SEEDS OF DEFIANCE
Seed lending offers way to resist commercial farming, production
When Rosie and her family immigrated to the United States from Italy generations ago, they brought precious seeds with them, carefully wrapped in linen — a touchstone of home and an investment in the future. Each season, the seeds were planted in their Richmond garden, the crops grown and another generation of seed saved. Among them: a family favorite known now as Great-Great Aunt Rosie’s pole beans.
For years, the beans were raised in backyard gardens of entire neighborhoods. Now, you too can grow Aunt Rosie’s famous pole beans, thanks to the Richmond Grows Seed Lending Library, which offers vegetable, flower and herb seeds free to anyone who wants to grow them.
More than 660 seed-lending libraries have sprung up in recent years, not just around the Bay Area, but across the nation and around the world. Housed inside public libraries, the seeds — and
their stories — are part of an effort to reconnect people to the land and community, and to restore seed diversity that has been lost. These seeds, like those of the Rosie beans, are investments in the future, a bulwark against climate change and a commitment to diversity.
Plant diversity began slipping away during the Industrial Revolution when the first children left their family farms for the promises of the industrial age. Since then, we've turned more and more to commercial farms, many of them owned and operated by huge commercial conglomerates, for both our food and seeds. Half the seed varieties in the world today hail from DowDuPont, Bayer-Monsanto and Syngenta-ChemChina, according to Mark Schapiro, an investigative journalist and author of the 2018 book “Seeds of Resistance: The Fight to Save Our Food Supply.”
“Most of the seed companies are owned by chemical companies,” says Rebecca Newburn, co-founder of Richmond Grows. “They don't care about selling seed. They care about selling chemicals.”
Hundreds of fruit and vegetable varieties have been phased out of commercial farming and seed production in the past 150 years, Newburn says. Most produce is grown with an eye to uniform ripening, the ability to withstand shipping, and hardiness in the field with never a thought to Rosie, her two sisters and the three brothers they married — and those delicious beans.
Hillie Salo, founder of one of the first Bay Area seed libraries, Silicon Valley Grows and the One Seed, One Community initiative, says seed saving and sharing is both an individual act and a community effort.
“The food we eat today,” Salo says, “is brought to us by the careful selection of many hands, year after year, thousands of times, over and over. Planting and saving a seed links you to all humanity, those we follow and the generations ahead. By saving a seed, we are ensuring those possibilities.”
Seed libraries are facilitating those possibilities by going back to the beginning, with the home gardener.
“It will be gardeners — and has always been gardeners — all over the world that will preserve the future of seeds and our food,” Salo says.
The libraries work on the honor system. Take what you want and what you need. Plant it, harvest some of the seed for yourself, share with your friends and neighbors, and return some to the library.
“It's a joyful experience,” Newburn says.
Newburn, who designed the model for other Bay Area seed-lending libraries, says gardeners improve their chances for success when they grow varieties that are time tested by their neighbors. Not all tomato seeds thrive in Richmond's microclimate, but one that has been grown there for generations has adapted to those specific conditions.
Saving seed is important as we move forward toward an uncertain future, Salo says.
“A broad genetic base is necessary to keep plant populations strong. When problems occur or growing conditions change,” Salo says, “it is good to have a wide variety of genes in the mix to come to the rescue. The genetic diversity, so necessary to maintain, lies in the hands of individuals and small seed companies.”
In addition to the broader role seed saving plays, the libraries help build communities.
Emily Odza, who oversees the seed-lending library at the Weekes branch of the Hayward Public Library, says it's rewarding to see gardeners get to know one another, talk about what they're planting and growing, and share tips.
“They really engage with other people,” Odza says, “and we have books on gardening and workshops to help them. We've lost ownership of food production. This is a good way to take some of it back.”
Most of the seed-lending libraries also participate in Salo's One Seed, One Community, which was inspired by the literary “one book, one community” idea. Salo encourages people to grow the same plant and return a portion of the resulting seed to a lending library.
This year's choice is Cherokee Trail of Tears, a bean whose heritage traces back to the seeds the Cherokee carried with them on the forced march from their native lands in 1838 to reservations in what is now Oklahoma, part of a decadeslong relocation of Native Americans. Encased in greenish-purple pods, the shiny, jet-black beans are an important part of Cherokee culture and cuisine.
Cheryl Zuur grew the bean plants in her garden this year, planting four — enough, she says, to share the seed with friends, give some back to the library and still enjoy the beans herself.
Many of the plants in Zuur's garden are from seeds “loaned” by the Hayward library and other sources, but as her interest in seed saving has grown, she's started sharing seeds with friends and acquaintances, creating a diverse garden.
“I love not having to buy seed from companies that don't have our best interest in mind,” she says. “There's personal satisfaction of being part of something that is sustainable and part of the world's cultural story.”