Seed Library Launches at Lake Country Montessori School

This spring marked the launch of a Community Seed Library at Lake Country Montessori School in Minneapolis. By choosing to take home a packet of seeds or plant start from the Seed Library, participants join a community of seed stewards. By saving seeds together in our local community we build food security, increase our resiliency in the face of climate change, and connect experientially to diverse foodways.

Lake Country is unique in that it maintains a working farm, known as the Land School, located in Wisconsin, an hour outside the Twin Cities. Students travel out to the Land School on a regular basis, for day trips and extended stays. When students reach junior high, they participate in Land School residencies, living and working on the farm for three weeks.

The Lake Country Seed Library is one piece of a larger Seed Stewardship Program, including both cultivated and wild seeds native to the Upper Midwest. Not only are students involved in selecting open pollinated seed varieties to fill the Seed Library, they also take part in growing and tending the seed garden at the Land School, where ultimately most of the seeds for the library will be sourced.

By checking out seeds from the Seed Library, community members are committing to planting what they take home, and making an earnest attempt to collect and dry the seeds to bring back to the library next fall. Because one seed can generate many seeds come harvest time, the growth potential is exponential. Most important to the mission of the Seed Library is the message that growing seeds and tending a garden is a grand experiment. Ultimately we want to get people growing their own plants from seed. Participants are encouraged to enjoy the learning journey and not stress too much about the end result.

Over fifty families have checked out seeds this spring. Popular varieties include the Armenian Cucumber, Hopi Black Dye Sunflower, Dutch Butter Popcorn, and Caribe Cilantro. After a kick off at the Lake Country School Plant Sale in May, the seeds now live in the school library, where they are available to be checked out by community members through the end of the school year. We look forward to seeing photos from gardens across the Twin Cities this summer, and working with families to mentor new gardeners in reclaiming the essential skill of seed keeping.

Abby Fenton, Parent and Volunteer Seed Librarian