And just trying to move the cabbage wears you out. So you take a long snooze.
And dream about sharing your cabbage with others.
                       from The Cabbage Seed’s Colossal Secret
                                    written by Karen M. Greenwald
                                          pictures by Alejandra Ruiz
                                     Tilbury House Publishers, 2026

    I love flowers and veggies and nurturing them in my small garden, even though I’m not very good at helping them grow. Their ground is a mixture of good garden soil mixed with home grown compost. Their water is drawn from our hand-pump-accessed well. 
    I talk to them and keep them company on a chair nearby. Sometimes we all listen to music or a story played on my Libby app.
    But mostly, they’re on their own. To enjoy the sunshine, weather, and pollinators. I’m on the lookout for the bad bugs and chase those away as best I can.
    If we’re all lucky, they will thrive throughout the whole growing season. Sometimes I even collect seeds with the intention of sewing them the following spring. Sometimes, I even do.
    This afternoon I caught a short blurb on the radio about a local seed library in Kirtland, Ohio, near Cleveland. Since it began 2-1/2 years ago, the Native Seed Libraries of the Holden Arboretum and the Cleveland Botanical Garden has been helping holdenfg.org (Holden Forest and Garden, HF&G) live its mission to “[connect] people with the wonder, beauty, and value of trees and plants, to inspire action for healthy communities.” 
    This year, their Seed Bank opened to the public in several locations throughout the greater Cleveland area. on January 19. Three free packets of native seeds are available per visitor to “community members, gardeners, and educators.” I’ll post hours on FaceBook and whether seeds are still available when I can reach someone (They’re closed on Mondays).
    “Native plants play a critical role in supporting pollinators, restoring habitat, and strengthening our region’s ecosystems,” says Kim Lessman, Seed Bank Manager at HF&G. “By making locally sourced native seeds freely available, the Native Seed Library empowers residents to be active participants in conservation, right in their own backyards.”
    Several branches of the Public Library of Youngstown and Mahoning County are pick-up sites for free seed packets from the Ohio State University (OSU) Extension of Mahoning County. Packets include carrot, lettuce, or sunflower seeds with instructions. Here's the flyer.
    You can find local seed banks with a Google search, just make sure you check the site carefully. Most are outlets for Cannabis.
    And buried deep in the permafrost on Spitsbergen, a Norwegian island in the Norwegian Sea about halfway between Norway and the North Pole is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It was expressly chosen for its remote location, far from war and terror as well as natural disasters. 
    It was opened by the Norwegian government in February, 2008 to preserve seeds from around the world to protect biodiversity in areas that may experience devastation of one kind or another. 
    From Norway’s government site,“[t]he vault hold the seeds of many tens of thousands of varieties of essential food crops such as beans, wheat and rice. These seed samples are duplicates of seed sample stores in national, regional and international gene banks.” 
    The Vault holds 642 million seeds, and has the capacity to reach 2.5 billion. Grains make up 69% of the holdings, 9% are legumes. The rest are a “wide variety of fruits, vegetables, herbs, and other plants [i]ncluding hallucinogenic plants such as cannabis and opium. 
    Seeds are usually tiny. Some are just small, but so many seeds (in their containers) need about 31 x 88-1/2 feet (9.5 x 27 meters) of space arranged in a rectangle divided into three long halls. See photos of the interior and the exterior.
    In February, 2026, the facility accepted its 69th deposit since opening on February 26, 2008. It now holds olive seeds for the first time, and accepted a total of 8,880 seed samples from 12 countries. Two of them, Guatemala and Niger, are first-time depositors. 
    The purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is to safeguard duplicates of seed samples from as many countries as possible to ensure the world’s future food supply. It backs up the over 1,700 world-wide gene banks which are vulnerable to natural disasters, war, and poor management and or lack of funding.
    Securing crop diversity allows researchers, plant breeders, and farmers to adapt agricultural practices to the climate crisis and reduce environmental deterioration making sure we can feed ourselves adequately. 
    They develop new and more resilient crop varieties that are nutritious, tasty, and environmentally sustainable.   
    From Karen Greenwald's author’s note in today's quoted book, I learned that she based her story of the colossal cabbage on a real 9-year-old girl whose real 40-pound cabbage fed a soup kitchen’s 275 hungry people, inspired a whole town, and launched Katie’s Krops, an organization that nurtures, trains, and supports young Gardners nationwide. Here's a link to Katie’s Krops FaceBook page.

I’m still reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans. I borrowed a copy from a friend, but needed to return it to her at my halfway mark. The reserve list from the library is thousands strong, which tells us a lot about the book. The main character is so well-drawn that I’m sure I’d recognize her if we could meet. Her friends, neighbors, authors, and others she writes to are just as real to me. It’s amazing how much we can learn about ourselves and others through fictional letters!
                    -—Be curious! (and remember to thank a farmer)

Let’s make music
Let’s have fun.
It’s music time
for everyone.
                                        from Let’s Make Music
                                  written by Alexandra Penfold
                                illustrated by Suzanne Kaufman
                        Random House Children’s Books, 2024

    Before I retired, we children’s librarians all had several trainings on language development and the process of learning to read. They were based on cutting-edge research analyzed by professionals at the American Library Association and brought to staff librarians across the US. 
    “What is the most important activity parents can do with their babies to help them learn to read?” That was my interview question for a new position at the Library    .
     Sing was my spontaneous but logical answer. I hadn’t thought of it before, but it made instant sense to me and I guess the administration, too. I got the job. 
    I was to be the liaison between the library and the community: parents, caregivers, and preschool teachers. I would share the research and demonstrate how children from birth to age 5 acquire language and the ability to read.
    ALA dubbed their program “All Children Ready To Read.” Our library renamed it “Baby Brilliant.” 
    I’ve always loved the sound and music of language and loved sharing that with young parents, preschool teachers, and little kids.
    Singing has words (real ones and nonsense, made up ones), playful or complicated rhymes, steady or complicated rhythms, and an endless variety of melody, all aspects of language children need to be familiar with before they can sound out words and attach meanings to them.
    But music and especially singing is so much more than its various parts. It is inextricably linked to our emotions and moods. 
    An aspect of music I wondered about for a long time was the seeming contradiction between the melodies of most “break-up” songs and their lyrics. Broken-hearted lovers sing songs in up-beat major keys. Why?
    Various sources I studied explained how the quick, happy-sounding tunes that convey sad lyrics help listeners feel less alone in their grief, more connected to others going through similar circumstances. Experiments have shown that the happy-sounding music overrides the sad story, so lots of times as we sing along, toe-tap, or head-bop we actually begin to feel better, less alone. 
    Some examples to remember or look up on Spotify or Pandora include Elvis’s “Return to Sender,” or Neil Sedaka’s “Breaking Up is Hard To Do,” or Gary Lewis and the Playboys singing “This Diamond Ring.”  
    Nostalgia and catharsis are two important feelings brought up by break-up songs. Our longing for the past and using music to help us relive some of our most difficult times can lead to a release emotions that have been building up. 
    Singing is even more effective than just listening. From the first note we sing, a chemical symphony begins within our brain. 
    OperaNorth, an organization from the UK, lists several reasons why singing is good for us.

• Singing releases endorphins, serotonin, and dopamine, chemicals that boost our mood and make us feel good about ourselves.
• Singing requires us to breathe, helps us increase our lung capacity, and engage the muscles around our ribcage.
• Breathing properly and with more awareness is good for releasing anxiety and helps transition us to a state of rest and relaxation.
• Singing can help improve mental alertness, memory and concentration. Singers focus on multiple aspects of music at once, engaging many areas of the brain simultaneously. 
• Music is a powerful tool used to spark memories during dementia care, often long after other forms of communication have become more difficult.
• Singing with other people helps build connections and feelings of togetherness. 
• Singing in a group can boost our confidence and fire up our self-esteem. 
• Good posture is a key factor in hitting the high notes. We naturally stand taller when we sing.

    Val Bastien in VoiceYourselfSinging (10/5/24) says, “Beyond the chemicals, singing allows for profound emotional release.” 
    My dad had a wonderful tenor voice. He liked all kinds of music, with words and without. I loved to listen to him sing. 
    Mom’s voice was strong, but not so much “on key.” She wanted to sing in tune, but must not have been able to hear music that way, so she couldn’t reproduce it. That didn’t matter to me, though. 
    She taught our Girl Scout troop lots of songs. There must be some trigger in some (or maybe even most) people that allows them to hear pitches in tune, in standard intervals, regardless the tones actually demonstrated. We girls always sang in tune, even though Mom couldn’t really teach us the “right” notes. I’m a little bit fascinated by this phenomenon but haven’t found a helpful explanation, yet.
    Singing (mostly in tune) helps me perk myself up when I’m driving home from a long-ish trip. I crank up the volume and sing along. I know lots of oldies.
    It must be the endorphins and serotonin and dopamine. 
    
I just started reading The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown, 2025). According to Anne Patchett’s blurb on the back cover, “Virginia Evans shows how one woman changes at a point when change had seemed impossible.” I expect it to be emotional, internal, and thought-provoking. I hope I’m right. I’ll let you know.
                              Be curious! (and belt out your favorite song,
                                         with reckless abandon, and friends)