Twenty-five years ago, seed packets cost a dollar or two and held several years’ worth of seeds. Today, five dollars often buys only 10 tomato seeds. This is no accident: Just four corporations control half the world’s seed supplies.
But things look different at a local level, where dedicated gardeners and growers are stepping in to enact change. The Lillooet Seed Lending Library allows gardeners to borrow seeds for the season and return them in the fall. It also provides resources to people starting a food garden and supports the preservation of disappearing plant varieties.
The library stemmed from Roots Gatherings in the St’át’imc community of T’ít’q’et, created around 2008 by Doreen Whitney and Susannah Tedesco of the Úcwalmicw Centre. The workshops focused on developing self-sufficiency skills such as canning, herbal medicine, butchering and fermentation, always ending with a feast of local foods.
Inspired by these events, eight community members later formed an ad hoc group called Lillooet Food Matters. Their core mandate is to build local food security, ensuring everyone has access to enough high-quality, affordable and nutritious food. They work towards food sovereignty for all, which takes the concept of food security one step further to include healthful, culturally appropriate foods grown in sustainable and ecologically sound ways.
While the faces have changed over the last 15 years, the primary focus on food security remains the same, and seed saving is the cornerstone of creating that security. Without seeds, there is nothing to grow.
The portable Lillooet Seed Lending Library was created in 2013 and now travels to community and seed-saving events, pops up at the Lillooet Farmers Market and visits Lillooet storefronts such as Seed to Culture and The HUB.
What Is the Seed Library?
The portable seed library is a beautiful wooden display rack that holds packages of seeds, sorted by type. Some seeds are in commercial envelopes with detailed descriptions; others are in brown paper envelopes with handwritten names.
Much like the public library, everyone is welcome to use the seed lending library. Users sign out, or “borrow,” seeds from the library and plant them. They get to eat the food they grow from the seeds, but must leave some of the plants to reach the seed-setting stage. Then, at the end of the growing season, users collect the seeds and return them to the library, fulfilling their obligation and ensuring there are seeds available the next year for someone else to try. Year after year, the seeds multiply through the gardens of the seed borrowers.
“Our goal is to encourage and support gardeners and farmers to grow our seeds for themselves and return some to the library for others to take out,” says Eleanor Wright, one of the original community members who helped set up the library. New seed savers need not worry — the library also provides instructions and support for growing selected crops and saving the seeds, including printouts about how to save seeds, sorted into easy, intermediate and advanced levels.
If gardeners already have some heirloom or rare seeds, the library wants to help preserve them. “We welcome seed donations to the library, and especially encourage the entrusting of heritage seeds to our collection,” says Wright. Lillooet Food Matters members include plenty of people with the experience and desire to maintain the viability of any valuable seeds — and they always welcome new volunteers.
Why Save Seeds?
Back in the early 1900s, everyone who grew a garden saved seeds. It was the only way to ensure food for the following year.
When seed companies became involved, they focused on high productivity and making money, rather than on creating nutritious staple foods. The diversity of culinary seeds began to decline, and the price of buying seeds increased dramatically.
By 1983, 96 percent of corn varieties, 94 percent of peas and 81 percent of tomatoes were gone. Unless someone grows the seeds and saves them each year, varieties simply disappear. If no source for the seeds remains, gone from the marketplace becomes gone forever.
Preserving plant diversity is an essential asset for finding varieties capable of growing in the shifting conditions created by climate change, so food security in the future depends on maintaining access to seeds now. That’s a big responsibility for small organizations such as the Lillooet Seed Lending Library. But it opens up opportunities for anyone to get involved, save seeds — and money — and be a part of a community effort to ensure food security and, eventually, food sovereignty for Lillooet.
Get involved: Watch for sharing events like Seedy Sunday, volunteer with the Lillooet Seed Lending Library or visit the library’s website for more information: www.lillooetfoodmatters.com/our-projects.