If you’re growing plants this season, the library is here to help with an easy kit from the pros at Didier, links to local plant sales that benefit the College of Lake County and the forest preserves, and expert advice for new and experienced gardeners alike.
Garden Starter Kit Purchase a five-plant kit from Didier Farms ($9.49 + tax) to get your garden underway this season. Each kit includes 2 tomato plants, 2 pepper plants, and 1 bean plant. Orders are due May 21 and supplies are limited. Pick up your kit June 3 or 4 at Didier Farms, 16678 Aptakisic Rd., Lincolnshire. To order: complete this form before 2 p.m. Friday, May 21 College of Lake County Plant Sale The CLC horticulture department is holding its annual plant sale fundraiser virtually this year. Choose from herbs, annuals, perennials, floral hanging baskets, and vegetable plants. Purchase online now through Monday, May 3. Pickup is contact-free, May 6–12, at the college. Proceeds help support CLC horticulture student scholarships and internships. Lake County Forest Preserves Native Plant Sale Shop the forest preserve's popular annual sale online this year; your order ships to your door. Choose from native ferns, flowers, plants, shrubs or woody plants suited to almost any backyard. Native plants are beautiful, hardy, easy to maintain, beneficial to the environment, and thrive in Illinois gardens. Get all the details at lcfpd.org/plant-sale. Gardening Clinic with Master Gardeners • adults Get answers to all your gardening questions from the master gardeners of the University of Illinois Extension Office. Live online event. Friday, May 21, 1 p.m. • SIGN UP (required) How to Plant a Garden • grades K–8 with an adult An expert from the Lake County Forest Preserve's Bonner Heritage Farm provides basics for planting your own vegetable garden this growing season in this live online event. Saturday, June 5, 11 a.m. • SIGN UP (required) Take a turn helping in the Library Garden
The vegetable garden at the library returns this summer and you can help! Volunteering is a great way to enjoy the warm weather and support our community, since all vegetables are donated to neighbors in need. Helping in the garden is light work and all ages are welcome (children must be accompanied by an adult). Volunteer on your own, with a friend, or as a family or small group.
Questions? Email garden@VAPLD.info.
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 © NPR / Eda Uzunlar This illustration is from "Place of Peace and Security: Bringing the Library Home During the Pandemic," an online comic by National Public Radio intern Eda Uzunlar. It's part of a series that tells the stories of how, amid the backdrop of a global pandemic, students are being educated in entirely new ways.
The April 27 edition tells the story of how librarian Emily Curtis and bus driver Edwin Steer of Georgetown, Texas, have created places of "peace and security" by delivering books to students. Read it now. Your library continues to deliver the escape and comfort that books offer. Use these library services to connect with your next good book:
If you don’t have a Vernon Area Library card, get one now so you can use all these services. If you need help, please connect live with a librarian, Monday–Thursday 9 a.m.–7 p.m., Friday and Saturday 9 a.m.–5 p.m., and Sunday 10 a.m.–5 p.m. Happy reading! End of quarantine for returns4/28/2021  We no longer quarantine your returned materials for 7 days before we check them in. You may notice your library account now shows your returns as quickly as the next day.
The updated procedures are based on the newest information from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that says the risk of catching COVID-19 from surfaces is very low. Returned books and other materials are held overnight. During that time they are exposed to a high-intensity ultraviolet light and saturated with ozone, which reaches and sterilizes irregular surfaces. This provides an added level of protection and peace of mind for library employees who handle thousands of items each day. Library staff continue to follow a number of precautions to ensure that they remain safe as they handle returned materials. All employees wear masks while in the library. We clean bins and sorting areas regularly. We encourage frequent hand washing and provide hand sanitizer. Continued research from the CDC and others shows that COVID-19 mainly spreads through respiratory droplets in the air. You help protect yourself and others and bring this pandemic to an end when you
 Movie nights get a fresh take with a Binge Bag from your library. Each bag includes four to six DVDs on a theme. Choose from 56 different flavors, with great choices for viewers of all ages and preferences. Here’s a sampling.
Road Trip A good choice for this moment, when we’re all itching to be somewhere outside our own four walls. Includes The Blues Brothers, It Happened One Night, Little Miss Sunshine, Thelma & Louise, National Lampoon's Vacation, and Planes, Trains and Automobiles. Weddings It’s almost wedding season again, though celebrations are bound to be different. Take a deep dive into the ceremonies, festivities, and antics that surround two people making a commitment. Includes Bridesmaids, Father of the Bride, My Best Friend's Wedding, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, Wedding Crashers, and The Wedding Singer. DC Universe Superhero adventures provide a terrific escape from the ordinary. Includes Aquaman, Captain Marvel, Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman. (If Marvel is more your thing, we’ve got you covered with three Avengers Binge Bags.) 007 Sampler Suave, daring, and on a mission: James Bond doesn’t disappoint adventure-seekers. Includes Casino Royale, Golden Eye, Goldfinger, The Living Daylights, On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and The Spy Who Loved Me. Dreamworks G-rated animation that’s fun for the whole family. Includes How to Train Your Dragon, Shrek, Trolls, Kung Fu Panda, The Boss Baby, and Madagascar. If your interest is piqued, browse all Binge Bags now and reserve your pick(s) for curbside pickup. Keep each bag for up to three weeks. A good planet is hard to find4/22/2021 
Earth Day is a good time to learn more, get inspired, and even take some action. To pique your interest, we've selected fiction and nonfiction reads devoted to specific environmental concerns.
Protecting our water
The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan (nonfiction)
The Great Lakes—Michigan, Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario—hold 20 percent of the world’s supply of surface fresh water and provide sustenance, work, and recreation for tens of millions of Americans. But they are under threat as never before, and their problems are spreading across the continent. The Death and Life of the Great Lakes is prize-winning reporter Dan Egan’s compulsively readable portrait of an ecological catastrophe happening right before our eyes, blending the epic story of the lakes with an examination of the perils they face and the ways we can restore and preserve them for generations to come. [e-book | print] Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy (fiction) Franny Stone has always been the kind of woman who is able to love but unable to stay. Leaving behind everything but her research gear, she arrives in Greenland with a singular purpose: to follow the last Arctic terns in the world on what might be their final migration to Antarctica. Franny talks her way onto a fishing boat, and she and the crew set sail, traveling ever farther from shore and safety. But as Franny’s history begins to unspool—a passionate love affair, an absent family, a devastating crime—it becomes clear that she is chasing more than just the birds. [e-book | print | large type | audiobook] The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (fiction) In the midst of a mysterious environmental crisis, as London is submerged below flood waters, a woman gives birth to her first child, Z. Days later, the family are forced to leave their home in search of safety. As they move from place to place, shelter to shelter, their journey traces both fear and wonder as Z's small fists grasp at the things he sees, as he grows and stretches, thriving and content against all the odds. This is a story of new motherhood in a terrifying setting: a familiar world made dangerous and unstable, its people forced to become refugees. [e-book | print | audiobook]
Protecting our climate
How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The Solutions We Have and the Breakthroughs We Need by Bill Gates (nonfiction)
Bill Gates has spent a decade investigating the causes and effects of climate change. In this book, he not only explains why we need to work toward net-zero emissions of greenhouse gases, but also details what we need to do to achieve this profoundly important goal. Drawing on his understanding of innovation and what it takes to get new ideas into the market, he describes the areas where technology is already helping to reduce emissions, where and how the current technology can be made to function more effectively, where breakthrough technologies are needed, and who is working on these essential innovations. [e-book | print] The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells (nonfiction) Without a revolution in how billions of humans conduct their lives, parts of the Earth could become close to uninhabitable and other parts horrifically inhospitable, as early as the end of this century. In his travelogue of our near future, David Wallace-Wells brings into stark relief the climate troubles that await—food shortages, refugee emergencies, and other crises that will reshape the globe. But the world will be remade by warming in more profound ways as well, transforming our politics, our culture, our relationship with technology, and our sense of history. It will be all-encompassing, shaping and distorting nearly every aspect of human life as it is lived today. [e-book | print] We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer (nonfiction) Jonathan Safran Foer explores the central global dilemma of our time in a surprising, deeply personal, and urgent new way. The task of saving the planet will involve a great reckoning with ourselves—with our all-too-human reluctance to sacrifice immediate comfort for the sake of the future. We have, he reveals, turned our planet into a farm for growing animal products, and the consequences are catastrophic. Only collective action will save our home and way of life. And it all starts with what we eat—and don’t eat—for breakfast. [e-book | print]
Protecting our plants
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert (fiction)
Spanning much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the novel follows the fortunes of the extraordinary Whittaker family as led by the enterprising Henry Whittaker—a poor-born Englishman who makes a great fortune in the South American quinine trade, eventually becoming the richest man in Philadelphia. Born in 1800, Henry's brilliant daughter, Alma (who inherits her father's money and his mind), ultimately becomes a botanist of considerable gifts herself. As Alma's research takes her deeper into the mysteries of evolution, she falls in love with a man named Ambrose Pike who makes incomparable paintings of orchids and who draws her in the exact opposite direction—into the realm of the spiritual, the divine, and the magical. [e-book | print | audiobook] Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver (fiction) It wouldn’t be an environmentally focused reading list without a Barbara Kingsolver book; like The Signature of All Things, this also features a female biologist. From her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin, reclusive wildlife biologist Deanna Wolfe watches a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region. She is caught off-guard by a young hunter who invades her this private space, confounding her self-assured, solitary life. On a farm several miles down the mountain, Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land that has become her own. [e-book | print | audiobook] Lab Girl by Hope Jahren (nonfiction) Acclaimed biologist Hope Jahren has built three laboratories in which she’s studied trees, flowers, seeds, and soil. Her first book is a revelatory treatise on plant life—but it is also so much more. Lab Girl is a book about work, love, and the mountains that can be moved when work and love come together. It is told through Jahren’s stories: about her childhood in rural Minnesota, with an uncompromising mother and a father who encouraged hours of play in his classroom’s labs; about how she found a sanctuary in science and learned to perform lab work done “with both the heart and the hands”; and about the inevitable disappointments, but also the triumphs and exhilarating discoveries, of scientific work. [e-book | print | audiobook] If you've already read Jahren's excellent memoir, she has a new book addressing climate changes, The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here [print].
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Read past book blogs at VAPLD.info/readers. You're raising a reader; the library is here to help.  Nurture early learning skills with Little Pages & Play Boxes, a monthly subscription for ages 0–2. These boxes are designed to build the foundation for reading in babies and tots. Each month's box includes:
 Reading begins at birth, so library storytimes do, too. Each online session is filled with rhymes, songs, read-alouds, and simple movements to do with your tot, right where you are.
Baby Rhyme Storytime • 0–14 months Miss Kelsey guides you and your baby through research-based activities and books that promote reading readiness. Sign in 15 minutes before the storytime for New Parents Meetup, casual conversation with other local parents. 10–10:30 a.m. Wednesdays, May 5, 12, 19 • SIGN UP (required) Wiggling Ones • 12–24 months Giggle, sing, and jam along with your toddler in this music- and movement-centered program led by Miss Heather. 10–10:30 a.m. Tuesdays, May 4, 11, 18 • SIGN UP (required) View all pre-K storytimes and events  You know Lynda, the learning platform featuring thousands of video tutorials on a variety of subjects like programming, business, design, photography, and marketing. All those expert-taught courses are now part of Linkedin Learning, where they have a fresh new look that's easier to use. Plus there are new courses. And some are offered in other languages. Here's what else you need to know:
If you need help, visit the LinkedIn Learning FAQs or contact the library. Go to LinkedIn Learning now. Find other career-building resources in the Careers & Job-Hunting Guide.
 Walls for the new drive-up window and workspace go up at Vernon Area Public Library on April 9. Spring's mild weather has been a boon to the construction project under way at the library. Over the past few days, the walls for the new drive-up window and adjoining workspace were put up (pictured above) and the soffit for the new covered walkway (pictured below) was installed. The progress is encouraging, and it bodes well for the anticipated June reopening of the library building. These are the services we're working to roll out after construction is done:
Of course, all building reopening plans depend on local COVID-19 measurements. If the situation changes, we may need to pause. Thank you for doing your part to help bring the pandemic to an end. As of yesterday, Monday, April 12, all Illinois residents ages 18 and up are eligible to be vaccinated. Learn more about vaccine safety and efficacy, and how to schedule your appointment at VAPLD.info/coronavirus.  The soffit for the new covered walkway is installed at the library, April 9.  Librarian Lynne Butler (center) holds a shovel at the 1973 groundbreaking of Vernon Area Public Library’s first building, on Indian Creek Road. The library has received a $5,000 donation from the Butler Family Foundation. The gift was made by Lincolnshire resident Gilbert Adams in honor of his wife, Lynne Butler Adams, who was head librarian at Vernon Area from 1973 to 1985. The donation allows the library to begin a pilot program offering portable assistive technology devices for people with low vision, extending access to print materials.
The library is acquiring two types of handheld electronic devices that allow people with visual impairments to read print materials, regardless of format. The Ruby XL HD is a video magnifier with an auto-focus camera. When held up to a print source such as a book or newspaper, the device displays a clear, enlarged image on a high-resolution screen, which can be adjusted for optimal viewing. The Ruby XL HD retails for $895. The OrCam Read will also be purchased. Priced at $1800, the device features a smart camera and reads text aloud from any printed surface or digital screen. The OrCam also responds to voice commands, allowing the user to request specific content, such as an entire page, headlines or the desserts section of a menu. This device is useful for people with low vision and those who are blind. Initially the Ruby XL and OrCam Read will be made available to local senior centers. An early evaluation by Sunrise of Buffalo Grove was enthusiastic. Activities Coordinator Sue Church called both tools “amazing,” adding that the devices go beyond books to “help with daily living situations, including reading the paper, which I know residents with low vision miss.” Church added that many lifelong readers would prefer to continue to read independently, not be read to. “For some, large print text has become a struggle,” she said. As head librarian, Lynne Butler played a critical role in establishing Vernon Area Library and fostering its early growth. She began her work when the library was located in a temporary building in the parking lot of Adlai Stevenson High School. Butler took part in the ground-breaking ceremonies for the first library building, situated along Indian Creek Road. (Today that building is called “the Annex,” providing office and meeting space.) Throughout her tenure, Butler faithfully served the public and attended board meetings before retiring in 1985. As an area resident, she has remained involved in the life of the library, attending author events, book discussions and retirement parties for her colleagues. Vernon Area Library delivers books, DVDs and other materials to 13 local senior centers. For more information, visit VAPLD.info/seniors.  Photo by Lucy Hewett, © 2018 Field Museum Vernon Area is among the 41 public libraries partnering to offer "Your City @ Home" — a series of virtual field trips and lectures from nine world-class, Chicago-area cultural destinations.
The online events kicked off on Saturday, April 5, with an at-capacity Shedd Aquarium event. Your City @ Home continues each weekend through May. The series includes virtual tours of and talks from household favorites like the Chicago Children's Museum (May 1), the Art Institute of Chicago (May 15), and the Field Museum (May 22), along with the opportunity to discover smaller institutions such as the National Museum of Mexican Art (April 24) and the DuSable Museum of African American History (April 10). "We are excited to offer this safe and accessible way of 'visiting' so many excellent Chicago-area cultural treasures right now," said Vernon Area Library Program Coordinator Roz Topolski. "We hope these events help those who are feeling stuck at home to experience something fun and maybe discover some new places to eventually visit in person." The events are free, open to all and are hosted on the Zoom platform. Registration is required. View the calendar. |