Sustainably Speaking: Brown County Seed Library up and running once again
GREEN BAY, Wis. (WFRV)- A local seed library is back in operation for its second season, providing the area with another option for nutritious food in the area.
The Brown County Seed Library began in March of 2023 and, in its first year, packaged around 15,000 packets of seeds with the goal in year two to exceed that number.
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A seed library is a place where anyone can go and pick up seeds to plant for no cost at all.
The Brown County Seed Library, located on the second floor of the Central Library in Green Bay, consists mainly of vegetables but also has fruits, herbs, and native plants for pollinators.
This library offers residents the opportunity to try new plants in their garden and the information as to how to tend to those plants. Northeast Wisconsin Master Gardener Melissa Wass says that the goal of the seed library goes beyond the scope of just planting seeds in the ground:
“The overall goal of the seed library is empowering people to grow nutritious food, giving people access to a source of food that they may not have considered before cause there is education for learning how to grow vegetables, how to harvest vegetables, and then how to process them to make them palatable and enjoy eating them.”
The group hosts seed packing events, where they gather and clean the chafe off the seeds, prepare the envelopes, and place the seeds into those packets. At the third seed packing event of the year on February 3rd at the Brown County Central Library, the group packaged 3,766 envelopes, bringing their yearly total up to over 11,000 on the season.
Wass says that this initiative is a great example of sustainability by helping teach others how to save seeds that may have just been forgotten about:
“One of the awesome things about our seed library is we train people to be seed stewards, which means we are training people on how to save seeds that are true to type. For example, it’s not a tomato seed. It’s a Brandywine tomato seed. Seeds that are true to type will produce the fruit year in and year out. It’s going to be consistent, so you know what you will be getting.”
Wass goes on to say that growing food right here in our area reduces the need for importing through shipping and weather, impacting the arrival of that food.
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The final seed packing event of the year is February 18th from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. at the STEM Center in Green Bay. This is in preparation for their launch date of March 2nd, 2024. The organization is continually looking for help in packaging the envelopes as well as monetary and seed donations.
Seed envelopes can be picked up anytime the Green Bay Central Library is open for business hours. To view how to tend to certain plants or get involved, that information can be found on their website.
