@ Your Library
It is the middle of March and that means it is time to start seeds indoors that you want to transplant into a garden bed in late May or early June. The Library has again ordered seeds to share with the community. If you would like to plant just a small garden with a few seeds of a variety of plants then the library can help. Stop by and fill out a form indicating which seeds you’d like to plant and a staff member will pull together a couple of seeds of each item selected. We are also planning to start our own starts and hopefully be able to share those as well depending on how they grow.
We can also loan grow-lights to help your plants have access to light 18 hours a day. Yesterday we had exactly 12 hours between sunrise and sunset! YEAH!
Here are some of our newest gardening books including two that were still ‘in process’ as I wrote the column. Last year we added Organic Gardening for Everyone by CaliKim which claims ‘homegrown vegetables made easy’ and ‘no experience required.’ It is very well organized and makes it easy to start the process of growing some of your own vegetables. The Healing Garden by Deb Soul of Avena Botanicals provides a guide to gardening, gathering, drying and preparing teas, tinctures and remedies with herbs for health and wellness. Lots of gorgeous photos in this book along with tips, ideas and guidelines for growing your own herbs and plants for health benefits. Our two newest gardening books are Grow More Food by Brad Halm and Colin McCrate and subtitled ‘a vegetable gardeners’ guide to getting the biggest harvest possible from a space of any size.’ I hope this one lives up to its title. And Sustainable Food Gardens by Robert Kourik with myths and solutions. I love the idea of gardening with nature by an early pioneer in edible landscaping. An older title that always makes me yearn for a garden is Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.
Until I get can outside I will have to make do with books about gardening. I went looking for fictional titles about gardens and here are the results The Perfume Garden by Kate Lord Brown is set high in the hills of Valencia in a garden that hasn’t been stepped into in almost seventy years. Rhys Bowen writes of the great war and the power of gardening in The Victory Garden. The Garden of Happy Endings by Barbara O’Neal is a novel of hope and renewal, two things gardening definitely inspires. I am looking forward to reading The Girl in the Garden by Kamala Nair, a dark, grown-up fairy tale.
Ann Ripley has written a Gardening Mystery series with four titles that sound light-hearted even with death in the titles. The Garden Tour Affair, Death of a Garden Pest, Death in the Orchid Garden and Death at the Spring Plant Sale sound interesting.