 Okay. All right. Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I'm your host, Krista Porter here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. Central Time, but if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are this morning and it is then posted on our website for you to watch at your convenience. And I'll show you at the end of today's show where you can access all of our archives. We will have the recording of the show and the presentation, the PowerPoint presentation if there are any for a show will be included there. Both the live show and the archives are free and open to anyone to watch. So please share with your colleagues, friends, family, neighbors, anybody who you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. Encompass Live, the Nebraska Library Commission is the state agency for libraries in Nebraska for anyone who's here not from Nebraska. And so we do provide services and training, consulting to all sorts of libraries. So you will find things on our show that are for publics, academic, K-12, corrections, museums, anything that's a library we will have could be potentially on the show. Our only really criteria for what we have on the show is anything that libraries are doing, the same things we think they should be doing, services and products to share with them, cool things libraries are doing at their locations. So we have a mixture of things that can be on here from all types of libraries and covering every topic you could think of. We have book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products. So you definitely should be able to find something that you would like. We sometimes do have sessions that are, the presenters are specifically Nebraska Library Commission staff presenting things that are services and programs we're offering through here, but we also bring in guest speakers. And that's what we have this morning with me today is Joanne Neiman. Good morning. Good morning. And she drove up this morning, so far away. Oh yeah. Whole 25 minutes. Yeah, from Beatrice, Nebraska, which is just south of Lincoln where I am here for the Beatrice Public Library, where they have a library garden. And she's gonna talk to us about that, what they've got set up at their library. She was supposed to be joined by Marlene Gackle, Gakley, who is a master gardener and horticulturist who works now. Does she work at the library? She used to, she just retired last year. Ah, okay. So, but she still takes care of our gardens as a volunteer. Okay, but she was unable to come up this morning. So, but that's okay. You can email me any garden questions and I can get a hold of her. She'll answer these questions for you. I can do a lot of stuff, but not some of the stuff she could do. Sure, sure. All right, so I'll just hand your view to tell us how does your library garden grow? How you can make your wish come true. Get yours together. Well, just a little startup. We also have a seed library where we, where you can come in, the community can come in with or without a library card and check out seeds. So I'm going to kind of go in and out with our seed library and our garden. Sure. So, Loreen Redacell, our library director had gone to, attended a session on seed libraries at PLA, which is what Public Library Association, and that heard about the seed library and giving seeds out. And so we are, I think, one of three in Nebraska. Yeah, there's other ones. I think South two, Omaha and us. And we all three do it just a little different. But when Loreen went to the session and knowing Marlene was on our staff at that time, she thought, oh my gosh, this has got a half for her. Yes, she can make it good. So Loreen and Marlene put their heads together and Marlene got other master gardeners to help with it. And so we now have a seed library that opened officially, March 5th, 2014. Oh, wow. And we have people coming in and asking for seeds before we even get them in there. And so we also have them where they bring local seeds back. And so it's a great community option. So, but we, I wanna tell you about, oh, sorry. Yeah. Sorry, here's the, here's the. And this is awesome. I saw this, I actually visited the Atres Public Library about a month ago for the grand opening of their library innovation studios, Makerspace. And this is just a great repurposing of our good old car catalogs. Yes, it's perfect. We love our car catalogs. And so the packets just fit in there perfectly. And so it was, but we did have a lot of help. It's maintained by the library and a lot of the master gardeners, but just to make it happen, all of those other people on the list there keep it going. The Sondreggers, our new building, and I say new building, was built on the Sondregger Mansion site. And I say new because we've now been, I think, at the site for 28 years. Newer than the old building. Newer than the old building. But the Sondreggers had a nursery and seed catalog company. And so, there's our connection to the seeds in the gardens, and of course, because they had, that was their site, their home. They had lovely trees and bushes and everything. And so most of those stayed. The original tree that's planted down there is kind of the start of our Beatrice Public Library Arboretum. So Nebraska has given us that title. They're actually designated. Oh, nice. We have, oh, probably 36 different trees on our little site. And all of the little labels like you have, so you know what you're looking at, good. Yep, and then there is a map coming up here next. There's the map that you can get at the front desk and then you can follow the map around. I do a lot of my kids interactive or kind of, they're on their own. I give them a sheet and then they go in and have their scavenger hunt kind of. Explore other trees, yeah. But our gardens up there on the bigger one, the Sargent Garden courtyard, that garden consists of a lot of the heirloom plants that were on the site. And so we have a rose bush that we kind of baby just to keep it going because it's original and we want to keep it. Roses can be picky or they can just live forever. Yeah. And then the rest of the stuff in the garden are just, they're not original, but they are the type of plant that would have been sold in the Sondrecker. So the building, when it was built 20 something years ago is an original building built there or is it built onto the, something that was already there? It was built onto the Boolean. So it's a completely new building. Okay. And they were just very careful about all those trees that were there. It had to be very difficult to build and rather than just wipe everything out and have an empty slate to have all your room to move around. Exactly, exactly. So if you look, that's, you know, you can see the building where all the trees that work around to put it out. So that's awesome that they wanted to preserve all of that. Yeah, and that, you know, Lorraine is a big hand on that where she wants to keep things the way it was because that's kind of our historical background. Okay. So my forte in my garden is the alphabet pollinator garden. This is what I, this is on the kids side, the children's side. And it's always been the alphabet garden. And we have, if you'll notice the letters in the background where they designate the plant. So the Y is for yarrow. There the R is for rose bushes. The B is for the butterfly bush, but also, I don't know how well you can see it. There is a B house in the background and a butterfly house in the front of it. And that came about Marlene Gaikli's husband passed away and she wanted to do something for the library. And so I suggested she help me change just a few things in the garden to make it an official pollinator garden. And again, we are official in these things. And so we put in a new walkway that the kids could actually walk in between all the plants and just really make it interactive. And so now we're a pollinator garden. So who gives the official designation of being a pollinator garden? Is that from the Nebraska, is it the extension? Extension, yes. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. So then that was that was the last year. So then this year, I kind of, we did a program on herbs. And then I came up with, oh my gosh, I want to make a sensory garden because this is such an interactive garden. So I have lamb's ear in a pot that you can touch. And if anybody's ever felt lamb's ear, it's very soft. And then for just as a juxtaposition, then I put some prickly pine cones in there. And as that turned out, the pine cones also keep the squirrels out of there. So, but taste, we did basil and lettuce and then the tomatoes. The tomatoes I'll talk about in a little bit. We actually have a reading time, a summer, excuse me, a story time about tomatoes. And then our smell is the lemon basil and the rosemary. And the caterpillar was actually in our garden. So I grabbed a picture of that. And I don't know that it's necessarily the correct one for the tiger swallowtail, but anyway, that was a different bit than our bees. And you really can hear them and the birds chirping. And we used to, like I said, have more squirrels, but we've kind of deterred them. So they could be the chirpers out there. So the beginning of our seed library, this just shows you, we have people from all over send us their free packets. And then we have just an amazing group of master gardeners who come and sort through them and mark them and put them in. It takes at least a couple of afternoons for these ladies and gentlemen to do that. And that's something that I know with seed libraries I always wondered about. And I know a few years ago, we did a show about seed library. It might have been south of cities, but I was wondering, you know, how do you know what are the good ones and what they are? Or someone brings in like, I have a baggie of seeds from something. What is it? They do have some. Having the experts, the master gardeners. Now, if you need someone in your area, this would be your extension office. Extension office to get in touch with or whoever would be your local master gardener. Exactly. Yep. And so these are the pictures of these wonderful people. They are just fun to work with. They're always having a good time. So couldn't do it without them. All right. So back to my tomato. Every year now for, let me say four years, five years, that we've had our seed garden, I've done a seed story time and we plant tomato seeds and we have books on tomatoes and we just have a good time. The kids love to play in the dirt. So it's very tactile. And then they watch it grow. Sometimes they don't grow, but that's okay too. And mine, I am not a green thumb, but mine at the library with the help, I'm sure if Marlene in the background, mine grows. And the kids can go out there and pick the red cherry tomato. And I specifically do cherry tomatoes because I feel kids can do that better. And they're for picking them right off the plant. My mom is actually a master gardener back in New York. And yeah, she'd always grow cherry tomatoes and you just pick them right off the plant and eat them warm off the plant, which sounds, it's just, yeah. But it's good. Yeah. And that's what the kids do. So it is great fun as well as learning. And it's nice because they're small. They're easy to do that with, yeah. And that we always have, so seed packets available with whatever is going on at that, you know, whatever theme. I always do a book display of gardening and seeds. We also like that we have healthy eating. So that's one of our, for the Nebraska Library Commission, that's one of our things that we wanna be a part of, the goals here is to advance everybody's knowledge on healthy eating and how to grow it. So, but we have our fifth grade class at St. Joe's one year took some of our seeds and they did a science project out of it and they, I don't know how great you can see but it's not, it's a plastic glove and each finger was a little seed pod. Okay, so each of those is a finger of, okay, I got it. So kind of like when you do the bag, it's why I've done this too, wherever you've taken the beans plant, the bean seed and made a bean sprout in a baggie. This is just kind of another take on that. To go along with our goal for healthy eating, the community garden takes advantage of our seeds and they make a beautiful garden every year and then they give the efforts to the food pantry. Whatever they grow goes to the food pantry. And then we always have every month or so something seed or garden related. A lot of times it's with the master gardeners giving their own kind of like a special thing or Nicole Stoner from the extension always has a good. That's a lot of different events that you can do. I mean, even different things, landscaping, transplanting seeds, yeah. Wildflowers, that would be. The wildflower week, we always try and do something with them and then we do an annual tomato tasting. Yes, I've seen pictures of that. Which is just phenomenal. And it actually, I am not, if a tomato is not what it's supposed to look like, I may or may not eat it. Like the yellow or the heirloom ones are always crazy colors sometimes. So I would never have tasted some of these tomatoes had I not been offered this. So this is just another thing that you can get your community in to try new things. I tried a green tomato that was supposed to stay green. It tasted like what I would think the color green would taste like. I just want to say that. It was not my favorite. You use it for certain purposes. Exactly, exactly. So we went back to our, go back and jump back to the wildflower week. One year we did a winter sewing project that would coincide with our wildflowers. And so this was one of our sessions that we did on Tuesday night and how to grow this. And you took it outside, you let the snow do all the work and hopefully when it was all said and done you would get something in the spring. And so these are our wildflowers that we sewed in the winter and these are the ones. And then we gave those away during wildflower week and then the kids could. I see that on the slide when you had a list of all the sessions. Wildflower week that's something in conjunction with Homestead National Monument. Yes, and extension too. It's a whole big thing. So yes, we try to, anytime we have that opportunity to go wherever somebody else did. So then there's wildflower and I usually will do a project during wildflower week. So we up on the corner there we've made seed bookmarks. So we took paper pulp and sprinkled seeds in them and made bookmarks out of them. One year the summer reading was, I don't remember, but we did the bombs. We did all the seed bombs. Yes, I've had those. And so we could throw them out and the rain would break them up and then we pressed flowers one year. So we always try to get some kind of nature involved. We have, again, back to our great community, the fair board opened up a entry just for us and our seed collection. So if you took seeds from our library and grew them, you could take them to the fair. And enter them in the fair. Yes, and so it was open class, but it was designated only for the Beatrice Seed Libraries. Seeds that were from you. And there were, obviously, there were some criteria that you had to follow in. And then this was, when I did this at NLA, this was just coming out. So we do try to, like I said, go all year long trying to get some kind of event. And that's something to, people think about what to take care of your gardens, get them going, but you've gotta prepare them for the winter too, especially here in Nebraska. Exactly, exactly. And take things inside, cover things up, depending on what you're doing. And some things do do well, just left outside. Some things you do have to bring in. So it's always nice to partner with the extension office. Anyway, that is my bit of a program. I can open it up to questions. Yeah, sure. If anybody has any questions, go ahead and type them into the question section of your go-to webinar interface. And Joanne can answer them hopefully. Hopefully. Hopefully. Not too many in-depth questions about the plants themselves. That's okay. If I had Google in front of me, maybe I could help you, but you know. So the one question I did have the letters that you have in the alphabet garden. How did you, how did you get those letters? Did some, how did you get those names? We didn't have a grant that, and at that time there was a manufacturing place in Beatrice that would do that kind of iron work. Oh, is that what they are? Yes. And then their powder. Like I said, I was there like last month and I took some pictures, but I didn't go outside. So I didn't see them in person. So I wasn't sure what they were made of. And so those are made up so they can stay outside. I do bring them in in the wintertime because of course there's nothing to mark out there except maybe if I wanted to put S for snow. But I do also, I forgot to mention that there's a notebook that goes along with the letters. So you can stay inside, look at the letters and then go to the notebook and see that the Y is for yarrow or mint. Yeah, a grant. And it's actually like, it is right outside the children's area which has like a row of like three or four. It's like a long garden, three or four open big windows to the garden too. So even if it's bad weather or too hot or something the kids, you can see it right out there. And you've got the whole alphabet A through Z. I wasn't sure, I took some pictures and I didn't check to see. I did have every letter. I did, one year we did barn quilts. And so, that's the only thing I could think of to put my cue out there. So I was excited. The cue does not go for anything but the quilt. Yeah, it's hard to see. What would you grow in a garden to? It starts with a cue. I don't get to use all of them. I mean, there's things, but that would fit into this garden right next minute. Right, yeah. Because now, Loreen always liked that garden to be kind of the native plants. Sure. And so. You don't wanna bring in something invasive. Right, right. And so, it was when we went from the native plants of Nebraska to the pollinator garter, it was not a big job because a lot of the native plants are natural pollinator, you know, gardens. And we talk about, I've done story times on pollinators because it's so important that the bees and the butterflies and everything keep going. And I tell the kids that, yes, we might have apple trees, but without the pollinators, we won't have apples on our apple trees. And that gets them to thinking, oh, okay. And also just knowing that bees are not aggressive, that they, if you leave them alone, they're flying, buzzing from plant to plant. So. Just don't poke them or bump into them or something. Yeah. Especially with, and I'm sure everyone's seen the stories that we are having trouble with the bee population across the world declining or in some areas just disappearing suddenly. A lot of people are trying to fight that. Yes. Keep it going. And doing something like this and educating the kids that to keep it going too. Yes. I'm allergic to bee stings and things like that and kind of the wasp, whatever. So I do avoid them. That's okay. That's all right. So I have a healthy fierce that I don't get stung and swell up or something or in the hospital. But I know, yeah, they're just doing their thing. And if I just go this way and they go that way, yeah. They aren't aggressive. No. They won't chase you. Not the ones that the kind that are going to be in this garden. Right. These are usually little. The fuzzy bumblebees. Exactly. And they are, I think I usually get a couple pictures every year of them because they're just so fascinating. They're just, and when they're doing their thing, they just, they don't care that you're walking around or by. And I think we've had this for long enough now that. They know that it's a place to go. Yeah. A safe place, yeah. All right. So any questions anybody has, please type them in and we'll get them answered. So you said that you have a book then you have like a listing of like all the plants that are in there. Yes, and then pictures. Okay. I usually try to take the pictures that the plant looks like not going on. Sometimes I have to get an image off of the internet. But most of them I take. The feelings are blooming at the time, so I'm sure. Or mine isn't blooming like it should. Then I will go and find another picture of it. But most of them are, so they really see exactly this plant. Yes. So that's a question. Yeah, do, is there somewhere that people can get a list of what you guys have? Is that on your library's website or just somewhere separate? I don't know how much you have on your website. We don't have it on our website, that is a great idea. But yeah, if you want to email me, I will send that out to you because I did just, when we went to a pollinator garden, we did have to have a list. So I have it. Oh, right, to officially say this is what we've got to become approved, okay. So I do have it. So email me and I will, it's a rather long list. Well, A to Z and possibly multiples depending on what your space is and everything. But we do, our garden grows from the first part of, even during the snow, we have some little crocus that come out and some other winter plants that kind of come out that very first part of spring and all the way to the mums and the aster in the fall. So we do have a year round, somewhat year round. Let's put it that way, gardens. You can have year round. Let me people think of mostly spring, summer has all the blooming, but there's stuff to be done. Yeah, I just want to see here. Chuck, did you have a question? I see you have your hand raised. Did you want to ask a question? I didn't unmute you or you could type in. You don't have a microphone? Do you know? Oh, we do a question. A beautiful garden, Joanne, as I'm very inspired. Yay. Joanne either their own or something at their home. And I do have to tell you, like I said earlier, I'm not a green thumb, but it is very inspirational and I have now changed my backyard into my little, yes, in my own little garden and I have a frog now. And it is, it is very inspirational and I just, I love to be out there, so. So that's another question. This is a garden, and you were talking about frogs that got me thinking some people have when they have these gardens, ponds or a water beach or whatever. Is that something that you would ever have here? Do you have something like that? We have two water features. One, we have a beautiful bird bath. And then of course, where Nebraska has great snowstorms, we also have really hot sun. And so we do have to fill that up with water, but it's fun to watch that. And then closer to where the butterfly bush is, we have a butterfly pond, which is a very shallow huddle with rocks in it so that the butterflies can just dip in and not submerge them. Sure, you're sure. So we tried to make a fountain kind of thing, but there just isn't enough water back there. So yeah, you'd have something specifically like a line, a water line run out there for something to work. So this is kind of our best thing we can do. So I didn't know, I've had bird baths in my yard. I didn't know about the butterfly one. Is that something on the ground or so? It's on the ground. You can also change your bird bath. Sure. It can be a bird bath and then yes, and just put a big rock in there so that that rock stays dry and then they can dip it in front of the water. So you can change just a regular bird bath into a butterfly pond. So seeing how the butterflies, because I've gone to the butterfly encounter or whatever at the Omaha Zoo, in close thing where they feed the butterflies, you can go there and you'll see they have pieces of fruit and what laid out. Do anything like that in this or we don't really, we just leave it to the plants to, but we just leave it to the plants, but then entice them in any other way. Now that has inspired me. I think I would mind doing a story time and then I've seen them where they put the little sugar water and then that. Oh, to get them to land on them. We might try that. Thank you. Thank you, Crystal. I just got to think of that's what they do in there, but that's, I mean, they've got lots of plants in the area too, but they obviously also supplement by feeding them fruits. Right, right. And we have a couple honey producers. I don't know if I'm saying the right thing. You said you had a bee house. We don't have any bees. We don't have any bees yet, but we do have a couple in the area and he brought in a honeycomb for us one time, for story time. Cool. And again, for my first time of having honey right off the comb and is very sweet. And he says because of whatever kind of flowers you have. The flavor depends on what they've been able to have access to, yeah. Okay, we have a question here about the seed library. Do patrons just take the seed packets or do they check them out? Like you have an official process to track and do you have a limit on how many they can take, how does your actual molding of the seeds work? All we ask is that they, we do a general inventory at the beginning of the season. And then we just ask them, I took two tomatoes out. I took two cucumbers out. They can have up to three of one kind. We didn't used to have a limit on it but we had somebody come into the library and they wanted to receive their garden for whatever reason and they took all of our grass. Oh my gosh. And it wasn't, I'm afraid that when it started to grow it was not what they were considering because it was the very ornamental grass and the wild grass. They may think that they have weeds growing now because that's kind of what ornamental grass is. But we did put a little bit of a limit on it. And so there's just a sign out sheet to show so you kind of know it. And then with these seed libraries, generally then people later on, sometimes if depending on what they're growing produces more seeds they bring back. They can bring back. We've had a requirement though. No, not at all. If they do bring it back, we do ask that they keep the original packet so that they just kind of remember what it was. That we have locally grown zinnias and locally grown golden marigolds. And then in our, sometimes we have the corn come back to us and the beans, the pole beans will come back to us. And asparagus sometimes comes back to us. So how do you start if you don't, how did you start with the first, you said they were just donated, the first to go around, I mean, and every spring do you need to get some extra donations? We do, we haven't had enough returned. I'm wondering, I worry about it just like going away and suddenly everybody's used them all. We have a list of vendors that we contact and tell them what we're doing and why we're doing it. And if they would want to donate or sometimes it's at a very nominal cost or we have to pay for shipping. So it's very, we don't have a lot of expense on it, but most people when they find out we're a library and what we're doing, they have no problem giving us a lot of our retailers in Beatrice will give us their unsold. Oh, sure. And we didn't sell well here. Right, right. And sometimes they can give us some really good, some of it, if it's just, they got a surplus of it and sure we can take that. You never know what you might find there. You got to keep checking back to see what's going on. Right, right. And most of the, well, all of them, I should say, with the Master Gardeners, they will know what works in our area. But we also tell that to our suppliers. We'll say, you know, this is where we're at. This is who may take them and... What hardiness zone that we're in. Right. Well, a question about story times. You've talked about doing story times and relating them to activities you do in the garden. Have you ever considered doing a story walk through the garden? Oh. We do have some libraries in Nebraska and that I've seen that do that. That's the... That would be another thing. Taking apart a book, which sounds horrible, but you take it when you just go and you put pages on stands throughout an area apart of the sound. And we actually... From page to page reading the book. We actually have that, not at our library. One of our, oh, civic groups got together and wanted to know if I wanted to do a story walk. And so I did the research forum and they did research on their own. And so we have many hiker-biker trails in Beatrice. And so they chose one of the hiker-biker trails. And so for those of you that don't know what a story walk is, it encourages literacy and physical activities. And so you take a picture book and there are criteria. So that, and again, I wish I would've known that I was gonna get that question because there is a lady's name who you have to, if you want this story walk, you have to say her name and give her credit for it. I wanna say it's back east somewhere. But it's easier if you take a paperback book and you do have to destroy it because of course you can't decopy it. So you need two paperback books as well as then a third book to keep in your library so that if you went to check that library book out. Right now I have in there a duck on a bike and so I took two paperbacks, I had to buy them and cut them all up and put them in and then had them laminated and then they go into specific holders that are about 40 paces away from each other so that you walk a pretty good pretty good jaunt as you read the book. And so it is, like I said, you gotta get exercise and you have to make it worth it to do it. Yeah, so that's why I'll change them out every three or four months so that they don't get stale and so yeah, if that's another one. Do you want me to go back again and again to see what's the next book? Do it just once, yeah. Right, I also do a story time where we, that same sort of idea but I read the story in the group and then we go out and I've eliminated a lot of the story but I have clues on each station and where like one of the ones that I did right off the top of my head was the three Goldilocks and the three Bears. And so we read Goldilocks and the three Bears and then we go outside and we go to each station and so at the first station it might be a spoon for Papa Bear and the second one would be a spoon for Mama Bear and then a block of wood for the bed being too hard or a little soft pillow for it being too soft and so we just go around it then we take our clues back, we sit in a circle and then we recite the story from our clues and so then they just get three different ways to get literacy. Yeah, mix it up, yeah. So I was looking up Straywalk, yes. We actually did a session about a Hastings Public Library to Straywalk as well, but that didn't help me so I just, I used the Googles. Straywalk was created by Anne Ferguson in Vermont as the original one and you can see it's Straywalk with our registry trademark. So if you just look up Straywalk on the project you'll find links to her and how it can all work and how it was originally started. Yeah, it is very fun. I wanted to do that for a couple of years so I was excited that this group of individuals wanted to do this and so they paid for it all. All I have to do is do the books, buy the books and- Figure out what the next book's gonna be to go into the displays, yeah. All right. All right, other questions you have. We still have a little bit more time in our hour today. We're getting close to the end of the hour, so that's cool. If you have any other questions for Joanne about what they did at Beatrice. As we said, we're recording the show and oh, here we go. What is your most popular seeds that patrons take out? Like what do you need to- Our tomatoes are probably the most popular. As far as flowers go, the wild flowers and herbs. I should go back. Herbs are always, they don't stay very long but we also don't get very many of those but any kind of mint, sage, any of those things, they go like that. Fresh herbs for cooking and stuff. It makes a huge difference if you can- And that's kind of getting big with like having your kitchen garden and so yeah, I would say herbs, then tomatoes and the flower, the wild flowers go. I prefer the marigolds because they're hardier. Yeah, I can't really do, it's hard to kill a marigold. But wild flowers are nice I think too because they're just so easy to throw them out there and they'll do their own thing. They're wild and so they're happy to just I don't struggle and yeah. A lot of them are drought tolerant which is what happens sometimes in Nebraska in the late summer. And so wild flowers are probably the best. If you wanna have success and good time with it with your family or your kids. Yeah, yes. And they do, kids do, they are so interested in things growing and how they grow and just the fact they get to play in the dirt too. It is, it's very kidlike, it just works well. It's okay to get dirty, it is. You have to. All right, so as I was saying, we're recording the show. For those of you, it'll be available by the end of the day today. Has to process through the webinar and then you get up on YouTube. All of you who attended today and who registered for the today's show will get an email from me letting you know when it's ready. The slides will be available as well. I mentioned that at the beginning but for people that came in after we started the presentation here I have Joanne's presentation so you'll have access to all of her slides and information and pictures and maps and everything on there as well. And we do have a link also to the Bantras Public Library from the session page for whatever contact information is in there. But Joanne and Marlene and Lorraine, if you wanted to. Lorraine is the director and so she has kind of gotten a lot of the garden and trees and everything going. So, yeah. So any other questions you have before we wrap it up for today's show? Get them in right now. And so while we've got Joanne here with us today we'll push her head back. Are you heading back down to the library for us today? I'm gonna go have lunch with my daughter first. Ah, okay. It's all good, yeah. I would take ideas too because I'm always looking for new things to do even though my kids kind of cycle out so I don't always have to change too many things. But I would, I love doing hands-on things and interactive stuff. Yeah, and that is actually, I didn't even ask that, so the question, does anybody out there who's watching today have done any sort of a library garden or a pollinator garden or anything related to that at your libraries? Or any, I mean, people have questions about it, which is good, I think, there. Hopefully thinking about doing one. We do every once in a while if it's nice out on a Wednesday morning because I'm actually missing storytime this morning. Oh, sorry. But if it's nice out, I'd love to go out in our garden and do it. However, the library is situated on a busy street. And so sometimes we have to battle, that's the sound of our five senses there. Sometimes the sound of the noise is as much. But it's still, and I sometimes lose their attention to whatever bug crawls across the patio. So, you know, get it bad. Let's see, someone says here, oh, at their library, we are talking with our municipal court to get community service workers to help with the upkeep of theirs. Oh, good. That's a good, that's an idea. Yeah, people, and I know sometimes in schools now, the kids have to do some sort of amount of community service hours. That's a good resource, potentially do. And I have a question, how many seed packets do you usually have in stock? I guess in total. Oh, I mean, that can actually look like a thousand. It holds a lot, yeah. Thousands. And since you've been doing it since 2014, and we do, well, we clean them out. Oh, okay. We clean them out. They do not, like, we clean them out every, at the end of the season, and some of the waxier seeds, they have to go kind of in cold storage. So we'll keep them for about two years. So they are marked as the year we got them, and we don't keep any of the old seeds. But you can see from that card catalog, that's full. Yeah, everything there, yeah. So, Kamen, thank you so much. I love the idea of an alphabet garden. I'm an outreach librarian, so I'm looking for ways to take gardening projects to the community. Do you have any suggestions for anything? I have taken it on the road. Yes, I, we do, Beatrice has a program on their early out days. And I know that Nicole Stoner from the Extension Office, and I both take stuff to the schools. And I've, we've done little sewing. So you can buy the soil. I've used egg cartons, the paper egg cartons. I take those to the school, we give them, and then they just do it right there. You take the seeds, and there's something to put it in, yeah. And then paper, excuse me, plastic bags, Ziplocs usually kind of hold that dirt in place so that they can get it home. Until they get it home, yeah. So that's nice for that it's sealed, like the kids are taking it in their school bag or whatever. And the seed bombs I've done at schools too, where we just take the paper pulp and the seeds, and we do that. Oh, sure, that's a great project to do, yeah. So most of it is, you do have to carry stuff with you, but it's not too bad. So you have taken it off, people always have to come to the library. I saw some of your events actually were at other locations that you were doing things, yeah. So I do try to do outreach quite a bit because we do have kids that can't get to the library but do, and then to, because of my outreach, I will do something that Wednesday afternoon and maybe that Wednesday evening, the child comes back with his parents. I saw the immediate, yeah. So, yeah, so we get, so I'm all for doing an outreach thing and taking a project with you. Absolutely, yeah. Have you done any self-watering planters? If you tried that. No, that's a great idea. I might have to try that. So that would be like, I know that you can take the two liter soda bottles and turn them upside down side. And then it will just keep it wet. Did the soil damp enough for the, that would be something to do with it. Next project, thank you. And that would be something in a container not out in the garden that's out in the yard is where you do that kind of thing, yeah. So when we did talk about how it didn't get very dry, hot and dry here in Nebraska later in summer, do you have volunteers that water the plants? Like how do you keep them watered? And do you save rainwater at all? Are you doing any rain barrel? That's something that's something to do. Again, another idea was good rain. However, we worry about mosquitoes. Sure. And sitting in water. But I have, I sometimes water them. Otherwise, Marlene, again, even though she's retired, which just means that she now volunteers and doesn't get paid to say thank you. She is wonderful about coming every couple of weeks and always watching the weather if it's gonna rain, if it's not gonna rain. And then when I do notice that some of my plants on my side, like the alphabet garden, needs watering, the kids loving. And so I have watering hands and I fill them and then bring the watering cans out to them. And sometimes they get a little more wet than the plants do, but you know, it's okay. Again, whatever I can get the kids involved in, we'll keep them always wanting to learn more about the plants and flowers and things. But as you said, having the native plants too that are hardy enough for these dry summers that we have, the dry times we can have helps. We've had quite a bit of wet earlier this year. How did that affect things? Did it have any? It didn't have any negative effects. Out of the ordinary rain and flooding here. And we are all, Marlene is very good about keeping everything mulched. And mulch will keep things from kind of floating away. Sure. But yeah, deep down, the soil was still moist and so maybe just the top part of it was dry. And so you guys didn't have any flooding issues from the spring flooding that we had. We did, but the library did not. Right. Okay. So yeah. The big blue did kind of go out a little bit, but it did not affect the library. Do you do any indoor gardening at the library? Or you just have the, just outside, we have regular house plants. Yes, the usual decorative things. And I will start the tomato plants before I do my tomato seed story time, I'll start some just so that they'll see it grow before they get them. That's what it's gonna look like. Right. And so I do start stuff inside and then I, sometimes we'll start my own stuff because there are great windows to them. There is, yes, this library, I don't know if they were planning it when the architects were doing it, but it's got tall, huge windows. Beautiful. Lots of natural light coming in the building. And so I will even, there's a couple of us that will start our little seedlings indoors and then take them back home and so. So that's really the most that you do is the starting, but most of your gardens that the kids would, or anyone would work with or they track us outdoors. Yes, yep. All right. All right, well, this was great. As you'd mentioned about NLA, Nebraska Library Association and School Librarians annual conference is every October. And that's why there was that side there about something coming up in October. Which I assume will be coming up this year too again, the best to put your beds to sleep, yeah. I'd seen this on the schedule from last year in Missouri. I don't get to go to everything that is at conference. So I do sometimes use this as a way for me to find out so I can see some of the sessions I missed and bring one and cut the slide, but also just to share beyond the people who could have attended in person. So this is great. I'm glad I've got to hear all about it because I know we've had seed libraries on before and presentation and hear about StoryWalks, but I hadn't seen anything, I hadn't seen anything yet about these interactive alphabet garden type things. It's something I don't know if it's new, do you know of any other places that have done that particular. This is the only one that I know. Yeah, maybe we'll hear more about it. Yeah, yeah. Other ones will start doing it. All right, so we're getting close to 11 o'clock here. Any last minute, 11 o'clock central time, any last minute desperate questions you wanna ask Joanne before we wrap it up for today? Type in there. If not, you can always use your email there to contact her at any time when you're working on your gardens. Any specific gardening questions, ask her to contact Marlene. She'll get to your questions to her if necessary. I will send those off because she's extremely knowledgeable. I went to her with, I had a bug at home and I did not know what it was and so I described it to her and of course she's brilliant and she will become a pragmatist. Oh, and it didn't look like one yet. No, it looked like a little inchworm with a shell on its back and the shell looked like it's a bark, piece of bark and I thought there was a bark crawling up my column there, but I got closer and it was a little worm kind of thing and so I described it to her. It's a good baby, it's a good bug. Yeah, it's a good one. You want to have those. But you do wanna make sure that's something too. You wanna make sure about if you are having any bugs, which are good, which are bad, which is important to have someone who's an expert in these kinds of things. You don't wanna someone who's panicking. Well, you don't want those bore, the elm. Oh, emerald, yeah, emerald ash or yeah, we're having that trouble here and like all the trees being, yeah. That's a tree thing. That's a tree thing. But you haven't had trouble with the trees there around the library or anything like that? Not too bad. Okay, no, good, all right. I don't know, it doesn't look like anybody's typed in any desperate questions while we were just chatting here, wrapping it up so we're almost at the top of the hour again, excuse me. So I think we will officially wrap it up for today. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming and joining us. Thank you for having us. This was nice. We have a good lunch with your daughter. And thank you everyone for attending. As I said, we'll have the recording available by the end of the day today. You'll all get a notification from me when it is ready and available for you to look at. And I'm gonna show you now if you just hit escape over there. Going to pop over to our website. This is Nebraska Library Commission website, but you can search for Encompass Live. We are so far. The only thing called that on the internet. So use your search engine of choice and you'll find us anywhere in your search results. So our archives, these are upcoming shows, today's show in the next month or two, but our link to our archives is right here at the bottom underneath the bottom of the list. And this has our most recent ones, the top here. So this is last week's show. Today's will be there and be added to there today. So I'll send you a link to that. We will have, if you look at this one, we have a link to the recording on our YouTube channel, the Library Commission's YouTube channel and a link to the presentation on our slide share accounts. You have access to both of those. The same kind of set of as this one for last years. Or last years, last weeks. And I'll show you while we are here. This is our archives. This year, 2019 is the 11th year of Encompass Live. We've been doing it for going over 10 years now. And we do have all of our archives here going back to the very first show in January, 2009. So do keep that in mind when you are looking through here. We do have a search feature where you can search the entire archives or just the most recent 12 months if you want just the newest topics we've had on the show. But everything does have a date of when the original session was done. So you can scroll through here and see when it was originally broadcast. So when you are looking through our archives do pay attention to that date. Some of the things that are on here, the service might not exist anymore, the program might be gone. Things might have changed since then. Some links to things might not work anymore. I don't have time to go back necessarily and change everything in 10 years worth of it. But just pay attention when you're going through here to the original broadcast date was. We are librarians. It's what we do. We archive historical things. It's one of our things we do and we'll always have these up there as long as YouTube is happy to host them for us. Now we'll put them somewhere else. But so you will see our archives been all the way back to beginning when you're just a warning about that when you are looking through our archives. And Compass Live is also on Facebook. We have a link here on each of our page to our Facebook page. So if you're a big Facebook user, give us a like over there. I give reminders. Here's your reminder to log in to today's show. That's a picture I took of their gardens when I was there. Beautiful photography. It was actually through the windows. This is looking from the children's area out to the garden. I did not go outside and take pictures. But so I had to crop out some things. So no, we don't need to log in right now. Thank you, Facebook. So if you are big on Facebook, give us a like to get reminders of when our shows are coming up, when the recordings are available. So you can keep up on things there. We also post to our mailing list, social media, the library commission has, we have Twitter account and whatnot. So I hope you join us next week when our topic is Life in Fort Schuyler. The challenge is faced at the SUNY Maritime College Library. Now some of you might not know what the heck that is. This is from New York. SUNY is the State University of New York library system, their university system. And in a specific library, the Maritime College Library is actually in a fort. It's Maritime as in like Navy, maybe. And Shante Hope is gonna be on the remotely unless she's not coming to Nebraska. She'll be logging in remotely from Bronx to tell us about their library. It's really cool to learn about how they've managed to have a library in a fort. Nice. Very interesting. So please do sign up for that show. And any of our other ones on our schedule, I've got August all filled in here. I have September all booked as well. And I'm just working on confirming some final descriptions for things. So you should soon be seeing our September dates come up as well. So please do join us. Hope we'll see you on those. So that will wrap it up for today. Thank you everybody. Thank you. Thank you. This is great and hopefully we'll see you next time or another time in Encompass Live. Bye-bye.