I spent the afternoon sorting garden seeds into
smaller packets in preparation for the spring launch of our Seed Library on
April 1 (no fooling). This marks the fourth year that we have had a lending library
for garden seeds here at the Collingwood Public Library. A Seed Library, for
those of you who are new to the idea, is a community-created library of garden
seeds that are free to loan to anyone interested in growing their own
garden. Obviously, a seed library is a
lending library only in the most extreme sense of the word “lending,” since you
can’t return a seed once you’ve planted it in the ground. But you can save some seed at the end of the
growing season and return it to the library for use the following year. That is how a Seed Library is supposed to work. In practice though, it doesn’t, …or rather it
hasn’t, and that is something that I’m
hoping to change.
To that end, we have invited Jaden Calvert to the
library on Saturday, April 9, at 1 pm, to run a seed-saving workshop. Jaden was one of the founders of the Meaford
Seed Library and is very knowledgeable about how to save garden seeds. I am hoping
that he will instill some confidence is those of us who have never done this
before, and we will see an overflowing seed library collection for 2017.
If this is something that interests you, please feel
welcome to attend. The workshop is free…just
like the seeds.
