The Six Bean Story: or why gardening can drive you crazy.

Mary, Mary Quite Contrary
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and cockle shells
And pretty maids all in a row.

The song mothers sing to their babies sounds like a sweet paean to a little girl's garden, but Mother Goose's nursery rhyme about gardening alludes to Bloody Mary Tudor and her habit of burning her subjects at the stake - 300 subjects, to put a number to it. "Silver bells" refers to thumbscrews and and cockle shells were instruments of torture used on areas of the body even more sensitive than thumbs , as explained in this Nursery Rhyme Origin and History website.
My experiences this spring as a novice gardener are what got me thinking about how Mother Goose may have been on to something by linking gardening and slow torture.

Timeline of librarian's garden, 2009:
February: very impatient to start seeds but none are in stores except for a basil kit and a bachelor button kit at the drugstore: dirt, pots and seeds all inclusive. I buy the kits. There are more seeds than pots though so I...
March: plant leftover seeds in egg cartons enclosed in plastic "clamshells" (the things take-out salad comes in) and place on sunny windowsill.
March cont'd: water seeds as needed and stare at plants several times a day. Check local stores for seeds other than basil and bachelor buttons. Told that seeds are late coming in this year to stores (duh.)
Sometime later: green basil and bachelor b. sprouts appear. Announce to all family, friends and colleagues by phone, email and in person, that seeds have sprouted. Strangely, no one finds this as exciting as I do.
Soon after: anxiety about the dread "damping off" sets in, but most sprouts continue to thrive. Friends, f and c not anxious about this possibility either.
April: become impatient to put plants outside but read that Mother's Day is the traditional target date. yeah, right: in Florida maybe, not New Jersey having a cold, rainy spring.
April cont'd: very cold and rainy April continues unabated, no chance of moving plants off windowsill and putting outside even though they have outgrown their clamshells and egg cartons and now there are seedlings all over the house in every available sunny spot and my Director does not want them in the library staff room. If I were the Little Red Hen, I would promise myself not to share in my bountiful harvest when the time comes.
May-ish: fellow librarian takes pity and gives me peat pots to put overgrowing seedlings in. She has given up gardening due to deer, bugs, mildew, diseases, drought, varmints etc etc. I do not take the hint.
Mother's Day: very cold May, cannot put plants I have obsessed over for two months out to die in cold, which brings us to...
Hardening off: plants must spend some time outdoors in shade, being jiggled, exposed gradually to their future surroundings with more light, but no direct sun.
Must find large trays: to transport seedlings outside for their little outdoor recess every day and to bring them back in at night. Cookie sheets pressed into service.
Memorial Day: finally put plants outside overnight. Awake all night worrying.
Last week of May: put seedlings in large pots and place in the few sunny places available in my shady yard. Stare at out of window with dog at my side (she is looking for the mailman and other dogs though.)
Rainiest June in the history of the planet: plants look pale but hang in there.
Still June: still rainy, plants even paler, but the deer seem to like the squash blossoms, something is eating the bean plant leaves, the basil looks all wrinkly, the lettuce is malingering, and sproinging up (forget proper term), the radishes are anorexic and the leaves have been munched into lace, the oregano has brown spots, the sage has spider mites and might not survive.
Insecticides: Do I have to?
Morning coffee for me and my plants: I spray aphids with my leftover morning coffee. It seems to work. Imagine what it's doing to my stomach.
Later in June: tomatoes up to their necks in puddles of water which I dump out twice a day.
Moving: squash plants put in backyard where deer do not go due to my dog and fence but in which there is very little sun.
Finally! Success! June 27: after months of work, I harvest six, count them, six, green beans, mix them with the store-bought variety and have for dinner. I dig through my stir fry trying to figure out which are "my" beans.
End of June: my library colleagues will never let me live down the Six Bean Story.

The Dewey number for gardening is 635.
Apologies for long post, this is only the tip of the iceberg of the emotional rollercoaster that gardening has been this spring for this blogging gardener.

Starting a Business, Starting at the Library

I was reading The Martha Rules by Martha Stewart the other day (she was inspired to write it when a fellow inmate asked her advice about starting a hair salon combined with a restaurant). She has a friend who started his own exotic plant nursery. He often counsels people who want to begin their own nurseries that their biggest investment in the early years will be a wheelbarrow and a shovel (unwelcome news to those who see starting a business as an opportunity to go on a spending spree).

The library has an extensive collection of books on starting businesses. I've listed some titles on starting a home based businesses, for those who want to start small:

101 Best Home Businesses
101 Best Home-Based Businesses for Women
The Best Home Businesses for People 50+
McGraw Hill's Careers for Homebodies and Other Independent Souls
Entrepeneur Magazine: Starting a Home-Based Business
Entrepreneur Magazine's Ultimate Book of Homebased Franchises

and then there are some very specific ones, such as:

How to Start a Home-Based Craft Business
How to Start a Home-Based Catering Business
How to start a Home-Based Professional Organizing Business

You can check out your potential competition (at least, those who advertise in the yellow pages) by searching ReferenceUSA, an online database the library subscribes to, by clicking here. Guided Search will let you choose a type of business via yellow pages heading and you can choose to search by a lot of geographic factors (my favorite is radius, which lets you choose how many miles to search around a particular zip code).

Books I Almost Read

"So many books, so little time." That phrase is bandied about on t-shirts, bumper stickers and stationary sold at librarian conventions or hawked on bookbags for public television fundraisers. I've always found it smug and annoying. If I put that phrase on my car bumper, my kids would refuse to ride in the car. It conveys an image of librarians that librarians claim to try to avoid (bookish, dweeby, bespectacled etc.) I do like the image (minus the smug phrase) of the old-fashioned, shushing librarian with her nose in a book and hair in a bun, and think the profession should embrace it, embrace the kitschy irony of it. Irony because librarians today spend their days with noses, not in books, but pointed toward the computer screen where we blog and Twitter and Facebook and Google and search databases and make websites and email newsletters and answer questions by email, chat reference, cell phone texting, podcasting and so on. Our days are electronic, our commutes may be enlivened by audiobooks, but I suspect that most librarians revert to good old books in the evenings, on our own time. Which is where I meant to start this post: books I almost read or almost finished or mean to read someday. The fact is, obnoxious as it is to proclaim on a t-shirt, it is true that there are so many books and limited time, that as the years slip by, I am more willing to set aside a book that is taking too long to read . Weeks go by in which not a single book seems "finishable" and then one comes along that I wish would never end. Those are the one I review on this blog. What are your favorite books that you wished would never end?

Now, Even More Audiobooks for the Pod People

iPod, that is. If you have A) an iPod or an iPhone and B) a computer that runs Windows, you can now download a whole lot more audiobooks to your iPod now at listennj.com. That's because on Tuesday, the powers that be made it possible for the Windows Media Audio (WMA) audiobooks to be downloaded to an iPod, as long as the publisher agreed.

If you have an iPod and a Mac, you can still download audiobooks for free at listennj.com (but not as many).

Just to give you a taste of what you can line up for at ListenNJ, here are some titles they have that everyone can download, whether you have an iPod, Creative Zen, or what have you:

Losing It by Valerie Bertinelli
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
The Associate by John Grisham
Wolf Brother by Michelle Paver
Dr. Blair's French in No Time
David Sedaris Live at Carnegie Hall

Crafts on the Internet: the dark side of hobbies

Clicking around on the internet (I don't think anyone says "surfing the web" anymore) can lead to the occasional treasure trove, some subset of the internet of like-minded people who record their experiences in such a funny and fresh way that you keep returning to their website. http://www.craftfail.com/ is a blog where crafters congregate to celebrate and commiserate about their failed efforts and the writing can be hilarious. The sidebar lists links to other craft blogs which are also very funny. Be careful to set aside some time for these (mostly) ladies. There are lots of humorists on the homefront, raising children, crafting and blogging about it on the side. Some of my favorite posts:
"Horton Doesn't Hear a Darn Thing" in which LovingMom describes her efforts to create a cute Horton the Elephant that sadly has only one ear. Sympathetic readers commented that Horton is a cute alien though.
Notagirlymom writes How Not to Knit a Stuffed Toy complete with photo of a very bedraggled toy mouse.
The Felted Frankenstein Bear could befriend the toy mouse maybe: toyland outcasts.
It's not that these crafters don't follow directions, although sometimes that is optional when the creative juices and available materials just call out to start a project now, but sometimes directions just aren't that good. In any case, if you have ever had a craft failure, take a look at this blog.
If you do want directions or craft books, go to the 745's which are shelved behind the circulation desk at BHPL. Wherever your local library is, the Dewey number will be the same.