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Anyone with a garden knows they need a few tools to plant and tend. If you want to create garden for your workplace, the tools go beyond a hoe and some kneeling pads. You’ll need some communication and collaboration tools too.

My piece on Fortune.com gives many reasons why employee gardens are valuable and worthwhile. My previous blog post gives some more motivation for adding seeds and dirt to your employee benefits. Now it’s time to dig in and offer practical tools and tips for those who want to follow the lead of Timberland, Haberman and many other companies.

Here’s some smart suggestions if your organization wants to plant an employee garden this spring:

• Start small and grow the garden the second year. It’s easier to expand it based on serious interest than to have plants or beds go untended.
• If your company isn’t ready to commit or doesn’t have land available, find a community gardening organization and see if they’ll let you join.
• Understand your goals and if possible, articulate them before you begin. You may want to set some measures of success, too, whether it’s based on how many bags of beans you donate to the soup kitchen or how many staffers start eating healthier with produce picked from the parking lot.
• Connect the garden to your company’s mission or employment practices.  If wellness is a major theme, give staff recipes that use garden produce. If you’re trying to encourage cross-pollination, make your garden teams a hodge podge of folk. If you want to add more organic food companies or farmers to your client lists, you need to use the best practices that will resonate and impress them.
• Cultivate teamwork. If you want people to collaborate over carrots and cucumbers, set up teams that bring together people from different departments.
• Hire outside help.  Haberman uses youth to handle some of the routine weeding.
• Spread the word. A garden can help attract the people you want to your team, so include it on your website, Twitter and company Facebook page.
• Include everyone.  Hold a harvest party for all. Have a green open house or meet the bees events, as they do at Chesapeake Energy.

You also can request a booklet from Chesapeake Energy on establishing a garden by sending an email toemployeegarden@chk.com . Haberman’s website on corporate gardens also has a variety of articles and resources that could be helpful. (My kindest thanks to Haberman’s Liz Morris Otto for her assistance and ideas for this blog post and the Fortune.com article.)

Now, I’d love to hear from you what other tools, tips and resources you can offer, based on your experience as a backyard gardener or a corporate green thumb.

Some gardens produce peppers, pumpkins and tomatoes. Others grow squash and leafy greens. Still others spring forth in flowers of many hues. At Haberman, the company garden grows collaboration and problem-solving skills as well as kale and arugula.
Its garden shows the way employers use the earth and seeds to grow their teams and wellness programs.  My piece in Fortune.com gives an ample harvest of ideas and advantages.  So here I share one gardening story and some advice for managers or leaders who want to give a garden a try.
Liz Morris Otto was the first employee hired by Haberman, a media and marketing company that started on the founders’ kitchen tables in Minneapolis. Fred Haberman was a storyteller, not a gardener, yet when he heard someone talking about CSAs – community supported agriculture – he said, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had a garden?”  Otto, who has been gardening since she was a girl, offered up some expertise and a plot on her farm, 45 miles west of the company offices.
The Haberman gardens, started in 2009, are are evolving in approach and how workers participate. What has stayed the same: Everyone gets to enjoy the vegetables, and anyone who works in the garden gets first choice.
Otto’s story of a memorable moment in the gardens takes place during a major planting, with a team of gardeners who hadn’t worked together before. They drove out to the garden together and got started. “I’ve never seen a team work so well together,” she said. “They worked in such synchronicity.”
Near the end of their four hours, a storm started blowing in. Yet some tasks remained, including staking the tomatoes to hold them off the ground. “I remember telling a couple of guys – ‘The lightning’s coming but we have to get these stakes up. We have maybe 20 minutes left to work.’ ” Otto recalled. The men worked quickly, pounding and tackling other tasks.
The lightning was all around -  yet the team finished, wet and overjoyed with accomplishment.
“You’re learning something new together. You’re laughing because it’s out of your comfort zone,” Otto said.
Now Haberman includes a report on the gardens at each weekly staff meeting, and Otto said, “people have a sense of ownership on one plant.”

Lightning and learning both are important but so is the sense of joy and stress reduction that gardening can bring.  Again and again in my interviews for the Fortune.com piece, I heard how the gardens could bring positive feelings to crew. Employees who garden on a break, “come back with a really good feeling.  It’s healthy, fresh air;  for some people it’s really a godsend.” said Steve Bates,  Society of Human Resource Management online editorial manager and author of a gardening book.

The gardens at Chesapeake Energy’s Oklahoma City headquarters seem like a godsend to at least one employee, a senior geological technician we will call Ron. Before he started gardening last year, he would often wake up in the middle of the night “stressing out about spreadsheets,” recalled garden coordinator Kathryn Goodwin.  After gardening for a while, he would wake up and think about his plants or turning the compost pile and get back to sleep.  “It reduced his stress levels… It really filtered down into his work life.”  (I did not speak to Ron, which is not his real name, but gardening has been used as therapeutic tool for ex-prisoners and many others, so I tend to see this stress-reduction as a real fruit of employee gardens.)

“It really does make people happy,” said Goodwin.

Come back later this week for a second post offering advice on starting your own employee’ gardens this year. I also hope to post a couple of photos from the Haberman gardens (if my seeds of learning how to upload photos bloom!)

Unless you have a huge trust fund or a hyphenated career already going strong, you need a Plan B for your career.

And a Plan C or Z may be a smart idea too if you work for a bookstore or newspaper, a competitor to Facebook, or a sector you abhor or find a bore.

Sometimes you just discover a career path that seems to suit you better than the one you’re on, as Kate Heffley did about a few years ago while working for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. She’ appeared in my Washington Post article on how to visualize a career change and then take several steps toward it. Heffley wanted to move into corporate communications, so she decided to get a master’s in communications to set herself aside from the hoards of people seeking those jobs. That’s a major commitment to a career transition, and one that worked for her – she now works as a communications and training consultant for Booz Allen.

For those who want to start smaller than Heffley, I have some ideas to share:

• Start a Plan B file in your computer or mobile phone. Add ideas to it often – even those that seem far fetched or very difficult. Include jobs that you wish for secretly and those you qualify for now.
• When you have 15 minutes, go to the Occupational Handbook on the BLS site and read up on the best of them. Or check out materials on a professional association website, blog or career article.
• Talk to friends and colleagues about their careers – and the opportunities and possibilities they see opening up that might match your talents and personality. Use your connections to spend a few hours or even a day with someone in your dream career. (These “job shadows” are not just for teens; a company called Vocation Vacations will arrange one if you have the time and money.)
• List three to five skills you need for your favorite Plan B careers. Then rank them so you know which matter most.  Decide which ones count by reading job postings or through informational interviews with people with credentials and expertise in the field you are targeting. Then come up with a plan for developing each skill, one or two at a time.
• Create a Plan B resume and see how it looks.  At first you may think you have nothing to put on it, but look again. What pieces of your last two jobs were stepping stones to the work you want?  What volunteer work have you done to build skills? How have you demonstrated talent or abilities already? And what else do you need to make the resume shine?
• Read about successful career transitions. My piece for Kiplinger’s Personal Finance showed three people’s transitions – including a woman who went from helping to manage a pest control / extermination business to professional harpist.  Or pick up Kerry Hannon’s new book What’s Next? subtitled Follow Your Passion and Find Your Dream Job  with profiles of career changers most in their 40s and 50s.
• Find a mentor or guide for your journey. This could be a good friend who will make a great “goal buddy” or a paid career coach (if you’ve got the funds for this investment). It could be someone you meet at a professional meeting or a birthday party. It could even be your partner, in business or in life.

Among my Plan B options are work as a professor or a workshop leader. Others include a motivational speaker and career coach and developing a creativity camp and inspiration coaching practice. Little by little, I’m developing my CV in some of those areas. I’ve taught a few classes and created a seminar-support group called Jesus & the Job Hunt. A few months ago, I assisted with speed interviewing. I just produced my first writer’s workshop and I’m eager to stage others. And I’m looking for opportunities to lead workshops and short classes for career changers and for teens seeking their first job.

Even if you love your current occupation, as I do, a backup plan can give growth opportunities and more security. Life is full of ups and downs and surprises and setbacks — so carrying a flashlight or fallback career makes sense for almost all of us.

You see the numbers in your Twitter feed or headlines on your mobile phone. Job creation reaches 216,000 last month. The unemployment rate declines. Optimism in job market.

Unless you’re looking for a job as an economist or a statistician, the data may not mean much to you or your life. But there are tricks to taking the numbers and using them in your job search or career choices,  whether or not you’re actively looking at the moment.

Here’s  six ways to use unemployment to advance yourself:

1. See the big picture on the economy. The unemployment numbers give you one big picture window to see what’s happening with hiring, with employment. Pair this with a few other economic reports – consumer price index for inflation, gross domestic product and business capital spending among others – and you will be armed and ready to discuss economic conditions and corporate strategy in a job interview or at a networking event.   You may want to pick a couple of media outlets or websites for context and commentary – the Washington Post and Marketwatch are two of my favorites, and I also regularly read the New York Times. (Full disclosure: I have been a Washington Post freelancer for five years.)
2. Identify growing sectors and sub-sectors. The Bureau of Labor Statistics rolls out a huge array of data on the first Friday of each month – and some of the best of it shows up in the tables.  I highly recommend looking at Table B1, which gives industry detail on hiring. This allows us to see that amid manufacturing hiring, the strongest gains are in fabricated metal products, machinery and transportation equipment. It also indicates which retailers are growing and which are not and what sectors within health care are adding staff. Look beyond the one-month increases to see trends developing over two to four months. Then consider the sectors that are hiring steadily – and see what opportunities they could offer you. Even if you never expected to work in accounting or medical field, you could land a job managing social media or human resources for a CPA firm or a nursing home company.
3. Watch the quit rate and turnover. The BLS reports on turnover – including data on who is leaving their job voluntarily – in something called JOLTS. The quitter information may be especially useful – since people usually quit because of other better opportunities. If you see a rising quit rate, you may identify a sector that’s warming up. The changes on the quit rates are tiny many months, but these report also can help you see what sectors are cutting jobs and see how many job openings are available – 2.8 million openings at the end of February. Sometimes this data could JOLT you into action.
4. Look for one-off opportunities. As bars and restaurants add more staff, it could mean opportunities in night time promotions businesses – or for a micro-brewery or major beer distributor.  As temporary hiring continues to grow, temp firms may need more administrative and other staff.  Or you may see possibilities for consulting services in health care, which has added an average of 24,000 jobs in each of the last 12 months. Employers are adding contractors and service providers too.  Watch for indications of opportunities in smaller cities and counties too – the BLS data shows places such as Elkhart, In., and Bell, Texas, showed the biggest gains in jobs in the latest 12-month period.
5. Make your move better. If you’re being recruited for a job that requires relocation, start digging into local employment and unemployment statistics before you accept the offer. This data  could come from state labor departments or the BLS’ monthly metro unemployment report. Why is it important? Relocating for a job entails some risks – and you may also need to find work for your partner or a teen-ager once you arrive. Plus it’s good to see if there will be other opportunities, a fallback employer, if the job that recruited you is a dud.
6. Motivate yourself with optimism. The job market is warming up now and more employers are hiring – a growing array of data confirm this view, and so do media reports. So if you’ve been waiting to jump back into a search, get started now. It’s easier to be hopeful of your chances when the outlook seems better, so start or resume your job hunt today.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics also offers an excellent resource for those considering a new career path. The Occupational Outlook Handbook gives details from salaries to working conditions to hiring prospects on hundreds of jobs.

Just remember, the jobless numbers in the headlines and in this post are important windows to possibilities and opportunities. But they aren’t the door into new work. That requires a whole different data set.