Episode 801: Library Gardens

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Welcome to Season Eight of Linking Our Libraries! We are so happy to have you with us this season!

We are the Central Minnesota Libraries Exchange. Our members are libraries of all sorts: public, schools, academics, special libraries, archives, and history centers. Join us in working thorough skills library staffers can use to be more successful in their work!

This week we are going to take a trip to the past, and update one of our episodes from Season One: Library Gardens. It’s cold and snowy outside, but it’s never too soon to start thinking about setting up your garden. Join us in dreaming about warmer weather, fresh flowers and vegetables, and all sorts of fun library activities!

The Basics:

Libraries increasingly include gardening in their programming, or just as an activity for staff to do with some help from patrons. As more research is done on the physical and psychological benefits of gardening and spending time in nature, more people are turning to their gardens. And of course, during the early stages of our pandemic, many people worked on gardens and gathered seeds to start a hobby and to have the possibility of fresh food.

Libraries are part of all of this! There are as many different possibilities for gardens as there are libraries. Here are just a few types of gardens that already exist in libraries:

  • Container gardens
  • Demonstration gardens, with Master Gardeners in residence
  • Seed collections
  • Community gardens
  • Vegetable gardens, with donations to local shelters and food banks
  • Rooftop gardens
  • Arboretum of trees
  • Aquaponics program

There are so many great garden programs in libraries of all types! But an incredibly frustrating aspect of library gardening is that so few libraries add their gardens to their websites.This seems like such an easy thing to promote – and an easy way to put up a few nice photos to make the website more cheerful, while sharing a very cool program. But while it’s easy to find all kinds of articles filled with brief mentions of library garden projects, it is harder to find information about the gardens from the libraries themselves. (Refer back to our episode 606 on Marketing your library, so you can avoid this mistake!)

And a few libraries are even branching out beyond plants, flowers, and trees to set up beehives! The BoulderPublic Library has a hive, and has given it a lot of thought to keep bees and people safe from each other. (And to keep both safe from bears!) The Niskayuna (N.Y.) High School has a hive. “The media center, with its large windows overlooking an enclosed courtyard, is a prime location for students to watch bees exit and enter the hive through the pipe that connects the hive to the outdoors. And it’s a hub of activity at the school.”

Community gardening

Not everyone is able to garden where they live, due to space limitations or other issues. And some people just enjoy gardening with others. Whatever the reason, a community garden at the library can be a wonderful ongoing program for everyone! The Schreiber Public Library has a community garden they call the Little Sprouts Community Garden.

“Community gardening allows community members to learn and share gardening skills, meet new people and reduce food costs in their homes.” 

The Pottsboro, Texas public library has an active community garden. “The community garden mission is to strengthen community while reinforcing the library as an important anchor institution; enable the cultivation and consumption of wholesome, homegrown food; provide an environment for hands-on education in gardening; provide educational resources, foster an intergenerational gardening experience; and enhance the beauty of neighborhood green space.”

Food

There are other libraries that have designed vegetable gardens. These can be grown and worked by library staff, or by community members. The libraries that have these gardens then often donate the produce to kids who worked in the garden, or to local food banks.

The public library in Orlando, Florida has had good luck with their garden. “Although patrons have full access to the plants, they have never been picked, poked, or vandalized in any way. This is the third year of our garden. We have grown strawberries, potatoes, carrots, assorted herbs, beans, peas, and peppers. The children in my environmental club care for the plants and are rewarded by harvesting the vegetables and herbs.”

The public library in Shreveport, Louisiana grows food with local people in mind. “This is the second year that we have had a community garden and have planted and harvested crops throughout the entire year, with a focus on introducing new vegetables and fruit to the community. This program was devised with the entire family in mind and has yielded great fruit.”

Helping kids, and people of all ages, to get more acquainted with veggies of all types is a good goal for any garden. “Pizza, salsa, or salad gardens—in which ingredients for those dishes are grown, harvested, and prepared at the end of summer—are popular programs. “I’ve seen a kid pick up a piece of raw kale, eat it, and pronounce it delicious,” says Karen McIntyre, a librarian at the Westmeade Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee.”

Indoor gardens

You can set up a lot of different kinds of gardens inside a library. This might be useful for libraries without a lot of outdoor space, or libraries in places – like Minnesota – that have a lot of cold weather. 

Setting up container gardens is an obvious, and easy, strategy for hosting indoor gardens. Giving kids cups, dirt, and a few seeds, then letting them do some planting – either to stay in the library or to take home – is a fun way to let kids get started on some gardening projects. And don’t forget about adults! Many of us like gardening cups and seeds too!

Some libraries have plants in pots around the library, and kids can be responsible for watering them, and harvesting any herbs or flowers being grown there. Building other small containers in the library is not too hard, and you can find a lot of information and ideas for both building and decorating them.

And there are a few libraries that have really gone the extra mile with their gardens, to make aquaponic systems! One of our members: Talahi Elementary School, started an aquaponic garden a couple of years ago. “Fourth-grade students Talahi Community Elementary School are harvesting plants from their aquaponic systems. Many were surprised at how good the food tastes. They also labeled and recorded parts of a plant. Now they’re conducting an experiment on how water travels in plants.” (If you follow the link in our shownotes page, you can see pictures of the kids and garden!)

“At the Cranbury School in Cranbury, New Jersey, media specialist Kelly Fusco started an aquaponics program in the cafeteria. A large tank houses goldfish, while mint, basil, and bell peppers grow in a mixture of rocks and water. These plants, along with strawberries grown in small pots, get nutrients from fish waste, and the system is replenished with rain water. First- and fourth-graders work together to feed the fish and monitor the plants.”

The public library in Gwinnett County, Georgia set up tower gardens. And these towers of veggies growing in the library has helped connected them to the community in new ways. “When Wilson and her team started conducting research on Tower Gardens—self-sustaining, aeroponic gardens that grow vertically using water and minerals to feed the plant—they discovered that there was much more need in the community than they had thought. “One of the things we found when we were conducting research ahead of our grant application is that Gwinnett County has a lot of food deserts,” said Charles Pace, Executive Director of GCPL. “There is a lack of good nutrition education and a high rate of obesity. Knowing that, we saw these towers as educational tools aimed at all ages to solve some of these health issues the county was facing.””

Gardening with kids

Gardening is a fun program in any library, and many libraries work with kids to produce all kinds of activities. Libraries can grow a wide variety of different things, they can incorporate books and reading activities, and they give kids some fun digging and other physical work to do.

The public library in Elkhorn, Wisconsin is working with local schools to make their library garden interesting. “It is a collaborative project with the Elkhorn Area School District and Parent Connections Programs. We started this summer with three pizza gardens (tomatoes, peppers and basil) and with pumpkins.”

In Alameda, California, the library works with a local Girl Scout troop. “The front of the library has been re-landscaped with drought-tolerant plants and a new bubbler (water-saving) system. Girl scouts helped with a landscape plant proposal and worked side by side with city workers on planting and irrigation system. The Fremont City Park Superintendent invited the troop to be part of this year’s Arbor Day declaration and tree planting.”

The public library in Frederick County, Maryland has gardens to help kids learn about vegetables and gardens. “We have three beds that we maintain: a corn and carrot bed, an herb bed, and a flower and veggie bed. The children came in May to help us plant the seeds and make signs to mark the dirt. They come every other Monday to help weed, water, and harvest. We start all of the programs with a garden-related book, an explanation of what’s growing, and a short tutorial on how we weed and harvest the garden. Once we weed and/or harvest, we let them water the garden. The program is designed for those aged three and up, so it’s not perfect. There are some carrots growing really close to the corn, but it’s grown very well this year, and the kids have been having a blast helping us with it.”

Setting up your library garden

We have talked about a lot of different strategies to use in setting up a library garden. And we have a few suggestions you can use to set up your own library garden!

  • Talk to your staff about their interest in a garden of any sort. If you don’t have buy-in at this level, it will be harder.
  • Think about how a garden would fit into your overall mission. It’s always fun to try a new thing, but a garden will require a lot of time and energy. If you get started, you want to be able to push it forward.
  • Talk to your community members about gardens. Do you have any enthusiasts? If you can find some people to help you, that will be great. And if you find people who want to learn about gardens, that can also be helpful.
  • Are you going to be indoors, outside, or both? You may not have much of a choice, but it is probably a good idea to start small at first. You can always grow more things once you get some success going.
  • Think about the budget. If you are doing cups and seeds, the budget is pretty small. If you are setting up an aquaponic system, you need to start looking for some big grant dollars. And if you are going to be somewhere in between those extremes, you need to find money.
  • Thinking about supplies you will need. If you are indoors, you need containers, dirt, tools, seeds, and plants. If you are outside, the dirt is there but you need to have tools to clear it, plant seeds, and all the other work of a garden.
  • Be prepared to spend some time on this. Yes, more time than whatever you just thought would be appropriate. Every project and program takes time and energy; gardens can be great, and can also take as much time and energy as you will give them. Budget how much you can spend on your garden.
  • Be sure you share your garden! Put a page up on your website, post articles to Facebook, send a press release to your local newspaper. Everyone likes to hear happy stories, and when you combine libraries with gardens you get two happy things!

The idea of gardens in libraries is really taking off across the country! We hope you will be ready to start your own garden soon!

Resources for you to consult:

A few libraries with gardens:

Books Read

And now we have one of our favorite parts of each episode: sharing books! Each of us will share a book we are reading. Links to each book will be on our show notes page, with a link to Amazon.com. If you buy a nice book – or anything else – Amazon will give us a small percent of their profits. Thanks in advance!!

Conclusion

Thanks to you for joining us this week! It’s always better when you are here with us!

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Check back in with us next week for another library skill!