How A Garden Saves You Money: Not the Way You Think, I Don't Think

Last night we had a bi-partite dinner: Mr. FS ate the remains of black bean and pumpkin soup, while I had roasted vegetables and feta with bread. Mr. FS's dinner consisted of the leftovers of a soup by Rachael Ray and others that I had long been wanting to try. It is so healthy and sounded so good. Readers, we hated it. So if you want to try it, you can search for it on the internet yourself.

The soup was an example of how pantry cooking can save you money: its main ingredients were a can of pumpkin (25 cents!) and a can of black beans (40 cents!). Both came from my overstuffed pantry.

My dinner came from the overstuffed freezer. Mr. FS has mixed success with gardening and we usually have an oversupply of two vegetables and the tragic deaths of many others. For the last two years, our summer oversupply has been of eggplant and peppers midway between mild and hot. Mr. FS--braving the heat of the oven in our oven-like climate--bakes the eggplant and peppers with some onions and--sometimes--canned tomatoes (our tomatoes are long gone by late summer). He freezes this concoction in ziplock bags and we eat it through the winter.

That's what I ate last night. My entire meal took no time to put together and it was delicious, especially since I sprinkled the bread with olive oil.

That meal was an example of how a garden can save you money. What did I mean when I added "Not the Way You Think"? Well, most efforts to deal with the gardening and frugality issue eventually come down to ascertaining the value of the vegetables you produce. Some bloggers painstakingly weigh their produce and assign it a value, based on market prices. Then they have to sadly admit that gardening does not save much money, because all that work, not to mention money for seeds and other stuff, doesn't really pay a decent "hourly wage."

I measure the value in another way. In addition to the frozen concoction, we have lots of greens in the winter. Right now, we have chard and kale. I seldom buy vegetables in the grocery store. I plan my meals around what I have.

The concoction lends itself to many cuisines. Plain, it is a ratatouille; with feta, it becomes Greek; with coconut milk and curry paste it becomes Thai; with soy sauce, sesame oil, etc, it becomes Asian. For the Thai and Asian versions, you can add shrimp or chicken or whatever. You can add sausage and make a pasta sauce. You can make it Indian and serve with dal (NOT cooked in your rice cooker).

As for the greens: eat braised with whatever; eat braised at room temp with lemon (from our tree!); add to soups of all nations; put in stir-fry, and so forth.

Need I say that we don't get tired of our vegetables: how could we?

As for saving money, I have long spent only around $50.00 a week on food. Now that my children are elsewhere, I have to admit the amount is too high. My cupboards are overstuffed, as is my freezer. A while back I decided to limit myself to around $25.00/week for food to force me to use up my oversupply. I'm at around 10 weeks and I still have a lot left.

People marvel at my grocery budget. The "secret" is three-fold: stock up on staples when prices are low; eat what you have; and learn how to cook.

I think, then, that my garden saves money, not because we end up with $XX.XX worth of kale, but because we use the kale and don't buy other produce. The proof is in what we spend, not in what we save.

And, of course, not driving to the store very much saves on gas. More green(s)!

Leaving you, dear Readers, with some famous lines from a famous poem about "that happy garden state":



Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness :
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find ;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas ;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.

For the rest of the poem, check out the wonderful Luminarium.

Frugality 101: What I'm Wearing and What My Lemon Tree is Wearing

No pics, because I look ridiculous.

It's so cold. This might be expected in Minnesota, but seems totally unfair in the DEEP SOUTH. In truth, we often have cold, damp winters. When we moved into our old house, we heard that the previous owners had just spent a week in a motel because the house was so drafty. So Mr. FS insulated as best he could.

Still, it's a cold house, partly because of our 12 foot ceilings and many windows. Here is my outfit.
Feet: sheepskin-lined fitflops (Found NEW at Goodwill!!).
Bottom: Eileen Fisher long wool skirt. (Also from Goodwill. My daughter says I am NOT allowed to wear long skirts in public. This is working well in private.)
Top: The piece de resistance. Pieces would be more accurate. Regular old tee shirt topped with toasty wool sweater (Brooks Brothers, via Goodwill) topped with great Dale of Norway cardigan (I LOVE these sweaters and figure the Norwegians know about cold winters. Also from Goodwill)topped with a down vest (from Banana Republic, the actual store).

By the way, Frugality 101 involves anticipating your needs. So all the Goodwill items were purchased last summer. There is little competition for the warm and toasty then.

Oh yeah, the tree. The tree is decked out in a mover's blanket, with some kind of light bulb. We picked about a zillion lemons yesterday, which we will share with people when we return to school. Frugal Son made some lemon bars, which he will share with friends.

Another Frugality 101 tip: Be nice to people with lemon trees.

What do you wear when it's cold inside?

Clerodendrum Speciossisimum: the Frugal Gardener’s Pal

A double gift for me from Mr. FS: a post and something floral. Thanks so much. Just what I wanted.


By Mr. FS



I grew up in Pasadena California, which, as you can imagine, has a very different climate than Louisiana. For one thing, here we get about 60 inches of rain a year; Pasadena got about 20 in a good year. But when we moved to Louisiana I hadn’t done much gardening, and for the first few years I’d order plants from catalogs, choosing whatever looked best or sounded most interesting. Zones? I ignored them. I don’t think any of these plants survived for more than one season.

Now I have a different and much simpler philosophy: if it doesn’t both grow and reproduce with minimal care it doesn’t belong in my garden. Zones can be a rough guideline to survival, but there are so many “microclimates” that even this isn’t sure fire. The easiest way to decide what thrives is to look around at local gardens, especially ones that are a bit “wild.”

Let me introduce you to my favorite plant. I’ve never seen it offered in a nursery around here, but it’s spectacularly prolific and over the years has brought at least a score (an underestimate) of questions and comments from passers-by. This plant grew in one neglected spot near the fence of a neighbor’s yard, and I’d always much admired its large tropical heart-shaped leaves and huge panicles of red flowers that lasted literally for months. One day I snipped some cuttings overhanging the sidewalk and got them to root without too much difficulty.

And that was the beginning of a long and satisfying relationship with clerodendrum speciossimum (or clerodendrum paniculatum), AKA: giant salvia, pagoda flower, java shrub, Javanese glorybower. It was actually a year or so before I found a description of it in Charlotte Seidenberg’s The New Orleans Garden and could finally give my new best friend a name. (Seidenberg mentions she first saw the plant in an old garden in my home town of Covington.) This plant is nearly impervious to pests (and we have plenty down here), reproduces from seed and root (and even fragments of roots), and grows in sun and shade. If I’m working in the garden and some passerby begins “I just wanted to know what that plant . . . .” I don’t have to wait for the end of the sentence. It’s the clerodendrum. Over the years I’ve given away dozens of plants and roots.

So a frugal person’s garden is inexpensive to start, inexpensive to expand, and inexpensive to maintain, although this is a lesson I had to learn by wasting money on plants that didn’t grow. And the best way to meet these requirements is to let your garden be itself and to say goodbye to exotic flora. You and your garden will be much happier. What is your favorite plant?

By the way (Dear Readers, as Ms FS would say), does anyone know how far north the clerodendrum speciossimum thrives? I haven’t seen it in many other gardens, even around here. That’s a real mystery to me, especially since the plant evokes such passionate interest from everyone who sees it. The websites I’ve looked at say it doesn’t do well above zone 9, but we’re zone 8, and it does fabulously well (and apparently flourishes as a house plant as well--I’ll have to try that.) It’s true that it dies back in the winter, but always comes back from the root, and is indeed a bit invasive, though easy to keep under control. The photo (taken May 1st)is of the first plant to flower; it grows right against the south side of the house and so gets lots of sun and heat.

Work Clothes Revisited

By Mr. Dr. Frugal Scholar.

I was amazed and honored by how many people found it worth responding to my humble meditation on an equally humble topic. I was going to answer the various comments individually, but I realized that with my tendency toward prolixity (an occupational hazard, I suppose), I’d better just give in and offer a collective response here.

First: the Duchesse raises the issue of smell—a delicate issue indeed. There is a distinction between something that smells (perfume, sirloin steak), and something that stinks (you supply the examples). Now, what is on my work pants is soil, not dirt. My pants are soil-y rather than dirty, and if one enjoys the rich smell of loam then perhaps it is not entirely sophistical to argue that my pants have their own earthy perfume.

I admit this is a stretch, and is somewhat compromised by the Duchesse’s observation that the soil is probably mixed with sweat, though most of this is absorbed by my shirt (changed regularly), which is tucked into my pants and which, along with my underwear (also changed regularly), forms a prophylactic (that word again!) barrier against the sweat. I also hang the pants in the sun after each use, which seems to kill most of the odor.

However, all of this may seem empty conjecture; what I need is some hard, scientific, experimental evidence. For this, I enlisted the sensitive nose of the Divine Miss Em, who is not only a connoisseur of scents but is also quite willing to express her unedited opinions. So I watched with bated breath as she brought her nose closer and closer to the soil-iest part of my work pants until it was a scant ¼ inch away. “Papa,” she said, her face lighting up in a beatific smile, “it hardly smells at all! It just smells a little like soil!” I kid you not . . . . although her smile might not have been beatific, and she might have said “dirt” rather than “soil,” not being as sensitive to the political connotations of these words as I am.

Flushed with victory, I ran to find Dr. F.S. and asked her to confirm the Divine Miss Em’s judgment. I regret to say that Dr. F.S.’s response strayed considerably beyond the bounds of polite discourse, and included certain gestures and phrases that cannot be mentioned in a family-oriented blog such as this. Of course having someone thrust a foul-looking garment in your face as you are trying to grade papers is itself probably a breach of some rule of decorum (I’m not up on all the fine points, so I can’t say for sure). In any case, I think Miss Em’s testimony is enough: minimal smell, and no stink.

And even if it did stink, no one in her or his right mind would come within ten feet of someone who looks like I do when I’m gardening, unless it’s a fellow fanatic who understands the visual vocabulary, and knows that the soil-encrusted lunatic brandishing a hoe is actually a gentle cultivator of the earth.

Second (sorry for the long first): while it may be harder to wash clothes that have had soil ground into them for months, washing is optional. My pants are the lowest of the low, have done honorable service in various capacities for years, and after weeks or months of garden duty often go directly into retirement (the garbage can). If I do wash them, I first give them a good hosing down outside, which gets rid of the heavy incrustations. And since I’m not going to wear them only for more gardening, any stains that remain after laundering I think of as marks of a long and worthy career.

Third: the slippery slope (similar to the old domino theory): unwashed garden clothes lead inevitably to an unwashed life. I think that in fact my gardening clothes work as a sort of safety valve, allowing me to indulge my primitive needs in an acceptable way. In this sense, my cruddy old clothes become the guardian of civilization; they allow me to be a happy citizen and sweet-smelling spouse without the slightest chance of going postal.

Fourth: gender. I always thought that men, more often than women, would wear clothes (even non-gardening clothes) until they glowed in the dark. Certainly Frugal Son seems to confirm this view, which would make men genetically (or culturally) more frugal than women. So I was very pleased to hear Chance, Vicky, and Reggie Girl say it’s not a gender thing at all, that there’s a sort of fraternity (and sorority) of the unwashed out there that I can lean on when the going gets rough. Thanks to you all ( or y’all, as we say down here) for the support and encouragement!

Here's our old friend again, after several more muddy days' use, and in the condition that the Divine Miss Em, in the spirit of objective inquiry, investigated with her sensitive nose. But I think retirement looms.

Frugal Fanatics: Is There Any Limit for Work Pants?

By Mr. Dr. Frugal Scholar.

Dr. F.S. is taking a well-deserved break, so she said I could post one of my marginally helpful musings on frugality.

Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether I have gone over the line from frugality to psychopathology. And it doesn’t help that so many others are eager to vote for the latter, even my beloved frugal spouse, who thinks that some of my habits and routines are immoderate. But frugality is not just about saving money, it’s also a sort of mental discipline: Zen frugality.

Case in point: my work clothes. My work clothes belong to the lowest of complicated clothing cast system, and are generally culled from the third and final tier of my “general house and lounge-about” attire (not to be confused with my “go to your average store” attire). Work pants, I think we can agree, are for working, and as such I see no point in washing them—at least not until they can stand up by themselves.

Here’s my argument: when I garden, or do any other sweaty, grubby work, the pants get dirty. If I put on a new clean pair the next time I go out, they too are going to get dirty each and every time. However, pants that are already dirty will stay relatively clean—relative, that is, to their initial condition. So what’s the point of wasting time, water, electricity, and effort to wash work clothes after one, two, or more wearings when re-use contributes to the cosmic cleanliness quotient? (I just made that phrase up.) When I garden, I am the king and only subject of my domain: it’s not as if I’m going to an important meeting or can offend anyone but myself. And once I put my old clothes on they feel just fine, however disreputable they may look. And I don’t see how one can object that used work clothes are danger to one’s health. (Paradoxically, donning such clothing might even promote good health, since, as medical researchers have found, keeping children too clean prevents them from developing antibodies, and I don’t see why the same should not apply to adults.)

I have to admit that I like putting on my used clothes. As my friend Henry David Thoreau says in Walden, “Every day our garments become more assimilated to ourselves, receiving the impress of the wearer's character, until we hesitate to lay them aside without such delay and medical appliances and some such solemnity even as our bodies.” (Sometimes, after a few weeks of hard use, it does seem as I’ll need medical appliances to get them on—and off.)

So am I a fanatic? I think not, since I’m not only saving myself time and money, but I’m helping to save the world as well. An overstatement? Perhaps, but I’ve done some quick calculations, which demonstrate conclusively that if everyone reused work clothes the way I do we would save enough energy to light Tickfaw, Louisiana for 625 days. So why not be the Mother Teresa of your garden as well?

Bonus test. See if you can put the following photos in sequence. One is of my work pants after two wearings, one after ten wearings, and one after another 15 hours of very hard use (spring work: on my knees weeding and digging and grubbing happily around).








Answer (I know this part should be upside down): the first is after two wearings, the second is last, and the third is the middle. (Pretty sneaky, hunh?!) So how much longer do you think I can keep going?

Frugal Food: What Would an Italian Peasant Do?

Thanks for your patience, Dear Readers. I am not quite "up to snuff," as my beloved dissertation director used to say, but I'll give this a try.

One reason I didn't want to write anything yesterday was because I was saving my strength for the 12 hour day I knew was ahead of me. In addition to my classes, I had to put in appearances at various events with a visiting writer: lectures, lunch, readings, presentations, ending with a pot luck at the home of my Department Head (to be known as DH in future mentions for reasons obvious to anyone who knows him).

As it turned out, the day was a delight. The writer, Richard Ford, was charming, and spent a lot of time with students, gracefully answering questions he must have been asked a million times (Did you feel you had to leave the South? Are your stories based on your life? What are your sources of inspiration?). The reading of the story Optimists was quite moving, and left me teary-eyed.

And, as for the pot luck dinner: we brought braised greens from our garden. Served room temperature with olive oil and lemon. This turned out to be a good choice because no one else brought veggies, aside from a salad left over from the lunch, and one of those vegetable trays with dip that you pick up at the grocery.

Of course, we were also motivated by the fact that we still have tons of greens in the garden and will have to pull them up soon. Plus we wanted to make something ahead that could be transported to school, hang out in the fridge for 12 hours, and be served without any further prep.

We have been eating greens without cease for the last few weeks. Except for one bunch of broccoli that I purchased in a moment of weakness, I have bought no other vegetable. Even with giving away bags of greens and offering some to various dog walkers who stroll by, we may still have to mulch some.

Some people are shocked by the fact that my vegetables have been lacking in variety. Tonight, after a rich dinner last night, we had potatoes with caramelized onions and--yes--greens! I am comforted by a vision from Under the Tuscan Sun. I must say that I absolutely detested that book, which seemed to me more about self-indulgence and shopping than anything else. But I seem to recall an encounter between the author and an old woman picking wild greens on the author's property. The old woman is my role model here. She probably ate greens every day too.

When I was engaged in a previous frugal enterprise that came to naught (reviewing the thrift stores of New Orleans--Katrina put an end to that project), I read a book that my then-partner suggested. It was about dressing from consignment shops. The author warned against the common problem of acquiring too much stuff because it was so cheap. She urged her readers to dress like a French person. The gist was that French women don't try to look different every day, they try to look good every day. Americans, as most of us know, have the opposite philosophy.

So I say, we don't have to eat different vegetables every day. We just have to eat good vegetables every day! Eat like an Italian peasant.

Any thoughts, Dear Readers?

Frugal Gardening: World’s Cheapest Greenhouse

Even in Louisiana it gets cold in the winter, and it’s useful to have some sort of greenhouse or cold frame to keep those tender plants going through cold spells, or to start seedlings in the very early spring.

I’m not sure if I invented this, but I have no doubt it’s the least expensive and most versatile greenhouse you can make in under fifteen minutes. It doesn’t win lots of points for beauty, but for just a few bucks what do you expect?

Materials and construction are incredibly simple. Buy some ten foot lengths of white pvc pipe (you will need a minimum of three, and the smaller the diameters are more flexible) and some fairly heavy-duty plastic (6 mil in a 10 foot width). Shove the pvc pipes into the ground where you want to situate the greenhouse and bend them into an arc. All you need to do now is drape the plastic over this structure. Voila! Total cost: about $12 max.

To keep the plastic from blowing off, you can weight the ends down with bricks, stones, or dirt. This is by far the simplest method, but I prefer to staple some scrap wood to the end of the plastic. This allows me to roll up unused portions of the sheet (like a toilet paper roll), and it’s just a bit neater.

One of the great advantages of this greenhouse is that it is infinitely adaptable and portable. Just shove the pvc pipes wherever they are needed, when they are needed, and move as required from one spot to another. And it’s easy to store in the summer.

In a fit of ambition, I once made a frame out of two-by-fours, with holes into which I insert the pipes, because I wanted something that seemed more permanent and symmetrical. But I wouldn’t bother: it isn’t necessary and limits you to the size of the frame.

The plastic will last for a couple of seasons, but eventually will have to be replaced. Not a big deal. The plastic alone won’t keep your tender plants safe if it gets really cold, but when that happens I put some movers’ blankets over the plastic, and run an extension cord out to power a 100 watt bulb that I hang inside the structure. Since most of an incandescent bulb’s power goes to producing heat, a 100 watt bulb will keep this small greenhouse quite toasty at night for just a few pennies, and actually looks very cool! Think of it as a night light for your garden.

I’ve also made cold frames out of discarded shower doors. About ten or fifteen years ago tempered glass shower doors apparently became passé, and I picked up a half-dozen from various the neighbors’ garbage. This also works fairly well, especially for starting seeds and for small plants, but there isn’t as much head room as there is with the pvc-greenhouse, which, depending on how you place the pipe, can offer quite a bit of space--plenty to allow you to crawl around inside if you are so inclined.

Here’s the basic structure, shown to illustrate its absurd simplicity. Note again that it doesn’t win any beauty contests, but is perfect for the lazy gardener like me.


Oh, so you don’t think I need a greenhouse in Louisiana? Check this out: a very, very rare snowstorm on December 11, 2008. The last one I can remember was about 16 years ago. The then-two-year-old Miss Divine Em was so upset by that strange meteorological phenomenon that she started to cry. (Note I didn't check the weather, so the plastic isn't even in place!)



But I guarantee that you will shed no tears over the cost of this greenhouse.

Frugal Garden Art

(By Mr. Dr. Frugal Scholar)
My mother was committed gardener, and after her children left home she gradually converted most of our small front yard (the only place with sun) into a fabulous cactus garden. (You can see photos of the garden at its prime in Desert Gardens, text by Gary Lyons, and photographs by Melva Levick [NY: Rizzoli International Publications, 2000]])

Louisiana, of course, is very different from California in all sorts of ways. It is not, for example a good place to go surfing or grow cactuses. I discovered the latter when, at the age of eight or nine, our son developed a keen interest in cactuses and we began buying one every month or so—the kinds in teeny-weeny pots that cost about a dollar or two. When a few outgrew their pots I tried planting them in a raised bed--specially prepared and exceptionally well-drained--but after a few months they began to rot. Too much humidity, too much moisture.
Eventually I built a long, narrow planter to put on the front porch. I filled it with a mixture of compost, sand, perllite, and vermiculite. This became our own little memorial cactus garden, and it has flourished (slowly) for the past decade and more. Since the planter is sheltered I don’t have to worry about too much rain and they get enough sun. I eventually built another planter and the two extend almost the entire length of the south side of our L-shaped front porch.


These cactus gardens have also proven the perfect place for all those beautiful little objects that you can’t throw away, but know won’t be taken at Goodwill: marbles, little plastic fish the kids played with in the bathtub toy cars, seashells, rock collection, dolls, Mardi Gras doubloons, etc. If it’s small and interesting (or has sentimental value), and I can’t part with it, out it goes into the cactus garden. It’s become a sort of magical space, the sort of place that, when I was young, I could have invented stories about all day. Some of the objects are a bit scary—the diminutive blond-haired doll stuck to the side of a cactus, the hologram of a human brain, now thankfully faded--but most seem just fragments of some other, perhaps better, world. I like to think that some child will eventually stumble on the fragments of this world and try to put them together again, as I would have done when I was under ten. And I’d gladly let her take a memento.


So if you have any little things—anything, really, from marbles to scissors to old doorknobs--just make a little temporary alternative universe.

At some point I’ll write about the lattice-work fence to which I wire the larger objects (often our children’s old art projects) that won’t fit in the memorial cactus garden.

How to Pay For Your Entire Life by Mowing Your Lawn

(by Mr. Dr. Frugal Scholar)

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, my mother learned how to cut hair. My brother and I were her guinea pigs, and even though we had crew cuts in those days—what seemed to be a very simple enterprise—my mother managed to do considerable damage her first few times. But eventually she became quite the expert. She cut her children’s hair until they left home (and even after), and my father’s until she died in 2003.

The consequence of this was that she saved enough to pay for almost everything we bought. If, for example, we bought a new television, she would comment that it had been more than paid for by all the years of hair cutting. Ditto a painting, a vacation, a dinner out. There were a few limits; hair cutting didn’t pay for my college tuition, although it paid for a lot of the extras.

I have been faithful to this lesson in my own life. In fact, I cut my own hair (more about this another time), but more importantly, I cut our lawn.

Most of the people in our neighborhood use a lawn service (the “mow/blow/go” crowd that my sister-in-law, a dedicated gardener, so despises). But this doesn’t come cheap—I priced it once and for us it would be $40 to $50 a pop. Figure that it’s a weekly expense for at least 45 weeks a year (in Louisiana), and that’s $1,800 minimum. One thousand, eight hundred dollars! Just for mowing the lawn! This doesn’t count any real gardening, the work that makes a yard look good--I can’t imagine what that would add up to.

A basic mulching mower costs about $225; gas about $12 for the season. Throw in a string trimmer for another $200 and it’s still only $425. Subtract that from $1,800 and there’s enough for a round-trip ticket to Paris and three or four nights in the Hotel Saint-Andre des Arts (great location; cool building; no elevator or air conditioning). And that’s just one year! If you’re creative, like my mother, you can use it to pay for your entire life. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Frugal Gardener: Compost 2 (Compost Wars)

Compost Wars

In my last post I wrote about the growing competition in my neighborhood for pre-bagged garden waste, especially the top-end stuff: leaves, grass, and pine needles. To most people all those plastic bags by the curb probably just look like more work for the waste management people, but to the frugal gardener each one holds the possibility of being pure compost gold. I mentioned that, in general, we’re a friendly bunch of competitors. I’m sure that if I’d hailed that elegant gentleman in his Lexus who was appropriating “my” leaves from the neighbor’s parkway he would have quietly withdrawn from my turf. No hard feelings.

Maybe there’s something about leaves, grass, and needles that inspires camaraderie rather than serious competition. Of course we’re being virtuous as well as frugal, and that creates a feeling of self-congratulatory solidarity.

But whatever it is about curbside compost that makes everyone soft and fuzzy doesn’t translate to coffee grounds (a great soil addition). Maybe it’s the residual caffeine, but in my experience coffee grounds are grounds for conflict. Let me explain.

Many years ago we had an office coffee machine, and since consumption was ferocious (this is Louisiana, after all) we would go through several pounds of Community Dark Roast with Chicory every week (with some CDM—Café du Monde—thrown in occasionally for variety). This, of course, produced a hefty amount of grounds, and as a frugal gardener I couldn’t stand to let it all go to waste. So one day I brought in a container and taped a note behind the coffee pot asking for drinkers please to dump the used grounds in the container.

This worked beautifully for a while, and I took home a plastic bucket of rich brown leftovers for my garden every week.

Then came the mutterings of discontent: Why should I get all the grounds? Shouldn’t everyone have a chance? After all, it isn’t every day, or every week, that one gets a chance to take home a nice big bucket of coffee grounds for the garden! It was clearly an issue of great importance. The wife of one colleague finally moved from muttering to action, and put another bucket next to mine, and another note behind the coffee pot, asking that drinkers distribute the grounds evenly between the two.

Until that point I had been pretty complacent. But even if this wasn’t war, it was a definite challenge, and I decided to outflank the competition. I went to the food services people and asked if I could collect their coffee grounds; I’d even supply the containers, I told them. I was sure I’d hit the mother lode.

I wish I could tell you that this was the beginning of a frugal composting empire, but it wasn’t. Bureaucracies make everything difficult—even recycling coffee grounds—and apparently there were health codes to take into account, and the problem of where to keep the bucket . . . and on and on. For a while I shared the grounds with my colleague’s wife, and then for some reason—I can’t recall now—the communal coffee pot disappeared, eliminating the occasion for further intradepartmental conflict.

There is a lesson here. The best way (as Tom Sawyer knew) to get others interested in something is to show (or feign) your interest in it first. If you want people to recycle leaves or coffee grounds, pretend they’re the most valuable commodity around. So even though I lost some compost, I feel that in some small way I may have helped inspire others to become frugal gardeners and environmentalists. I may have gone down a rung on the ladder of material gain, but have ascended several on the ladder of moral value, and I will not hesitate to claim credit for reducing landfills and energy consumption, improving general cardiovascular health (it’s hard work lifting those bags and tilling in those grounds), and promoting the great American values of entrepreneurship and competition

So go out there and collect those grounds. Just not on my turf.

Frugal Gardener: Compost 1

Frugal Gardener: Compost 1

A contribution from my dear husband, also a scholar, lover of Proust and Emerson, cyclist and gardener. AND he does all the dishes, thanks to the training of his mother.



You would think that the soil of Southern Louisiana would be rich and fertile. But it’s not—or at least not where we live—and if I want to anything to grow I have to add lots of organic matter. During the first few years after we moved into our house I actually paid for loads of pine bark and manure. Then I wised up: there was lots of organic material all bundled up and just waiting for me. I’m talking about the organic garden waste that my neighbors so kindly package and put by the street.

Of course there is garden waste and garden waste, and it takes an experienced eye and an experienced foot (more about this in a later post) to distinguish between the deliciously compact and hefty bag of mower-mulched leaves and grass, and the asymmetrical and disappointingly light bag of miscellaneous sticks and branches. But a good bag of leaves and grass makes, after a bit of judicious aging, a wonderful addition to one’s garden.

And therein lies the rub.

When I began my compost foraging I had the streets to myself. I’d scout the neighborhood, note the promising locations, and then go out at night, before bed, when I didn’t have to worry about holding up traffic, and load the bags into the trunk and back seat of our Camry. (I put a mover’s blanket on the seat to keep it clean.) Then drive home, toss the bags someplace for later distribution, and go out for another load. The only minor crisis I had in the early days was late one Sunday night when a police officer saw me on my rounds and rightly thought I looked a bit suspicious. I had a hard time convincing him that I wasn’t trying to cover for some more nefarious activity, but he finally let me go. (He did follow me home to verify my improbable story.)

And then I began to notice that some of the especially good pickings would disappear before I could get to them. Sometimes I’d see them in the afternoon, waiting calmly for my later visit, and in the evening they would be gone. Competition! We have a friend who is also a compost bandit, but he insisted he was limiting his forays to his own neighborhood, and in any case preferred pine needles, whereas I leaned toward a nice leaves/grass mixture.

One afternoon I was distributing some of my composted leaves when the mail carrier stopped to compliment me on my garden. “Hey,” he said. “You can get some great bags of leaves around here. There’s one place on 15th—they have great stuff!! I just got five great bags last night.” Wait! That’s my place! And he had a pickup truck he used to gather the loot—much easier and faster than a Camry.

Just the other day I saw a dignified middle-aged man in his Lexus (I am middle-aged and undignified, and my Camry is ten years old) open his trunk and fill it with my neighbor’s three bags—unquestionably my territory.

So the golden age is over. Now I have to scramble to get my leaves. But I don’t mind: there’s still plenty to go around, and it makes my frugal green heart sing to see all of that wonderful organic matter going into gardens rather than landfills. Those who are frugal by conviction love to spread the word. So go out tonight and get your own bags of compost. You’ll be doing yourself, your garden, the waste-management people, and the environment a service.

Just prepare a story for the police officer.