Tulsa People magazine, January, 1997
Text from the article appears below.


Cyber-Gardening
Tulsa horticulturist Mary Bolack develops The Ultimate Gardening Tool
by Caroline Swinson

Sitting in front of the computer in her home office, horticulturist Mary Bolack recalls the chain of events that led her to develop The Ultimate Garden Tool, a CD-ROM searchable gardening rererence collection. "The Tool" contains over 14,000 pages of expert advice on garden plants, tasks, and problems from some 3,000 documents by state cooperative extension services and federal government agencies, plant societies, urban garden associations and commercial plant organizations.

And it all began with a bee sting.

"I was standing outside in the middle of Kansas State University's perennial beds, and I got stung by a very lucky bee who got me in a blood vessel," remembers Bolack of her last semester in graduate school, only a thesis away from earning her Master's degree in horticulture while single parenting two small children who had often accompanied her to classes.

"I started to say, 'Oh. . .' and didn't get it out. That's how fast I went down. I was dead for 22 minutes. And that ended the horticulture career."

Or so she thought.

Moving to Tulsa a year later, Bolack found a job in the health insurance industry and began selling health insurance to small businesses. But she never lost her love for horticulture, and when she learned about the Oklahoma State University Cooperative Extension Service's training program for Master Gardeners she got involved.

While attending a national convention of Master Gardeners in San Antonio, Texas, Bolack saw the future in "a CD that the University of Florida's Extension Program had done. It was all in DOS, very unfriendly and very slow. But it was a revelation."

Realizing the potential value of such a ready reference tool to OSU Master Gardeners who field some 20,000 gardening questions a year, Bolack says, "I came home thinking, 'if they can do this, we can do this.' "

She first consulted "The Geek," as she affectionately calls her computer programmer son David, who, like any good teacher, told her to go look up her software options at the library.

Her call to the Central Library on an icy day found a helpful librarian with time on her hands who, as Bolack recalls with a smile, "spent a good deal of time hunting me up reviews of document management programs and literally ran me out of fax paper that day faxing all that stuff to me."

She ultimately chose the Caere Corporation's Pagekeeper program because of its fast searching speed and its capability to do free form and boolean searching, to produce prioritized listings of search results with source notation, and to take the user directly to the search term in the document.

"But it had not occurred to Caere that this would make a good reference tool," says Bolack. "This [program] was developed back in the days when everyone was talking about the paperless office. So when I started talking to them about what I was doing with their program they got interested and kind of took me under their wing."

Initial support from the Tulsa Master Gardener Foundation got the project started, but when the Foundation decided not to continue funding it, Bolack started over on her own, spurred on by both its potential and the enthusiastic response she was getting from the Internet gardening community of which she is an active member.

Accumulating the material for her database proved to be easy. "As soon as people found out that I was not trying to pretend that I wrote all this stuff," explains Bolack, noting that each document is credited according to its source, "they started filling my mail box up."

About half of the documents arrived as hard copy and had to be scanned into her computer. The other half Bolack downloaded from the Internet, an equally time consuming process.

"The hardest part was deciding when to stop adding information," she continues. "I had this waiting list—the University of Saskatchewan, Cornell, Virginia Tech, some of the real bastions of the Master Gardener community—and they were calling me up asking when I was going to have CDs. So I finally had to set a stopping date and stick to it."

Two and a half years later that date arrived, and Bolack again turned to her son David who, in addition to a full-time job with a local Internet provider, has a small computer publishing company called Electric Mulch, Inc.

Because of the Caere Corporation's interest and involvement in the project, David was able to turn to them and work out a mutually beneficial arrangement to get the CDs pressed. He then began marketing the CDs on the Internet, and the orders started arriving. Although she has kept her day job selling health insurance, Mary Bolack is optimistic about the future of the CD.

"I'll probably do an update every other year until the end of time if this thing supports itself like it looks like it's going to. "Goodness knows more material comes out all the time," she says with a laugh, gesturing toward a box of documents waiting to be input. "It could become a 6 CD set in 10 years. "


Caught Up in the Web
"The Internet is really an absolute feast for gardeners," says Mary Bolack. "Every single day there's something new and wonderful coming up."

Here's a sampling of some of Bolack's favorite websites.

The Ultimate Garden Tool (her own website) at http://www.hortsoft.com gives specific information about the CD and serves as a link to her other favorite websites.

Joe and Mindy's Garden at http://www.nhn.ou.edu/-howard/garden.html is created and maintained by a couple at the University of Oklahoma. This is Bolack's "if I had to pick just one" choice.

ICanGarden at http://www.lCanGarden.com is a Canadian gardening resource and Bolack's second favorite site.

The Garden Web at http.//www.gardenweb.com offers gardening discussion groups, garden tips, seed request postings, and more.

The Cyber-Plantsman at http.//www. gardenweb.com/cyberplt is an online gardening magazine compiled by West Virginia nurseryman Barry Glick.

USDA Index of Cooperative Extension Sites at http.//www.esusda.gov/partners/ces-locs.htm#IN provides a source of links to all the state cooperative extension agencies that are online.