Category: Adult Resources

Time to Start Your Own Vegetable Garden

~ Sara ~ Leave a comment

Having a vegetable garden supports a healthy and sustainable life style.  Now is the time to start one, but how?

First, let’s find your plant hardiness zone from USDA Hardiness Zone Finder.  It will help you to decide which plants should go into your garden.

Second, timing is everything.  This Garden Planting Calendar tells you when to start planting your desired vegetables.

Third, let’s get up and start your own vegetable garden!

Resources

From OverDrive:

Ultimate Garden Guide
143 Ideas for Containers, Beds & Borders
Southern Living by The Editors of Southern Living

The Rodale Book of Composting, Newly Revised and Updated
Simple Methods to Improve Your Soil, Recycle Waste, Grow Healthier Plants, and Create an Earth-Friendly Garden by Grace Gershuny and Deborah L. Martin

Ecological Gardening
Your Path to a Healthy Garden by Marjorie Harris

From Seed to Skillet
A Guide to Growing, Tending, Harvesting, and Cooking Up Fresh, Healthy by Jimmy Williams

Starting & Saving Seeds
Grow the Perfect Vegetables, Fruits, Herbs, and Flowers for Your Garden by Julie Thompson-Adolf

There are also many resources from Fipster.  Search Home & Garden.

Other Resources:

Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture Food for Thought

Composting information from Chester County Soil Waste Authority 

National Agricultural Library

Gardening adds years to your life and life to your years. – Unknown
There are no gardening mistakes, only experiments. – Janet Kilburn Phillips
When the world wearies and society fails to satisfy, there is always the garden. – Minnie Aumonier

Tinkering at Home!

~ mxremy ~ Leave a comment

Looking for coding, gadgetry, and other STEM activities to do at home? These organizations have you covered!

First, follow along with the Girls Who Code and make binary bracelets, Scratch stories, and digital tutorials. They’ll be updating with new activities regularly, so stay tuned.

Next, check out Make Magazine’s Makercamp! They have a great catalog of projects to follow along with, from low tech papercraft automata to a fully functional Makey Makey Operation board game.

Finally, check out these Khan Academy schedules to add a bit of structure to your day! They have lessons on everything, from Math to Biology to Reading Comprehension.

Start your genealogy research at home

~ Book Club Mom ~ Leave a comment

Image: Pixabay

You can research your family history from home with these helpful library resources:

Access Heritage Quest Online, free with your library card.

Click here or visit chescolibraries.org, select Tools and Research from the menu bar and click on All CCLS Databases to locate Heritage Quest Online. Sign in with your library card.

Family Tree Magazine on Flipster

View this current issue and past issues of Family Tree Magazine through 2015 online.

Click here or visit chescolibraries.org, select Downloads from the menu bar and scroll down to click on Flipster and sign in with your library card.

General OneFile (POWER Library)

Our GALE General OneFile through POWER Library has millions of articles available in PDF and HTML full-text, supplemented by reference, newspaper, and audio content. Find relevant articles and periodicals by entering “genealogy” in the Search bar.

Click here or visit chescolibraries.org, select Tools and Research from the menu bar and click on All CCLS Databases to locate General OneFile and sign in with your library card.

Genealogy searches from home – a great way to learn your family history!

Jennifer Weiner Hosts Book Club on Facebook

~ makohl10 ~ Leave a comment

Where are our realistic women’s fiction/chick lit/relationship fiction/beach readers?! Whatever you want to call the genre, we know it is one that is heavily read and loved by our patrons. One of the genre’s flagship authors, Jennifer Weiner, is hosting a live Backlist Book Club of her work, beginning tonight, Wednesday, March 25th at 7:30 p.m. on her Facebook page. You can find a complete list of her work here.

Learn how to increase happiness

~ megyves ~ Leave a comment

Current events have many of us worried, stressed out, and with more time on our hands than usual. Why not try an online course aimed at increasing daily happiness? One of Yale University’s most popular courses is available for free through Coursera, an online learning platform. The Science of Well-Being is taught by Yale Psychology professor Laurie Santos. The topics covered include misconceptions about happiness, how we can overcome our biases, and stuff that really makes us happy. The course is taught through video lectures, optional readings, and activities to do each day to build happier habits. Click on the course title above to learn more and enroll or read a more in depth review from Business Insider here.

Your Emails, Voicemails, and Texts are Being Answered

~ makohl10 ~ Leave a comment

We may not be able to meet and help you at the library right now, but we can “meet” and help you virtually! You can still rely on us while the library is closed to provide you with excellent information to all of your reference and research questions. Librarians are staffing Reference email, voicemail, and texts throughout the day and returning messages as quickly as possible. Any messages received after 9 p.m. will be returned the next morning.

To Contact a Librarian:

Email: ref@ccls.org (or complete and submit the Contact Form on this site)

Call: 610-344-5957 and leave a voicemail, including your phone number (and email address if you have one).

Text: ref@ccls.org from your mobile device.