing selection, no dressing rooms, and very limited hours (about 15 hours per week). There is a new store on Raritan Avenue that has some pretty nice furniture and accessories, but no clothing, which is what I actually need right now.

I figured my best chance of completing the Thrift Shop Challenge successfully was to go down to the Goodwill store in East Brunswick. Although this is the nearest big thrift store to us (only about five miles away), we seldom stop in there because it's not close to anyplace else we'd be likely to go. In honor of the Thrift Shop Challenge, however, I decided to make a special trip out there on a Saturday. I went in with my $20 and a modest shopping list: some decent pants for winter, maybe a flannel shirt or a grey pullover, and anything else that happened to catch my eye. And I came out with...nothing. After working my way up and down all the racks of trousers, looking at every pair to check the size (since this store sorts them only by color), I didn't find a single pair worth the trouble of trying on. The few pairs I found in my size were all cut in the fashionably low-slung style that looks absolutely awful on me, and/or they were made of such flimsy fabric that they weren't worth the five to ten dollars the store was asking for them. And while I did try on a few grey pullovers, not one fit me properly.

The whole experience was so frustrating that I began to think maybe I should just give up on thrift shops entirely. Yeah, back in college I used to have good luck there, but I was younger and slimmer then, and maybe the tanking economy has made people more reluctant to get rid of good clothes. So imagine my surprise when, at the blood bank yesterday, the phlebotomist started chatting to me about shopping and confided that she gets nearly everything from thrift shops. The prices are so much better than the department stores, she rattled on cheerfully, and the selection is just as good—she can always find plenty of items in her size. When I eagerly asked her where she shopped to find such great deals, she steered me toward the Unique Thrift Store in South Plainfield—not much farther from us than the Goodwill, but in the opposite direction.

This got me thinking about the first time we visited a Habitat ReStore, back in 2010 when we were preparing to refinish our bathroom. The nearest one was about half an hour south of us, out toward the shore. When we got there, we found it was just a couple of rooms with a limited selection of crappy secondhand furniture. No tile, no paint, no light fixtures—none of the stuff we needed for the job in hand. So we decided, since we'd come this far, to continue south toward the next nearest store. After another half an hour's drive, we found a much larger selection of crappy secondhand furniture, plus a couple of seriously beat-up appliances. So after making a two-hour round trip through some not very appealing neighborhoods and finding nothing, I was naturally feeling a bit disillusioned with the idea of the Habitat ReStore and very nearly gave up on it entirely. But the descriptions my pals on the Dollar Stretcher forums gave of their great finds at Habitat convinced me that at least some of their stores must be worthwhile, so I did a little more investigation and found that the Morris County store, which was located in a more upscale area, appeared to be much bigger and offer a much wider selection of stuff. And sure enough, when we checked it out, this store turned out to have the good stuff: paint, tile, sinks, cabinetry, plumbing supplies, and even nails sold by the pound. We ended up picking up a bathroom sink for $30 and, on a later trip, several boxes of Italian ceramic tile at $11 a box.

It seems reasonable to conclude that where thrift shops are concerned, location makes a big difference. Thinking back over my vast experience of thrift shopping, I'd offer the following rules of thumb:

1. The bigger the city, the better the selection. Aside from one T-shirt, I've never found anything I really liked at the Goodwill near us, but when I've taken the opportunity to visit the one near my in-laws' house in Indianapolis, I've generally had good results. This rule makes sense if you think about it: the bigger the city, the wider the population from which it can gather its merchandise, and thus the better the selection it's likely to have.
2. The richer the neighborhood, the better the merchandise. When I was in college, living on the fairly upscale Main Line outside of Philadelphia, I had one great thrift shop just a few blocks from my apartment and at least two others within walking distance. (To this day, I've never forgotten the $15 leather miniskirt I bought at the Ardmore thrift shop in my freshman year—before I went vegetarian—even though I wore it exactly once and could no longer fit into it by senior year.) This rule also has a certain logic to it: rich folks can afford to buy higher-quality stuff to begin with, and they can also afford to discard it before it's worn out.
3. The better the store, the higher the prices. Our little local store may not have much selection, but the few things I've found there have been incredible bargains: pants for a dollar a pair, shoes for two dollars, shirts for 50 cents. The Goodwill store tends to charge more: maybe four dollars for a shirt and as much as ten for a pair of pants (although you can cut these prices in half by choosing merchandise with the right color-coded tag: blue tags on a blue-tag day, for example). And the Yelp reviews I found for the Unique Thrift Store generally say that the store is clean, well-organized and loaded with a great variety of stuff, but the prices are often unreasonably high based on the condition of the clothing. Of course, thrift-store prices are still bound to be lower than retail prices (at least for merchandise of similar quality), so it's probably a better bet to go to a store where you can actually find something you like and pay $10 or $15 for it than to one where you search a whole rack of $2 jeans and find nothing.

I did a little Googling around to see if anyone else has formulated a similar set of rules and found that Trent of The Simple Dollar is willing to back me up on rule 2, at least. He also says that once you've identified a nice neighborhood, it's worth taking the time to check out all the local thrift stores and see if you can find one with the right balance of quality and price (a tacit nod to rule 3). And he recommends looking beyond the one item you happen to be looking for right now: if the store has the sort of things that fit your size and taste in general, then it's probably worth a return visit.

So I'm hoping that when I get the chance to check out the Unique Thrift Store, I'll actually find something I like, even if I end up having to spend the entire "20 dollas in my pocket" on it. (Oh, and incidentally, if you're curious, you can see the results of the Macklemore Thrift Shop Challenge here.)

The trouble with free

It's been observed many times, and in many different places, that people often behave abnormally when they hear the word "free." Emily Guy Birken discusses the problems with "free" stuff in a recent post on the Live Like a Mensch blog, and behavioral economist Dan Ariely devotes an entire chapter to this phenomenon in his book Predictably Irrational. In one experiment he describes, college students overwhelmingly choose a free Hershey's Kiss over a 15-cent Lindt Truffle, yet when the prices of both candies are raised by one cent, they overwhelmingly prefer the truffle. A penny is still a trivial amount of money, but because it's not "free," it allows the students to perceive the transaction as a financial one and analyze the costs and benefits accordingly. He also talks about how Amazon greatly increased its sales when it started offering free shipping on all orders over $25—except in France, where it reduced the shipping charge on large orders to 1 franc (about 20 cents) instead of cutting it to zero. Even though this is still a negligible cost, it didn't have the allure of "free"—that tantalizing promise of getting something for nothing that can have the paradoxical effect of persuading people to spend more than they intended.

My own observation, however, is that the problem with "free" stuff cuts both ways. That is, not only can the promise of free stuff lead to poor decision-making, but an offer of a free item can also backfire on the giver.

Case in point: our old blender, which I listed on our local Freecycle group after we replaced it with a newer one from Craigslist. (Side note: I put the new blender to the test using this homemade Frappucino recipe, and I found that it performed admirably, actually doing a much better job of grinding up ice cubes than our old one. I also noticed that making this recipe with pectin rather than xanthan gum, which I couldn't find anywhere, doesn't seem to help much at keeping the drink from separating, but that wasn't the blender's fault.) Being a scrupulously honest person, I made a point of noting in the Freecycle listing that the blender's collar was cracked, so I feared that we might not get any takers. However, within just a couple of hours of the post, I received an e-mail from a Freecycler who said she was interested and could pick it up on Sunday "after 11 am."

When the Freecycler hadn't showed up by 2:30, I thought that the treacherously high winds we were having might have interfered with her plans, so I e-mailed back to inquire if she could still make it. She said she'd had car trouble and asked if she could come the next day "after 4:30 pm." Although I was a bit annoyed by her vagueness, I decided not to press for a more specific time commitment in the interests of getting the blender out of here. But as it turns out, it didn't matter, since she never showed up at all. Moreover, although she had both my e-mail and my phone number, she never bothered to contact me to explain why she couldn't make it this time.

Would this person have been so cavalier about her promise to me if she'd been proposing to buy the blender, rather than just take it for free? Based on an earlier experience of Brian's, I suspect not. Back when he was preparing to move out of his old apartment in California and move out East, he had to get rid of most of his belongings, so he listed several items on a message board at his workplace—some for sale, though at fairly modest prices, and others for free. The people who arranged to buy things, he says, invariably came when they said they would come, paid what they said they would pay, and left. However, the people who offered to pick up the couch he was giving away never came at all. He got multiple offers, but not one person actually showed up or bothered to send so much as a word of explanation. In the end, the couch wound up on the curb with the trash, because no one who promised to take it could be bothered to keep that promise.

This experience convinced him, and has since convinced me, that people just don't take a transaction seriously when there's no actual money at stake. If they've arranged to buy something, then they feel they have entered into a contract, and they won't break that contract without a good reason. But if they are merely taking something for free, then as they see it, there is no contract. Their reasoning, conscious or unconscious, seems to be, "Well, I wasn't going to pay anything for it anyway, so if I don't show up, it doesn't cost him anything." I suspect that if Brian, rather than giving away his old couch, had offered to "sell" it for a dollar, the people who offered to take it at that price would have showed up as promised with dollar in hand. (Of course, it's also possible that no one would have offered—but at least in that case, he wouldn't have had to waste time waiting around for a bunch of no-shows.)

The logical conclusion from all this might be that if I want to get rid of the old blender, the thing to do is to try selling it for a dollar, or some other nominal price, rather than Freecycling it. But since the majority of people I deal with on Freecycle actually do show up as promised, or at least give a good reason if they can't, I think it's worth taking one more crack at giving it away first. I've added a listing to the larger Middlesex County group, which reaches more people than the smaller Rutgers University group, and already I've had two requests for the blender. This time, I'm planning to leave the item out for "porch pickup" rather than try and schedule a specific time for the transfer. I'm hoping this will make the process go more smoothly.

However, it is rather interesting that two people (three, if you count the one who never showed up) actually want a blender that I candidly admitted is broken. True, only one part is broken, and it only costs about five bucks to replace that part—but as we discovered, it also only costs about five bucks to replace the entire blender with a secondhand one. It seems to be yet another example of the power of that word "free": people who wouldn't pay $5 for a secondhand blender will eagerly snatch up a "free" blender that needs a $5 part.

Buy this, it's recycled!

In my post on recycling a couple of weeks ago, I mentioned EarthWorks, a company that collects expired gift cards, credit cards, library cards, and so forth, and recycles them into new ones. Today, while reading over that post, it occurred to me to pop back over to the EarthWorks site and see where their recycled cards are actually being used. The answer, it seems, is a bit hard to pin down: their "partners" page had a list of 11 companies on it, most of which I'd never heard of before. Most of them are not the actual stores that distribute gift cards, but rather companies that manufacture these cards for others. There were a few exceptions, including a small chain of restaurants in Duluth called Grandma's and a bookstore chain called Half Price Books (which I've really liked the few times I've visited it out in Indianapolis, but which unfortunately doesn't have any stores east of Ohio). However, the one that particularly caught my eye was a company called Metrohiker, which was described as follows:

The Metrohiker card is the most sustainable way to save cash. Cardholders get exclusive discounts at a wide variety of locally-owned, environmentally-friendly businesses in participating communities across the nation.

This sounded particularly intriguing, since it offered an opportunity to support local businesses, promote sustainability, and save money all at once. However, since I live in a small town that isn't particularly close to any large cities, I suspected that the card probably wouldn't offer any discounts in my area. Still, out of curiosity, I clicked through to the Metrohiker website to see if I could find any more details about the program.

Well, I couldn't. Oh, the company's home page promised "exclusive access to discounts at great businesses in your hometown, nationwide, and online," including "your favorite restaurants, vintage clothing stores, transportation services, and more"—but when I followed the link that said, "click here to learn more," all I got was a blurb about the company's goal "to promote healthy communities, environmental sustainability, and adventure." Hoping for some more particulars, I tried another link reading, "Still don't have any idea what Metrohiker is all about?  Learn more about how it works." How it works, apparently, is as follows:

1. You sign up for a Metrohiker card. (No mention of how much it costs, and no amount of clicking on the site led me to this information, but a separate Google search eventually turned up the Metrohiker cardholder agreement, which says that the card costs $25 plus $3 shipping, is good for one year, and may not be shared with anyone else.)
2. You go to businesses that are partners with Metrohiker. (Again, no mention of what those businesses are or where they are located—and I had no luck trying to find this information indirectly through Google.)
3. They give you discounts. (The site doesn't say how much, and Google couldn't help me dig up this information.)

The most specific information the site provides about its program is a list of cities in which "exciting launch events" could be expected soon. One of the cities on the list was Boston, where my sister lives, and I wondered whether this card might make a nice present for her—but since the site gave no indication at all of what businesses in Boston were participating in the program, I had no way of finding out whether the card would be of any use to her at all. The site did say I could visit Metrohiker's Facebook page for updates—but when I clicked through to it, surprise surprise, it had no information at all except a copy of the blurb that appeared on the main website.

What struck me as particularly funny was the way the website kept repeatedly mentioning the fact that the Metrohiker card is made from 100 percent recycled plastic, as if that were its primary selling point. I mean, sure, I'm all for recycling, and I'd much rather have a card made from recycled plastic than one made from new plastic—but that's assuming that I had a use for the card in the first place. What the Metrohiker site seemed to be suggesting was that I should be willing to pay $28 a year for a piece of recycled plastic without knowing what, if anything, it's actually good for.

Frankly, I don't think asking consumers to send old, expired cards to be processed into new cards and then pay $28 a year for the privilege of carrying those new cards around, without ever using them for anything, and then send them back to be recycled again, qualifies as a sustainable business model.

Product free when you buy the package

As an ecofrugal individual, I like to reduce waste whenever I can. And since nearly a third of all trash in this country comes from product packaging, one of the main ways I try to reduce waste is to choose products with less packaging. Case in point: cleaning products. Rather than buy a separate product for every room in my house, complete with its own bottle that has to be stored and eventually disposed of, I rely on just a few staples to clean nearly everything: dish soap, baking soda, and vinegar. A vinegar-and-water solution, stored in a spray bottle, is especially handy: a squirt of this and a swipe with a rag is a quick fix for anything from grease-splattered walls in the kitchen to smudgy windows. (It can even keep your car windows from icing up if you spray it on ahead of time—and if ice has already formed, spraying it with this will help melt it faster.)

The problem is that I use this stuff so often that I find I'm always running out and having to mix up more. The squirt bottle I use is a cheapie that cost me a couple of bucks at the drugstore, and while it works fine, it only holds a little over a cup. So when I had to interrupt my cleaning of the bathroom yesterday to refill the bottle, I finally got fed up and decided it was worth spending a couple of extra bucks on a bigger bottle. And since we needed to go out anyway to get some compost, I figured it would be no trouble to add a quick stop at Target to our agenda.

Once we managed to find the cleaning supplies at the Target, I found that they only had one decent-sized squirt bottle on the shelf, and the cost was $4.79—a bit more than I'd expected. But I reminded myself that my expectations about prices are often unreasonable, since I live in a little tightwad bubble in which things are hardly ever bought new, and that it was unlikely I'd find a bottle like this for less than five bucks anywhere else. And that would have been that, except that on the way to the checkout, we passed by a rack full of Method brand cleaning supplies. This is a 21st-century brand that's marketed to eco-conscious types: nontoxic, vegetable-based cleansers, no animal testing, and 100 percent recycled packaging that actually looks decent out on the counter. Yet unlike many "green" products, it isn't really more expensive than mainstream cleaners of the same type. In fact, the shelf at the Target proclaimed that most of the Method products, ranging from glass cleaner to dish soap in all manner of colors and fragrances, were on sale at 3 for $8. And most of them were in—guess what?—squirt bottles.

So I did a quick mental calculation: "Hmm, I could buy an empty bottle for $4.79, or I could buy a bottle of cleanser for $2.67, and after I used it all up, I'd have a perfectly good reusable squirt bottle." Even if it turned out I didn't like the Method cleaner at all, I could just dump it down the sink (hey, nontoxic, right?) and have the bottle for less than I would have spent to buy an empty one. How could I go wrong?

After perusing the selection for a while, I settled on the "all-purpose" cleanser in Pink Grapefruit scent, which I figured would be closest to my trusty vinegar-and-water solution (well, maybe not for de-icing car windows). I gave it a try today, and it seems to be able to handle quick clean-ups as well as the vinegar solution, if not necessarily better—and I will admit, it does smell better. So I think we'll be perfectly content to use this stuff in place of the vinegar for the next several months, and when it's gone, the bottle can get refilled with the old standby (possibly with a bit of citrus oil added to improve the scent).

What I found most interesting about this little exercise is that, when I came to think about it, it wasn't the first time I'd bought a product mainly to get the package. I can think of two more examples just off the top of my head:

• Last week, after waiting a couple of months in vain for Blue Bunny frozen yogurt to go on sale, we finally gave in and bought a container at full price so that I could reuse the lid for my bathroom compost bin.
• After several months of reading the increasingly shrill warnings about the dangers of reusing plastic water and soda bottles (most of which, by the way, turn out to be based on insufficient evidence), and the repeated admonishments to go out and buy a safe, reusable bottle such as a $20 Kleen Kanteen, I decided instead to go to the store and buy a $1.29 glass bottle of Snapple. After drinking the contents, I washed out the bottle, filled it with plain tap water, and stashed it in the car, where it's continued to live (aside from the occasional re-washing) ever since.

The thing about these purchases is that, since what I'm really buying is the packaging, it's almost like getting the product itself for free. Buy a $2.66 plastic spray bottle, and get a quart of all-purpose cleaner free; buy a $1.29 glass water bottle, and get a pint of Snapple free; buy a $4.49 compost container, and get seven cups of frozen yogurt free. (Okay, maybe that last one wasn't really such a bargain, but I wasn't having any luck finding a better deal.) Of course, for someone who normally tries to reduce the amount of packaging I buy, it is a bit ironic to be buying products just for their packaging—but if the alternative is buying the package without the product, and paying more for it, that doesn't really make any more sense, does it?

Has anyone else ever done this—buying a product primarily to get the container? Can you add any more examples to my list?

The compost test

Earlier this week I realized that when all our new landscaping plants arrive in the spring, we'll need plenty of compost to amend the soil where they're planted. And since our little compost bin doesn't produce more than a few cubic feet at most—nowhere near the volume we'll need for three plum trees, five cherry bushes, a dozen raspberry canes and five rhubarb plants—that means buying commercial compost. Unfortunately, there is a problem these days with commercial compost: rather than nourishing your plants, it could actually kill them.

I first read about the problem of "killer compost" in Mother Earth News. Basically, the problem is that certain herbicides, known as pyralids, do not break down during the composting process. Even if they've been eaten and digested by a cow, they remain present in the manure, essentially unchanged. So if you put this stuff on your garden plants, it will do what herbicides are designed to do: kill the plants.

When the magazine first discussed in the issue back in 2008, the only way it mentioned to "protect your garden" was to avoid buying commercial compost unless the seller could vouch for its safety. That wasn't very useful advice for those of us who buy the stuff in bags from Home Depot, rather than directly from farmers. Eventually, nearly a year later, the editors got around to providing some information about how to test bagged compost to make sure it's safe to use. The linked article gives the procedure in detail, but the quick summary is:

1. Mark the bags of compost with numbers or letters so you can tell which bag is which.
2. Take a sample of compost from each bag you want to test. (Brian took the samples by piercing the bag with our soil knife, just the way drug dealers on TV cop shows do when they want to test the purity of a shipment of heroin. His reaction to this was always, "Dude, now there's a hole in your bag and all the heroin is going to spill out," but in the case of our compost bags, a small hole shouldn't be a problem as soon as they remain stacked neatly in the shed.)
3. Mix the sample with potting soil in a seed-starting tray or pot. (Brian used our seed-starting mix instead of soil, since he knew seeds would germinate in that.) Make sure to label each pot or section of the tray with the number or letter corresponding to the bag the sample came from. Also fill a couple of sections or pots with plain soil as a control.
4. In each pot, plant two or three fast-sprouting seeds, such as peas or beans. (We use mung beans, which sprout easily in plain water. In fact, while setting up the test, Brian also started a batch of bean sprouts in a jar, which will confirm right away that our seeds are viable—and also allow us to have Pad Thai for dinner next week.)
5. Put all the pots on a tray and water them thoroughly. Keep them in a sunny window for the next two to three weeks, keeping the soil moist. If the sprouts that emerge from the compost-treated pots are as healthy as the control seedlings, you'll know the compost is okay. If they come out with cupped leaves and twisted stems, that's a sign that your compost could be tainted and probably isn't safe to use on your garden plants.

The "Ask the Expert" column in Mother Earth News also describes a version of this test in which you start the seeds first and then water them with a compost "tea" made by mixing the compost with water. But we find mixing the compost directly into the soil is less hassle, especially when you have multiple bags to test.

We've done this procedure every time we've bought compost for the past few years, and so far, we've been lucky enough not to get a tainted bag. But we aren't prepared to trust to luck, especially where our new fruit trees and bushes are concerned. These plants are a long-term investment, and we're not about to risk losing them to a batch of tainted compost.

Repair or replace: a new wrinkle

I've discovered a new wrinkle in the "repair or replace" equation: sometimes, the cost of a replacement is actually less than the cost of a repair. Especially when the replacement is purchased secondhand.

Case in point: our blender is about four years old. We've had it about four years, and it worked fine for the first year or so. Then the collar—the plastic part that holds the pitcher on the base—cracked, causing the blender to leak whenever it was used. Being ecofrugal types, our first thought was to repair it, so we fixed the crack with superglue. However, before long the collar cracked again in a different place, so we figured we'd just replace the part. Just to be on the safe side, we ordered two, figuring that if this part is the weakest link in the blender mechanism, we might as well have a spare. And that turned out to be very prescient of us, because the replacement collar cracked after a few months of use. And then the spare one did the same.

At this point, rather than order another round of replacement parts, Brian decided to try again to repair the one we had—this time filling in the entire area over the crack with the epoxy. And that worked, sort of. The collar held together, but fluid still seeped into the crack, so instead of a big leak, we got a little trickle of blackish fluid from the bottom of the jar every time it was lifted off the base. This got old pretty quickly.

So today, I went online looking for the replacement part again. Brian suggested ordering three of them this time, since we seem to go through them so quickly. I was grumbling to myself about having to spend $10 a year just to keep this blender working, and I found myself wondering whether it would be cheaper in the long run to replace it. At first blush, the answer appeared to be no, because the top-rated blender at ConsumerSearch is priced at $200, and for that price we could replace the collar another 40 times. There was a budget model that cost only $65, but when I checked the detailed report on it, I found that it had some durability problems—so we might pay $65 up front and still end up having to buy replacement parts within a year. I found myself feeling nostalgic for my mom's old Oster, which was built like a brick house. It was big, heavy, and loud, but its metal parts took a licking and kept on ticking. And then it hit me: "If what you really want is an old blender, why not look for one?"

I tried searching the "appliances" section on Craigslist, but I didn't get many hits in our area. Then I expanded my search to the entire site and discovered a whole bunch of posts that included one or more blenders lumped in with a bunch of other household items. One seller, within striking distance of our house, was offering three blenders, all priced between $5 and $12. And it took me only a moment to calculate that any one of these would cost less than the $16 plus shipping we were about to spend on replacement parts for our existing blender. We could buy a whole new blender for $10, and even if it lasted only one year, we'd come out ahead.

So, to cut this long story short, we are now the proud owners of a secondhand Black & Decker blender, complete with a spare pitcher, all for a measly ten bucks. According to the seller, it's only a few months old, so we actually got a blender that's several years newer than the one we have now for less than the cost of the parts we'd need to keep the old one running another year. (I was actually a bit disappointed that it wasn't a solidly built model from the seventies with all-metal parts—maybe in a nice avocado green—but I guess people who still own those old troopers are holding on to them.) We've determined that it runs, and it isn't significantly louder or quieter than our old blender—and best of all, the base that holds the pitcher is BIG, spreading the weight of the glass pitcher out over a much larger area than the small, easily-stressed collar on our old model. So that part, at least, should hold up better than its predecessor.

All in all, I'd have to say that in this case, replacing was definitely the more ecofrugal choice. By replacing the old blender, rather than continuing to buy new parts for it, we're reducing waste; by buying the new one secondhand, we're reusing as well; and if we can find anyone on Freecycle willing to take our existing blender as-is, we can keep that one out of the landfill a little longer too.

And yes, this does mean that we celebrated Valentine's Day by going out and buying a cheap blender. Hey, to a tightwad with green sensibilities, that's way more romantic than a dozen pesticide-laden roses—and it will last a lot longer.