How seed libraries work.

Borrowing seed.

Most seed libraries keep their packets in a cabinet in the public part of the building, often an old wooden card catalog, sorted by crop. You browse, pick what you want, and note what you took on a sheet or a card. At some libraries staff hand the seed out, and a few let you reserve packets through the online catalog the way you would put a book on hold.

1. Check that it is open. Many run from late winter into early summer and close when the planting season ends or the drawers run low.
2. Take what you will plant. Limits are common, usually a few packets per visit or per month, so the collection lasts the season.
3. Grow it. Read the packet. Donated seed is not tested the way store seed is, so sow a little extra.
4. Save some seed if you can. Beans, peas, lettuce and tomatoes are the easy ones to start with. Our guide to saving seed to bring back covers the rest.

Bringing seed back.

The return is what makes a seed library different from a giveaway. Seed grown out in your own soil and weather, and brought back, is seed that has already done well locally. Kept going for years, that is how a community builds a collection of varieties suited to its place.

Bringing seed back is voluntary, and it has to be. The model seed law most states follow says a noncommercial seed sharer "may not expect, or create the expectation, that seeds must be returned." The Seed Library Network puts it more plainly: you cannot require returns. Of the 534 seed libraries we checked that say anything about returns, 423 encourage them, 107 do not expect them, and only 4 ask for them.

If you do bring seed back, label it: the crop and variety, the year you grew it, and your town. Say so if other varieties of the same crop were growing nearby, because squash, corn and many others cross.

What is in the drawers.

Most seed libraries stock open-pollinated and heirloom vegetables, herbs and flowers. Those grow true from saved seed: plant a seed you saved from a 'Cherokee Purple' tomato and you get a 'Cherokee Purple' tomato. Hybrid seed, often marked F1 on the packet, does not reliably reproduce the parent plant, so most seed libraries ask you not to return seed saved from hybrids.

A lot of what is on offer is donated commercial seed. Seed companies give away last season's packets, Master Gardeners and garden clubs donate, and libraries buy seed in bulk. A growing number of seed libraries focus on native plants for pollinators; those collections work differently, since many native seeds need cold, moist treatment before they sprout.

Why so many live in libraries.

Seed libraries also run in colleges, botanical gardens, nature centers, farms and community groups, but the public library is by far their most common home. The fit is practical and it is also about purpose.

• The mission already matches. Public libraries exist to give everyone free access to shared resources. Borrow, use and return is library lending applied to a living collection.
• The infrastructure is there. Open hours, staff who know how to organize a collection, a steady stream of patrons, and meeting rooms for seed swaps and workshops with the county Extension office.
• It is plainly noncommercial. State seed laws were written to regulate companies that sell seed. A library charges nothing, which is the line most seed laws now draw. See seed libraries and the law.
• Libraries lend more than books now. Seed libraries grew up alongside the "library of things": tools, instruments, cake pans, telescopes.

The honest part: returns.

Bringing seed back is the hardest half of the idea. In a 2018 study in Library Quarterly, the seed libraries that tracked returns reported getting back 30 to 40 percent, and none of the libraries studied could run on returned seed alone. Every one bought seed or asked seed companies for donations. Most seed libraries keep the lending model anyway, because it teaches something worth teaching: seed is something a community looks after together.