March Is a Good Time To...

...buy some long underwear on sale. I know winter's almost over. But this is when clothing sellers are most motivated to clear out their winter inventory. If you live in a cold climate, it's hard to have too much long underwear. Might as well pick some up now while it's cheap. If you know you'll be exchanging holiday gifts this year, you could pick up a set for anyone on your list. Wouldn't it be satisfying to know you got your "holiday" shopping done by March?

We just got our REI dividend and a 20% coupon in the mail. It's not a very big dividend, but some of you might have gotten bigger ones. If you have no better use for it, REI sure has some top quality skivvies. And since people go camping any time of year, REI doesn't tend to have seasonal sales on "foundation layers." So a dividend and coupon is about the best you'll get from REI on long underwear.

In my experience, silk long underwear is very warm, thin, and light, but it's extremely expensive and doesn't wear as well as some synthetic fabrics or wool blends. I don't recommend cotton long underwear unless you live in an area where long underwear is hardly needed. It's very comfortable, but doesn't provide much heat retention, and it doesn't wick moisture well at all. Get a warm fabric that will let you crank the heat down another notch next winter.

Well, that's all I got this dreary Monday. If it weren't rainy, I'd be out mucking about in the garden. Spring can't come soon enough.

The 2009 Seed & Rootstock Order

Okay, it's done. I've placed orders with seven (!) different catalogs for seeds, fruit trees, seed potatoes, asparagus roots, berry canes, and some milky spore to try to fight off the annual plague of Japanese beetles. This year we ordered from two divisions of Fedco, Seed Savers Exchange, Seeds of Change, The Maine Potato Lady, Miller Nurseries, and Arbico. I handled group orders for all of these catalogs, so that we share shipping costs and qualify for certain bulk purchasing discounts. In a few cases we are also splitting seed packets between two families. Honestly, what home gardener really needs 250 lettuce seeds of a single variety?

Wherever possible I chose organic, heirloom varieties. I also ordered several things this year with a view towards season extension using a minimum of construction. We're not going to have a greenhouse this year, nor probably next. If we're diligent we'll have a few proper coldframes built by the fall. But there are plants I can work with which can naturally provide a longer season of fresh eating straight from our garden. So here's the rundown of what I ordered, followed by a few things that I will be planting from older seeds.

N=new variety this year, N!=entirely new vegetable crop this year, i.e. I've never successfully grown any plant of this type before, L=grown last year or in previous years

Trees & Rootstock
2 Dana Hovey pears N!
1 Mesabi cherry N!
1 Stella cherry N!
2 All-American Paw Paws N!
3 Allen black raspberry N
1 Adams elderberry N!
1 Johns elderberry N!

Potatoes
2.5# German Butterball N
2.5# La Ratte L
2.5# Kennebec L
2.5# Sangre L

Asparagus
25 Jersey Supreme plants N!

Seeds
Dried bean, Cherokee Trail of Tears L
Dried bean, Hutterite Soup N
Beets, Cylindra N
Beets, Detroit Red L
Brussels sprouts, Roodnerf N!
Carrots, Red-Cored Chantenay N!
Swiss chard, Five Color Silverbeet N
Chili pepper, Poblano/Ancho L
Eggplant, Pingtung Long N!
Eggplant, Listada de Gandia N!
Leeks, Blue Solaize L
Lettuce, Red Velvet N
Lettuce, Bronze Arrowhead N
Lettuce, Slobolt L
Lettuce, Rouge d'Hiver L
Melon, Charantais N
Okra, Red Burgundy N!
Onion, Clear Dawn N
Parsnips, Turga N
Shallots, Prisma N
Spinach, Space N!
Stinging nettles N!
Tomato, Brandywine (beefsteak) L
Tomato, Cherokee Purple (beefsteak) L
Tomato, Peacevine (cherry) L
Tomato, Speckled Roman (paste) N
Winter squash, Hokkaido Stella Blue N


Seed from last year

Arugula Sylvetta
Basil, Purple Ruffles
Garlic, 6 different varieties
Kale Lacinato, aka Dinosaur or Tuscan
Pumpkin, Sugar
Sunflower, Evening Sun & Mammoth Grey Stripe
Watermelon, Moon & Stars

The garden also includes the perennial culinary herbs sage, thyme, oregano, and chives.


A few things of note about this year's garden plan. We are including three plants that we have never eaten on a regular basis before, and which we're not even entirely sure we're going to like. Brussels sprouts, stinging nettle, and okra are all new to our garden and relative strangers to our palates. We've enjoyed a European cheese with nettles in it before. These perennial nettles also come up very early in the spring, so I'm counting them among our earliest crops for the spring season for next year. They're incredibly nutritious and are also widely used to treat allergies in homeopathic medicine. I plan to make some pasta or gnocchi with them if we get a decent crop.

Brussels sprouts and okra fall into the category of things we're willing to try out, both in terms of how well we like to eat them, and how well they grow for us in our garden. I'm counting on the advantage of eating these foods in a state of absolute freshness. I've heard that both foods suffer significantly from sitting around too long after picking. Brussels sprouts will fall at the other end of my season extension plan. I'm going to try timing them so that I don't pick any until they've been through a good frost or two.

Well, when it was all toted up, we've spent a whopping $250 to mail order fruit trees, berry canes, asparagus starts, seed potatoes, and garden seeds. And that's with some bulk prices and discounts on shipping because of the group order! This (to me) is a lot of money. The trees, berry canes, and asparagus starts account for almost half the total cost. All of these are of course long term investments that I'm sure will repay the cost many times over in the coming years. I'm going to make an effort to save seed potatoes this fall as I did with the garlic. Seed potatoes are surprisingly expensive (~$30 for 10 lbs). It would make me feel much better if I could simply set aside some of this year's harvest as planting stock for next year. In our climate zone that may be difficult, but I'm going to try. For the rest, I'm going to be better about storing my seeds to preserve their viability, so that I will need to order very little for next year's garden.

If nature smiles and gives me good harvests, we should buy very little in the way of fruits or vegetables this year. We'll eat what we grow and be well satisfied with it, but for my husband's addiction to bananas. We're still eating produce we harvested over the summer out of our chest freezer. Let's hope it's a good gardening year for everyone in 2009!

What's in your garden lineup for this year?

Confession Time: What We Save For

I've mentioned before that paying off the remaining principle on our home mortgage is my primary financial goal. If you've been reading my blog for any length of time, you've probably also gotten the sense that I'm a foodie. Good food is a huge part of what makes life enjoyable for me. And as many personal finance bloggers will tell you, you have to live life too, as well as do the right thing with your money. Sometimes that means spending some money on what you love.

Frugality is often seen as penny-pinching misery and an endless parade of joyless deprivation by those who don't practice it. I would argue that frugality is all about clearly identifying your priorities in life, and then arranging your finances to best serve those priorities. In our case, we want the mortgage gone so that we have more assurance we'll be able to go on eating good food in peace well into old age. I'm not kidding. My golden visions of the future revolve around meals cooked in a home we own outright with lots of home grown, top-quality produce, and a few luxury ingredients we can't produce ourselves.

This week we made our annual daytrip into Manhattan, taking a two-hour bus ride each way. We made our gourmet rounds to Zabar's, Neuhaus Chocolates, Murray's Cheese shop, Kalustyan's spice bazaar, and visited a little pub where my husband enjoys draft beers. We also dropped a wad for an epic meal at an astonishingly good and expensive sushi restaurant. We tried to get into the Morgan Library for a dose of book fetishism, but we got there too late, so it was an all foodie day. We didn't set a price cap to this excursion. I was afraid to look at the total damage on our credit card statement, but inevitably I had to. It came to more than $450 including transportation costs (no taxi rides though). Ouch.

For that money we got many foods that we know and love well, and which are not available to us in our immediate area. The cheeses we bought were all new discoveries made in a shop that allows us to taste everything before buying. We brought home seven different varieties, and rejected as many others. From Kalustyan's we brought home cooking and baking ingredients we'll use for many months. We did pick up a few things that we'll use as stocking stuffers for family members, but mostly we shopped for ourselves.

I wanted to include an honest accounting of our trip, in the interest of self-disclosure. Frugality is important to me, and I take a lot of measures to save small amounts of money here and there every single day. If I figured out how many loads of laundry I'd have to hang to dry to save the amount we blew in one day in Manhattan, it would probably depress me. But gourmet goodies truly make us happy. This is an authentic and self-motivated pleasure for us, not something we're goaded into by marketing. And we'll appreciate our purchases as we savor them over the next several weeks and months. In my book, this was a justifiable occasional expenditure. I wouldn't do it every month, but once a year seems reasonable.

So if there's something you truly love that costs a good deal of money, don't let anyone tell you that occasionally indulging in it is incompatible with a frugal lifestyle. The key is in evaluating whether spending your money on that ephemeral indulgence balances out with a net increase in your long term happiness. A lifestyle of week-in, week-out frugality is what allows us this very occasional splurge without jeopardizing our overall major goal, which is eliminating our debt. So we are very mindful that we earned this splurge, rather than simply telling ourselves that "we deserve it" without thinking through the implications. That money might have gone to our extra principle payment next month, but our day-to-day happiness on our way to our happy golden future is important to us too. We pay our credit card balance off in full each month, so this treat will not contribute to revolving debt or cost us anything extra in interest payments.

What do you scrimp and save for?

A Frugalite "Lets go"

Yesterday I took a daytrip with my DH to NYC, something for which we'd had bus tickets for some time. I packed homemade picnic-y foods for lunch. I figured we'd eat one restaurant meal and have a great time as a planned splurge in a year of really good frugal practices. We are serious foodies, so we planned to visit Zabar's, Murray's cheese shop and some other culinary meccas.

The only food we ended up buying as convenience items to eat right away were a bottle of coke, two poppyseed bagels, some smoked salmon shmear, and two on-draught micro-brews for my beer fanatic husband. I just couldn’t see a visit to NYC without some fresh bagels for me or good beer for him. We spent somewhere around $100 on the gourmet items we brought home.

We visited the MoMa for the free Friday evening admission and paid for admission to the Frick. We decided not to eat dinner in the city and instead just head home relatively early. We were gone from 6:30 am to 10 pm.

It felt a little odd spending so freely when I normally keep such strict discipline over my purchases. I told myself that I'd only buy stuff that I had no way of finding in the much more rural area we live in. The feeling of letting go and giving myself permission to spend after living very frugally was so different from the way I used to quieten the twinge of guilt about spending by just telling myself that I deserved these things, or that I would cut back in other areas, which of course I rarely did.

I feel great about the trip. It was a planned excursion with a moderate amount of indulgence. The weather was great. We had both a birthday and anniversary this week, and this was sort of a combination celebration for both. We'll enjoy the stuff we bought for weeks to come. Yes, I wish stuff had been cheaper, or that we'd been able to comparison shop for better prices. But it really feels like we earned this fun, and that it was "all right."