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Amelia and the Little Free Seed Library

Like all Girl Scouts, Amelia Reece, a Girl Scout from Paulding County, is always looking for ways to better serve her community. In 2020, in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, Amelia saw a way to help others around her. As grocery stores experienced food shortages and adults lost their jobs due to the pandemic, she saw a solution: growing your own food, via a free, seed library. A seed library would be a way for people in the community to access seeds, for free, for their garden. This would increase food security and ease a possible financial burden. Creating a garden space also has an unintended, but positive side effect: playing in the dirt is therapeutic!

Amelia set to work on what would become her Bronze Award, a seed library for the people of Paulding County. She enlisted the help of her family. Her grandfather would build the box to contain the seeds, her grandmother would assist the painting process and her mother would help her to organize donated seeds into the library and ultimately find a place to house it. COVID restrictions were again a hurdle when finding a public home for the library, but ultimately, found a home at the UGA Extension-Paulding County office. Paulding County Master Gardener Extension Volunteers are a great fit as a collaborator. Their experience and dedication to educating Paulding homeowners about gardening, goes hand in hand with Amelia’s, and the Girl Scouts’ mission to help those in the community. To further the theme of community collaboration, just 2 weeks after finding the seed library a home at the Extension office, Tractor Supply of Dallas reached out with a very generous donation of unused seed packets. Amelia, her family and Extension staff, were overwhelmed with such an outpouring of community support.

If you are curious about how a seed library works, it is a lot like a regular library. If you have a garden space and are in search of seeds, “browse the shelves,” and see if there is something that will fit your intended space. Seed libraries are sometimes a great source of hard to find seeds, or things not usually found in your local Big Box store. Record in the library log book, your name and how many seeds you are “checking out.” At the end of the growing season, save some of the seeds and return them to the library. Record donated seeds in the log book. If you are an avid gardener and would like to add some of your seeds to the library, there are packets provided for you to label and add to the growing seed stock.

The author of this article, Christen Thomas, is the Paulding UGA Extension Agriculture and Natural Resources Program Assistant and MGEV Coordinator. Master Gardener Extension Volunteers are trained to provide education for homeowners on horticulture, sustainable landscaping, and environmentally friendly gardening practices using unbiased, research-based information from the University of Georgia. For more information, contact University of Georgia Cooperative Extension in Paulding County to speak with a Master Gardener or County Extension Agent at 770-443-7616 or view our online resources at www.ugaextension.org/paulding.