This past Tuesday I took our daughter to help organize the seed library, and she was floored by the opportunity to pull apart the seeds from a giant sunflower (she’s 4.5 months old). We swapped and categorized a bunch of plants, from annual flowers to veggies and native perennials. I took home some loofah seeds and won’t lie - I’m pretty excited to grow them this year.
We’re getting snow today so I’ve been continuing to split and store seeds for our own purposes, with an extra envelope of each to bring to the library. There’s a grow tent in the garage that’s probably going to be the overflow space for some of our hardier indoor plants so I can devote the grow closet in our hallway to seedlings and starts in the next week.
What’s growing on with you all?
I love this with every fiber of my being, in part because I had to look up all of those plants! Can you tell us more about the native plant nursery you volunteer with, or how you go about locating and eco-sourcing the seeds?
Also how does a seed library work? is it where people bring there excess grown seeds to share with others, because if so that’s so cool, I wish we had a thing like that here
Yes! The “check out” procedure is writing down what you took and promising to do your best to bring seeds back when you harvest so others can grow them too. Our library repurposed one of the old card catalogue drawer sections to organize the seeds. The whole thing is relatively small, and is on a mobile wheelchair accessible table. It’s totally worth seeing if your nearby library would host it. Our local grocery store even donated packets this year.
@nettle @LallyLuckFarm be the change you wish to see in the world
Thank you for your lovely reply. I’ll try and answer as best as I can.
I stumble across most seed’s while doing other things in the forest such as tramping or pest trapping. While the Kowhai seeds I grab from a beautiful old naturally bonsaid tree on an island I do conservation on.
The idea of eco-sourcing is that plants of the same species have regional variation which makes them better suited/more benificial for that region. So we want to plant planted with seed that came from a wild plant in the ecological region they are planted in. (Another benifit of wild plants is more genetic diversity).
The nursery is purely for conservation and is partnered with our department of conservation they sell plants at a price low enouph to buy the stuff to grow more plants and everyone there is a volenteer growing plants for fun (mostly lovely old people).
I think I can safely speak for folks here and say that we would love to see some pictures of your next collection trip!