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)
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)
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