As I said in my previous post, interest in homegrown food is taking off. One barrier to getting started in gardening is access to tools. If you've never gardened before, it can be a significant investment to get the set of tools to turn over some sod and get started. Especially if you invest in good tools. If you're turning to gardening to save food dollars in the short run, it's little consolation that good tools are the least expensive ones in the long run.

Some of Vermont's libraries have stepped in to help out. Ruth Hare has an article in today's Times Argus and Rutland Herald, describing the wealth of non-book items that libraries in Vermont lend out, including gardening tools.

Baldwin Memorial Library in Wells River loans out a four-person tent, five pairs of snowshoes, a couple of fishing poles (it's BYOL — bring your own lures), a posthole digger, garden rake, seeder for planting, gardening fork and more...

In Vermont's largest city, Fletcher Free Library serves the community's many storage-challenged apartment dwellers by lending an assortment of yard and garden tools. Safety counts here, too.

"We try not to have any tools that are hazardous," says Lorrie Colburn of the circulation department. That means no chainsaw, no matter how often people may ask for one.

Instead, the library maintains a collection of rakes, push brooms, cultivators, posthole diggers, trowels and other items — "anything that helps beautify and clean up the city," says Colburn. They're attractively arranged behind a picket fence tool stand with artificial flowers.

The collection also includes snow shovels, and people have been known to borrow them in the winter to make a little money clearing driveways and steps, she reports.

Kill-a-Watt digital electrical meters, useful for tracking down where your household or business has the biggest opportunities to save electricity, are also stocked at many libraries.

How about calling up your local library and seeing whether their collection includes gardening tools? And, if not, why not suggest they buy the basics?