Tag Archives: interview

Meet the Misses McGregors

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You may recall our bustling Peter Rabbit Party back in February, in which rabbit fans celebrated everything garden! At the center of the festivities were Barbara Lear and Anne Skalka from the West Trenton Garden Club. Armed with know-how and sprouting avocado trees, Barbara and Anne taught local families how their food grows from seed to snack, and helped them plant pots of their very own!

I caught up with them after the event to find out a little more about their personal connections to gardening, as well as take a peek at their gorgeous grounds…

Please tell us a little bit about yourselves!

Anne: I’m a retired CPA who practiced in Mercer County for 45 years.  For over 35 years, I ran my own my small tax and accounting practice and with my staff, we serviced approximately 700 clients. I retired in 2020. Currently, I sit on three not-for-profit agency boards whose missions are the empowerment of children and families in Mercer County. I’m the immediate past president of the Central Jersey Orchid Society and the current president of the West Trenton Garden Club.

Barbara: I have been retired for almost 18 years. I have a daughter, son in law and three grandchildren.

When did you first become interested in gardening?

Anne: I’m an avid gardener. I started in gardening in my twenties, as an antidote to the frustration I faced as a woman in what was once an all-male profession. I felt peaceful and competent with my hands in the soil. That feeling I get from gardening has sustained me throughout the years.  I got interested in orchids about 25 years ago, and my husband and I built my greenhouse in 2018.

Barbara:  Plants, gardening and nature have always been a part of my life. My parents had me pulling weeds and planting since I was a child. Even as a teenager, I had a few African Violets in my bedroom. Life and children kept me busy for many years, but once I retired there was more time to spend outside and enjoy my plants and flowers. Last year, I decided to join the West Trenton Garden Club and it was a perfect fit for me. Everyone was so friendly and so willing to talk about and share their experiences and plants.

Describe your gardens to us.

Barbara: After having to cut down many of the huge trees around our property, we decided to put in more flower and garden beds. My daughter gives me different plants for my birthday and Mother’s Day. There is always room for another plant. I also enjoy growing vegetables and then eating them. It’s so rewarding!

How did you come up with the concept “From Seed to Snack” for our Peter Rabbit event?

Anne: I’ve done “Seed to Snack” presentations with different age groups and different seeds, mainly in small classes.  I love doing it and it reminds me of the joy I’ve had watching seedlings come up. If I get at least one child to love gardening, I’ll be happy.

What was your favorite thing about the event?

Barbara:  Anne had the initial idea for our Peter Rabbit presentation, but it certainly evolved from her original plan. And with the pots and supplies Cotsen provided, it all came together as a very worthwhile and fun collaboration. The most fun part for me was watching the kids get their hands dirty.

What are the plans for your spring/summer gardens this year?

Anne: My daughter and her kids live in Wales, United Kingdom. My husband, Paul, and I bought a cottage near her and happily, the cottage has a huge well-developed garden. It also has a small greenhouse, workshop and tool shed.  In June, I’ll be leaving my garden here in New Jersey to live in Wales and will work on a very large, overgrown site that includes a pond. When we return to New Jersey, I’ll be tending my indoor garden of orchids and other house plants.

Barbara: I look forward to having a bigger vegetable garden and continuing to improve on my shade and full-sun gardens.

Barbara and Anne will be delighted to know that 2 weeks after the event, a family came into Cotsen to excitedly report that their bean was sprouting in its pot!

Three cheers for new gardeners!

And three cheers for Barbara and Anne!

Blueberries for Sal (jam edition)

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We might be edging out of blueberry season, but how about one last sweet hurrah of summer?

Robert McCloskey’s award-winning classic Blueberries for Sal is a tale of two mothers and two cubs who have a mix up in the blueberry hills of Maine. It’s also the favorite children’s book of Metadata Librarian Sal Hamerman! Sal and I had the joy of working with library intern Melanie Zhang this summer, and Melanie decided to explore both Sal’s love of the story and her own obsession with blueberry jam in today’s post. Take it away Melanie!

Picture this: you are Melanie, a very confused summer intern. It is 9AM and you have just arrived at the library to meet Sal, your new supervisor. You know nothing about Sal, except that they seem very cool. You are slightly terrified at the thought of meeting them. But then—you see it. The coolest tote bag ever known to man, emblazoned with the text “Blueberries for Sal,” and suddenly all is well.

You ask Sal about this incredible, wonderful tote bag. Do they just like blueberries a lot? Did they make this bag? Was it created specifically for them? Was it simply a miraculous coincidence? And thus, Melanie encountered for the first time the iconic picture book written and illustrated by Robert McCloskey, Blueberries for Sal.

Tragically, I never got to experience the joys of blueberry-themed picture books as a child. But fortunately, Sal did, and was kind enough to answer a few questions for me!

When did you first read Blueberries for Sal?

I first read Blueberries for Sal with my parents and grandparents on family vacations to Maine in the summer. We went every year to Mount Desert Island/Acadia National Park and picking blueberries to make muffins and pies was an essential family activity!

What is the book about?

The book is about an adventurous young child named Sal who goes blueberry picking with their mom in Maine on the side of a mountain. On the other side of the mountain, a bear cub named Little Bear is also picking blueberries with its mom. Will the two young blueberry pickers get into trouble?

What is it like to be named Sal, like blueberries, and read a book called Blueberries for Sal?

The book is really special to me because I relate so much to the main character, as a blueberry lover named Sal! I also have a similar hairstyle to Sal from the book. It brings back really special memories of vacations with my grandparents and the beautiful landscape of Maine. I look forward to reading it to my niece and nephews the next time I see them.

Big thanks to Normal Sal for the book background! And for making me hungry for blueberry foods. Now to some jam-making, because while I have not gotten the chance to pick fresh blueberries in Maine, and do not need to store up blueberry jam for the winter as Little Sal’s mother does in the book, I still want jam.

Ingredients you will need:

  • One pint of blueberries (you can use fresh picked, grocery store, or frozen)
  • 1/3 cup sugar
  • Juice of one lemon
  • Pinch of cinnamon (optional)

This recipe’s a simple one! Pop everything into a small saucepan over medium heat, stirring frequently. Once it comes to a boil, cook until your berries have all burst and your jam has thickened. Keep stirring so nothing burns!

One of my favorite parts of making jam is watching the fruit change. It goes from a bunch of blueberries and sugar sitting in a pot, to a bunch of blueberry bits swimming in sweet syrup, and then to a beautiful, thick jam. And it makes the kitchen smell amazing too!

One good way to test your jam thickness is to put a small (non-glass) dish into the freezer when you start cooking, then spoon a few drops of your hot jam onto the cold dish. That’ll give you an idea of how thick your jam will be when it has cooled down!

If you were Little Sal and her mom, you’d want to seal your jam in jars and then boil it in a water bath to kill the germs so it’ll stay good to eat all winter. As for me, I’m going to use my jam right away, so I won’t be worrying about that. Here she is!

Depending on what you are using your jam for, you can cook it to different thicknesses. For example, jam to spoon over ice cream or swirl into a cheesecake batter can be a little thinner. However, for my purposes—making a batch of blueberry thumbprint cookies—I went with a thicker consistency, which took around 20 minutes.

Here are the cookies! And one more question for Normal Sal, who taste tested them!

How were the cookies?

The blueberry thumbprint cookies were FANTASTIC! The jam was incredibly tasty and fresh and I’d love to eat them again any time!

Thanks so much, Normal Sal! Guess I’d better get back to baking…

Book cover image courtesy of Penguin Random House. Blog images courtesy of Melanie Zhang.

Our Kids Read

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Once upon a time a very wise woman, and her equally wise son, had a vision. They wanted to uplift, inspire, and make a difference in the lives of people of color. After careful research and consideration, the son decided that early literacy would be the best way to transform the futures of children of color for the better, helping them reach their truest potential and rejoice in a love of learning and the power of their intellects.

And so, the fantastic non-profit organization Our Kids Read was created by Jahmal Lake, in honor of his mother, Dr. Obiagele Lake. Our Kids Read has a two-fold mission: 1) To place free books into the hands of children and schools; and 2) To offer a remote “Reading Buddy” program to build literacy confidence through mentoring and companionship.

To date, Our Kids Read has placed hundreds of thousands of free books into the hands of children, participated in numerous free book festivals, and reached young readers ages 4-12 in Atlanta, Seattle, Los Angeles, Long Island, Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. In the fall of 2024, it built its first “Read in Color” Little Free Library at an elementary school. Last month, they exponentially expanded that concept by collaborating with Scholastic Books to open an entire Free Book Store in Baltimore, Maryland! Their reading buddy program is thriving with volunteer mentors from Verizon, Microsoft, Nike, and Sephora.

We were delighted and honored to catch up with Jahmal and talk inspirations and aspirations…

Hi Jahmal! Tell us a little about yourself!

I’m a child of the 80s who only recently found my life’s work, my true passion. I spent most of my career as a senior IT leader at American Express Bank, Booz Allen and U.S. Treasury, now I’m running a non-profit that’s taking aim at the country’s literacy crisis! I joined this fight in my 40s and sometimes wish I’d realized earlier that this was my calling but then I think of all of the lessons I learned during the first 40 years of my life that I’m applying as I build this organization and it all makes sense.

You uplift kids through literacy – what were some of your favorite books growing up?

Growing up I was for sure a sci-fi and horror nerd. Stephen King was my absolute favorite author, I remember reading It and Christine when I was eleven or 12 and I could visualize the characters in the story. I can’t pick just one genre or one author though, Madelein L’Engle, Toni Morrison, Ray Bradbury, Douglas Adams (oh wow, can’t forget So Long and Thanks for All the Fish!) and if I’m honest even some steamy romance as a pre-teen. There was never a pattern to what I read. I’d check out 20-30 books every week from the Tompkins County Public Library in Ithaca (my mother was a student at Cornell University for my elementary and middle school). I would just wander around the library with my favorite librarian (Gary) and he’d point out books to me and I’d read the first few pages to see if I liked it, then I’d throw it in my backpack. It was a marvelous childhood. I was an only child and these books kept me company. I NEVER felt lonely, my active (perhaps overactive) imagination took care of that.

Please share how your amazing non-profit was founded.

The non-profit was technically founded in 2019 but didn’t begin operations until 2021 when we got our 501c3. And this was really my mothers vision that she put on my shoulders when she passed a few years ago. We found out in May of 2020 that my mom had mesothelioma and by June of the same year she was no longer with us. In that last month she made me promise to move the dream of Our Kids Read forward in a major way and use at least $50,000 of my inheritance to kickstart the organization’s operations. So that’s exactly what I did. We applied for and were granted our 501(c)(3) status in November of 2021 and received major book grants from the NY Public Library and Scholastic shortly thereafter, over $1M worth of books between the two. We have given away over 120,000 children’s books since we started.

You began your work in 2020, it’s now 2024. What is the most valuable thing you’ve learned in four years?

The most valuable thing I’ve learned in the past 4 years is that childhood illiteracy is a solvable problem. I think as someone approaching the problem from the outside, it’s almost given me an advantage that practitioners who are deep in this space might not have. I’m questioning some fundamental assumptions about how we teach children to read, the biggest of which is that teaching a child to read is solely the school’s responsibility. It’s absolutely not. Children learn language at such an early age that by the time they get to pre-K at 5 years old or Kindergarten at 6 years old, you’ve already missed out on 4 critical years of language development. I believe that we as a society need to embrace technology to create an AI that is FREE that parents can use to teach their children how to read in the home, before they even get to school. A friend said to me recently, “if slaves could learn how to read in the dark, we can use AI to teach toddlers to read on a tablet.” Truer words.

Also in the past four years, what has been your proudest moment? Or your most significant experience?

I think my proudest moment was seeing the opening of the Baltimore Literacy hub recently and seeing the news story on CBS and thinking “wow mom, this is happening!” I honestly am not the guy to sit back and give myself credit for anything. Which I know is not good. If you never take time to appreciate the small wins it becomes a seemingly endless grind. But it’s something I struggle with. I’m always thinking about what I could have done better or what is outstanding, things that still need to get done. But when I saw the CBS new story and the anchor said something like “Jahmal Lake recalled how much he enjoyed reading as a kid” I have to admit, I might have teared up a little. So great to see this dream coming to fruition.

Please tell us about your national Free Book Festivals.

The Free Book Festivals are really just a hook to get students enrolled in our free evening Reading Buddies program. For the Festivals, we bring around 1,000 free books to an elementary school or community center, along with West African drummers and storytellers, to get students excited about story and reading. The storytellers act out the stories accompanied by rhythms that match the story. At the end of the performance we let each of the students in attendance pick out 3 free books and give then a flyer to sign up for our Reading Buddies program. We typically get 20% of the students to receive the flyer ultimately enrolled in the reading program. Not the greatest conversion percentage, but I’ll take it! At this rate we will be able to get over 1 million students enrolled by the year 2030.

What are your biggest goals for the future of Our Kids Read?

The biggest goals for the future of Our Kids Read is becoming a household name and making childhood illiteracy like polio, a thing of the past. We know it’s possible and as technologists we aim to leverage AI to make sure it happens in our lifetime.

Images courtesy of Our Kids Read