Gardeners' Holidays 2023: Plumfest

For many gardeners, late July and early August is the time of Peak Zucchini. They're harvesting squash every day, including some the size of baseball bats, and eating it at nearly every meal—in soups, stews, pasta, frittata, and endless loaves of zucchini bread. By early August, many are even resorting to sneaking it onto their neighbors' porches.

Not us. Our new zucchini variety, Emerald Delight, which our new seed provider described as "extremely productive" with "great disease resistance," has so far produced only three measly squash—and two of those were pretty dinky. We've also had to discard a couple due to blossom end rot, despite our use of crushed eggshells to supplement the plants. This pathetic harvest isn't the fault of our old nemesis the squash vine borer; the plants themselves are vibrantly green and flourishing. They just aren't making any actual squash. So we'll definitely be dropping this variety next year and leaving a negative review of it on the company's website.

Fortunately, we have plenty of other crops that are more than making up the difference. In fact, as you can see here, we have a whole rainbow of produce in our garden, including:

• Plums. We're at about the midpoint of our plum harvest right now. The Opal tree has been picked clean, and the Golden Gages and Mount Royals are just beginning to come ripe. So far, we've harvested about 36.7 pounds of purple-red Opals, 7.5 ounces of Golden Gages, and 3 ounces of blue Mount Royals. Now, that may not sound impressive compared to our 2021 harvest, which included 51 pounds of Opals, 21.3 pounds of Golden Gages, and 22.3 pounds of Mount Royals. But as Brian pointed out, that year we weighed all the plums as soon as we picked them. A significant percentage of the harvest turned out to be unusable, either because the plums never ripened or because they'd already gone bad. This year, Brian has been weighing only the plums (or portions thereof) that he's determined to be edible. So it's entirely possible that our 36.7 pounds of edible Opal fruit meets or beats our take from 2021, and that the eventual harvest from the other two trees might do the same.
• Tomatoes. Although our new zucchini variety was a bust, the same cannot be said for our new San Marzano tomatoes. They've only given us four fruits so far, but that's more than we've managed to get this early in the season from any other paste tomato we've ever tried—and there's more on the vines where those came from. We've also harvested 17 Premio tomatoes so far, nearly double the total amount we got last summer. And as always, our trusty Sun Golds are showering us with little orange-yellow fruits—143 to date, with no sign of a slowdown.
• Cucumbers. Normally, as I mentioned, it's the zucchini that tend to sneak up on you this time of year. You turn around, and there's a massive green phallus poking out from under a leaf that you swear wasn't there at all last time you looked. But this year, it's the cucumbers that have been providing that experience for us. The Cross-Country cucumbers have only produced six medium fruits so far, but the Marketmores have provided three medium cukes and six whoppers like the one in the middle of our produce rainbow. We have two quarts of ice box pickles in the fridge right now and plenty left over for salads.
  

And that's only the crops that are at peak production right now. There are several others that are just getting started, like the green beans, peppers, and basil. And there are a few more that are past their peak but still producing, like our new Salad Bowl summer lettuce, green onions, and bush cherries. Plus, there's still the entire second crop of raspberries to come. So there should be plenty to keep our plates filled with fresh produce as summer winds down—especially with our new rain barrel now in place to keep the crops watered and happy. (Of course, it would probably help if we got a bit more serious about weeding, as well.)

Re-roll out the barrel

For most of this gardening season, our rain barrel has been out of commission. When we first hauled it out of the shed in the spring, Brian found a problem with the spigot, so we couldn't use it until we acquired a new one. Then, while he was installing that, he discovered a bigger problem: the barrel itself had a big crack right down the bottom. He tried repairing this with polyurethane aquatic sealant, but that was completely useless; it fell out as soon as it dried. Then he tried a plastic repair epoxy putty from J.B. Weld, which molded nicely into the crack but didn't stick to the body of the barrel. Finally, he tried the regular J.B. Weld epoxy, applying it to both the inside and the outside of the barrel. That worked better than the other options, but it didn't hold for long. Once the rain barrel filled up, the crack partially reopened, draining off all the water above roughly the one-quarter mark.

So, having exhausted the "repair" option, it was time to move on to "replace." And that presented us with a new problem: what was the most ecofrugal choice for a new rain barrel?

I didn't really know how much it was reasonable to pay for a rain barrel, since we'd gotten ours for free from a friend who had an extra. I checked out the selection at The Home Depot and found that for the size we wanted—about 55 gallons—prices ranged from around $40 for collapsible models made of soft plastic to over $200 for fancy wood-look models with multiple spigots. The top-rated choice was a hefty industrial drum that cost $180, but based on the picture, we couldn't figure out how we'd hook it up to our downspout. And the top seller, a utilitarian plastic bin priced at $117, made me a little wary because it looked so similar to our old one, which had cracked after 9 years of use, even though we had diligently drained it and stowed it away every winter. I was hoping for something sturdier that would serve us for decades to come.

But after scrolling a little further, I hit on something that looked ideal: a 55-gallon model upcycled from an old food storage barrel. Priced at $100 and available in three colors, it was made from a sturdy HDPE plastic that, according to the listing, "can be left outdoors even in the winter months so there is no need to modify your downspouts in the Spring and Fall." That would save us time, free up storage space in the shed, and eliminate the step of wrestling the barrel onto and off of the cinder-block pad we built for it, which is what Brian suspected had damaged the bottom of our current one. It had all the features we needed: a mosquito screen on top, a hose hookup on the bottom, and an overflow valve near the top. And the fact that it's a repurposed food container is decidedly ecofrugal.

When I consulted the reviews, I saw nothing to discourage me even in the negative ones. The most common complaint was that the spigot leaked or fell off, but that was nothing we couldn't handle, especially since we already had a whole new spigot we'd bought for our current barrel. (There was also one amusing one-star review from someone complaining that the product was "not only used but used for transporting food items"—a fact that's stated right in the product description and that, in my view, was a feature rather than a bug.)

A quick $100 PayPal payment later, our new rain barrel is on its way. We didn't even have to have it shipped to a nearby Home Depot store for pickup; having it sent directly to our home was free and actually slightly faster. 

As for the old, cracked rain barrel, Brian has a plan to put that to a new use: growing potatoes. We didn't have much success the first time we tried this using 5-gallon buckets, but Brian thinks it might work better if we plant the potatoes in a nice big barrel with plenty of room. The crack in the bottom won't be a problem, since it needs drainage holes anyway. And we won't need to worry about protecting the plants from groundhogs, since the tall, smooth-sided barrel will be too hard for them to climb. Deer may still be a problem, but Brian thinks he can deter those with a little fence of chicken wire around the top. We just need to figure out where in the yard to put the barrel for maximum potato potential.

Vegan Recipe of the Month: Plum Whip

Last Wednesday, Brian and I went to a free outdoor concert of swing music in town. We sat on our camp chairs among a crowd of our neighbors and enjoyed the music and the sporadic attention of a frisky puppy belonging to a couple seated in front of us. Brian remarked that the one thing we could use to make the experience complete was some ice cream...and once he'd said it, I couldn't stop thinking about it. All through the concert and the walk back home. I kept feeling the urge for a scoop of something cold and sweet. 

Even when we got home, I couldn't shake the craving. We didn't have ice cream or any nondairy equivalent in the house, so I started hunting through the pantry and freezer looking for something I could whip up into a reasonable substitute. When I unearthed some bags of frozen pitted plums, I recalled the time we made homemade Dole Whip from frozen pineapple and coconut milk, and I wondered if it would be feasible to do the same thing with plums instead.

We had three different kinds of plums in the freezer, from our three plum trees: Mount Royal (blue), Opal (red), and Golden Gage (yellow). We chose the Golden Gage plums for this experiment, since they were generally the sweetest. We just tossed what looked like a reasonable volume into the blender, shook up a can of full-fat coconut milk, and dumped some in on top of the plums. Then we started pulsing the blender on the "grind" setting, trying to chop up this icy mixture. By repeatedly pulsing and adding more coconut milk and pulsing again, we eventually managed it to reduce it to a smooth slurry—thicker than a milkshake but more liquid than soft-serve ice cream. All told, we used about 10 ounces of frozen plums and 3/4 cup of coconut milk, and we ended up with enough plum whip to fill two of our little IKEA cups most of the way full.

The finished product wasn't quite ice cream. It wasn't as sweet, and it had an icier, less creamy consistency. But it was cold enough and sweet enough to scratch that ice-cream itch, particularly with a generous spritz of our favorite coconut whipped cream on top. As he polished off the last of his cup, Brian remarked, "I think we'll definitely be doing this again." (Next time, he thinks he'll start by blending all the coconut milk with a small amount of the frozen plums, then gradually adding more plums until it reaches the right thickness.)

This improvised plum whip is kind of the perfect summertime treat. It's simple and tasty. It requires only two ingredients—frozen plums and canned coconut milk—both of which we typically have on hand at all times. It's reasonably healthy, made primarily from fresh fruit with no added sugar. It takes only a few minutes to make. And it's suitable for pretty much any type of diet: vegetarian, vegan, raw vegan, paleo. With only about 16 grams of carbs per serving, it would even work on the strict low-carb diet that I'm (mercifully) no longer following. And for those who don't happen to have plum trees in their front yards, it would probably work with almost any frozen fruit: strawberries, blueberries, mango, or what have you.

Homemade coffee creamer, take 2

Yesterday I noticed that I was getting toward the end of my last carton of Silk Protein, the plant-based milk I habitually use in my coffee. That was an annoyance, since replenishing it would require a special trip out to the nearest Stop & Shop for just that one item. So I started wondering whether it might be time to take another crack at making my own plant-based coffee creamer. I'd bookmarked a couple of recipes from PETA that were based on coconut milk, but I had my doubts about them; all they did to thicken the coconut milk was heat it, a method that hadn't worked at all when I tried it with soy milk. And I already knew from experience that plain coconut milk, straight out of the can, didn't come close to producing the creamy texture I was looking for.

While hunting around for other vegan creamer ideas, I happened across a couple of pages mentioning oat milk. That got me thinking about our unsuccessful experiment a few years back with making oat milk from scratch. It was okay on its own, but when heated up to make cocoa, it developed a texture similar to Elmer's Glue. But I wondered: would that still happen if I didn't heat it directly, but simply stirred it into a hot cup of coffee? And even if it did thicken up a little, might that added body be a feature rather than a bug?

There was only one way to find out, so I whipped up a quick batch in our little Magic Bullet. I used a cup of water, a quarter-cup of oats, three-quarters of a teaspoon of sugar, and a pinch of salt—roughly the same proportions that Brian uses in his homemade walnut milk. I let that mixture sit in the blender container for half an hour, blended it for about 30 seconds, then strained it twice. I put it through a regular kitchen strainer once to filter out the big chunks, then strained it a second time through some old pantyhose to remove the finer grit. It was a rather slow process and I ended up having to push the liquid around a bit with a spoon, but I was able to get out all the liquid. (Brian mixed the solid residue into the veggie cakes he was making for dinner, so it didn't go to waste.)

The next morning, I tried some of this in my coffee. I was pleased to see that it didn't turn into glue like it had with the cocoa—possibly because it wasn't as hot, or possibly because I just wasn't using as much of it. Unfortunately, I was less pleased with the taste. I dumped in three to four tablespoons of the mixture, but it didn't lighten either the color or the flavor of the coffee by much. Adding more increased the slippery mouthfeel of the brew, but it didn't do much to lessen the bitterness.

This was disappointing, but I wasn't prepared to give up altogether. I thought perhaps adding coconut to the oat milk, as suggested on my favorite vegan blog, would produce the creamy texture I was going for. But before trying that, I had to figure out what to do with the remaining oat-milk-adulterated coffee in my cup. I thought maybe diluting it a little more would help, so I tried dumping in a little of our Lidl soy milk on top of the oat milk. And to my surprise, this combination worked pretty well. Neither the oat milk nor the soy milk helped the coffee much on its own, but together, they were able to produce the creamy cafe-au-lait consistency I was looking for.

That made me wonder if I even needed to mess with the coconut. Maybe all I had to do was combine the homemade oat milk with some amount of soy milk before using it. That would probably be much cheaper than adding coconut to the oat milk, and the resulting mixture would be higher in protein. And it would stretch out one batch of the oat milk, so I wouldn't need to mix it up as often.

So, for my afternoon cup of coffee, I tried mixing the oat milk with an equal volume of soy milk and adding a generous splash of that to the java. This didn't quite do the trick; it was still too thin and too bitter. But I continued to mix in a bit more soy milk, then a bit more, until I finally got something palatable. It looks like I need to combine roughly one and a half parts soy milk to one part homemade oat milk, and then use nearly a third of a cup of the resultant mixture, to get my coffee the way I like it.

But is this more cost-effective than the Silk Protein? Well, a cup of oat milk uses a quarter-cup of oats (about 7 cents' worth), three-quarters of a teaspoon of sugar (less than 1 cent), and a pinch of salt (negligible cost). And a cup and a half of the Lidl soy milk costs about 35 cents. So that's roughly 43 cents for two and a half cups, which is seven and a half servings. That works out to a little under 6 cents per serving—less than half the cost of the Silk Protein, even if I'm using significantly more of it. It'll take a little bit of work to mix up a new batch of the oat milk every few days, but that's not nearly as inconvenient—or polluting—as having to drive to the store every time I run out of creamer.

All in all, I think this oat-and-soy mixture may be just the homemade coffee solution I've been looking for. I'll keep tinkering with the proportions over the next few days to see what works best. But if all goes well, I can cross Silk Protein—and with it, Stop & Shop—off the list of things I need in my life.

Another quick fix for an oversized waistband

I have a perennial problem finding pants that fit me. The fashion industry as a whole seems to have determined that a woman's hip measurement should be 10 inches larger than her waist, and mine is 12 inches larger. That means any pair of pants that fits over my butt is bound to be about 2 inches too big in the waist, leaving an awkward and unsightly gap.

Over the years, I've tried a variety of methods for adjusting my pants waistbands to close this gap. With lightweight pants, I can fold over a pinch of fabric along each side seam and stitch it down, as shown on in the first video on this page. (The second video shows how to add darts, which is a bit above my sewing pay grade.) And with bulkier fabrics, such as denim, I can add a piece of elastic or a drawstring to the waistband. 

But by far the simplest method I've found is a little no-sew hack I used on a pair of thrift-shop jeans back in 2015. They only needed to be taken in by about an inch, and they happened to have two belt loops roughly that distance apart on the back. So I just secured the two loops together with a wire twist tie, neatly nipping in the waist with only a minute of work.

Unfortunately, this method doesn't work if your pants don't have two conveniently placed belt loops. But I recently found myself wondering if there might be some other way to achieve the same effect. I'd already found a way to pinch in excess fabric on shirts and dresses using a cute little cinch clip, which I could transfer easily from one garment to another. But when I tried using the clip on a pair of lightweight jeans that I'd picked up at Goodwill last winter, it wouldn't stay put. The fabric was too heavy for the clip to grab hold of, so it kept slipping off.

What I needed, I thought, was some kind of clip that I could attach permanently to the pants. Something like a big hook and eye that would fit on the waistband an inch or two apart and, when fastened together, pull in that little extra bit of fabric. So on a recent trip to Princeton, I decided to pop by Joann Fabrics and see if I could find a fastener that fit that description. And lo and behold, the closures section had exactly what I was looking for: extra-large hooks and eyes, only around $4 for three sets.

Once I got these home, it was the work of a few minutes to stitch them into place, one on either side of the center belt loop. It took significantly less effort than either the side-seam method (which probably wouldn't have worked on this fabric anyway) or the hidden-elastic method. And the beauty part is, if my waist size changes, it will be equally simple to snip them off and reposition them either closer or farther apart as needed. Plus, when the jeans finally wear out, I can take them off and reuse them, making this method extra ecofrugal. (And yes, that is the same shirt in this picture as in the one from 2015. What, did you think I'd have discarded it after only eight years?)

This may not be the best alteration method for all pairs of pants., since it's not as neat or unobtrusive as the side-seam and hidden-elastic methods. But it is definitely the quickest and easiest. I'm sure I'll be using it again in future—particularly since I already have two extra sets of giant hooks and eyes in my sewing box.

Gardeners' Holidays 2023: First Fruits

For New Jersey gardeners, June marks the real start of the harvest season. In April and May, you can gather a few salad greens, along with whatever you can get from perennial crops like rhubarb and asparagus. (For us, that's "plenty" and "almost nothing," respectively.) But by the June solstice, our garden is really starting to crank it out. Our two new lettuce varieties have proved to be quite impressive producers, particularly the Marvel of Four Seasons. The three squares we planted have already yielded around 17 cups, and it shows no signs of bolting. We've harvested about 14 ounces of snap peas so far—nothing like the 79-ounce bumper crop we got in 2019, but far better than the measly 3 ounces we got last year. And we've gleaned the odd few bits of garlic scapes, parsley, and other herbs.

But the real stars of this summer's garden are the fruits. We've picked between five and six cups of raspberries so far, and there's plenty more where that came from. We've also gathered two to three cups of honeyberries—not enough for the honeyberry fool I envisioned when we first planted the bushes, but more than enough to snack on or sprinkle over salads. And we're currently experiencing an early windfall of plums—literally. 

It's pretty normal for our plum trees to start shedding fruit in June. There's just too much for their branches to hold, so they drop little green plums all over the yard whenever there's a bit of a breeze. (We even bought a special tool to help us pick them up so we don't have to crawl through the grass collecting them before they sprout.) By late June, some of the Opal plums falling off the trees are red, but they're usually too small and sour to eat. But this year, Brian tried sampling some of the fallen plums and found that parts of them, at least, were ripe enough to use. So he's been spending some time today going through the collection, cutting them up and putting the edible bits into a freezer bag. When he has enough, he plans to try making them into plum wine. He's never made any kind of wine before, so it's an experiment, but if it works, it'll make a nice alternative to putting up quarts and quarts of jam.

Which is not to say we won't be making any jam at all this year. Brian has already made one batch from our raspberries and strained half of it to make a seedless jam for the top of our anniversary cake. The remaining extra-seedy jam has gone into the fridge for us to enjoy on toast or possibly even homemade tortillas. And that only used about two cups of berries, leaving us with three and a half (and counting) for scattering on salads, muddling in drinks, or just scarfing down by the handful.

The best thing about all this produce is that it's only the beginning. Out in the garden, there's the promise of so much more to come: a narrow, pale green pepper on one of the new Banana pepper plants; green fruits forming on the tomato vines; tiny little embryos of zucchini and cucumbers; pale purple flowers on the bean plants; and an abundance of little basil seedlings. So there's plenty to look forward to as the gardening season winds on.

Recipe of the Month: Another vegan sausage attempt

Last month's vegan sausage rolls were a success in some ways. They were tasty and satisfying, and they demonstrated that it's possible to make a reasonable puff pastry with our new homemade plant butter. But as an actual sausage substitute—a vegan-friendly alternative for the grill—they didn't work at all. So this month, Brian decided to tackle another of the veggie-based sausage recipes I'd found during my online investigations. This one, from the Minimalist Baker site, seemed to have a reasonable amount of protein—about 5 grams per serving—without using tofu, tempeh, seitan, or any other "meat substitute" ingredients. That was enough of a novelty to make it worth a try.

This recipe features a combination of roasted beans, cooked quinoa, mushrooms, and chopped nuts as the base. We didn't have the pinto beans and pecans the recipe called for, so Brian subbed in the suggested alternatives, black beans and walnuts. The recipe said you could season the mixture with fresh thyme, sage, or rosemary, all of which we had in the garden; he went with sage as having the most traditional sausage flavor. Since I'm a bit of a spice wimp, he omitted the optional red pepper flakes and cut the black pepper down from a half-teaspoon to a generous pinch; he also omitted the fennel seeds, which I don't care for. However, he did include the optional pitted date, since the recipe said this serves "for binding" as well as "offsets the spice."

This turned out to be a wise decision. Even with the date included, the sausage mixture came out rather dry, and the patties formed from it didn't hold together well. If he'd made the eight largish patties the recipe called for, they might have fallen apart entirely, but instead he went for 14 smaller ones that were closer to the size he was used to for breakfast sausage. Eked out by roasted potatoes and broccoli, just two of these smaller patties made a reasonable meal for me.

Taste-wise, these were quite good. The carefully calibrated mix of seasonings—garlic, sage, smoked paprika, coconut aminos, salt, and pepper—produced an overall flavor that was remarkably sausage-like. The texture, however, was anything but. Despite being fried in a considerable amount of oil, the patties were still quite dry and crumbly. Grilling them would obviously be completely impractical, and even serving them as a stand-alone protein dish was a bit challenging. I thought maybe they'd work better topped with some sort of gravy, like the Swedish meatballs he made for me last fall. Brian's idea was that perhaps the mixture shouldn't be cooked on its own at all, but used as a filling for something like stuffed peppers or mushroom caps. It would probably work pretty well in a sausage roll, producing something much more worthy of the name than the so-called sausage rolls we made last month—but since we both liked the non-sausage filling, we'd prefer to make that recipe in its original form.

In short, this is yet another vegan sausage substitute that doesn't quite live up to its intended job. It tastes pretty good, and it might work well as an ingredient in some other recipe that calls for crumbled sausage, such as a pasta dish or an omelet. But if what you're looking for is an herbivore-friendly sausage to toss on the grill, this ain't it. I guess the search continues.