Home gardeners in Lambton County – both green thumbs and newbies – are urged to pick up a free pack of seeds from Lambton County Library and grow Dwarf Gray sugar snow peas this year.
The variety is the 2023 selection for the One Seed Lambton program that runs in connection with a seed library that is part of the county library system.
One Seed mirrors the library’s One Book program, which picks a book each year for local residents to read and organizes special events around it, said public services co-ordinator Vanitia Campbell.
Lambton’s seed library, offering more than 60 varieties free to library users, has locations at Watford and Wyoming branches and library headquarters. But anyone with a library card can go to llibrary.ca/seedlibrary and reserve seeds for pickup at a library branch near them.
“If you are in Sarnia, for example, and reserve seeds, they will be packed up at library headquarters and sent out to the library branch you’ve requested,” Campbell said.
“It’s actually very well used,” with 1,420 packs of seeds “checked out” last year, she said.
Experience showed library staff that “there’s not always the skill or knowledge there to actually know how to use those seeds,” Campbell said, so One Seed offers free hour-long workshops:
- Preparing Your Garden, with tips from Sipkins Nurseries, at the Wyoming branch, May 6 at 3 pm
- Vegetable Gardening 101, at the Forest branch, June 6 at 3:30 pm
- 10 Ways to Improve Your Health, at the Corunna branch, July 19 at 2 pm
- Seed Saving, at the Alvinston branch, Aug. 31 at 1 p.m.
Visit llibrary.ca/calendar.for more on library programs.
Local nurseries and horticultural clubs are also good sources of information, Campbell said.
“In my experience, people who love gardening love to share their knowledge,” she said.
Gardening is a skill that many may have lost in recent years, whether due to busy lives, lack of time or no space for a garden, Campbell said. That’s One Seed also chooses a variety that can be grown in a pot on a balcony, porch or in a sunny window.
There are other criteria, she added.
“We picked beans last year because beans are the easiest, basically, to grow and they give you a really long harvest,” she said. “If you get them started and you care for them, you can have beans all summer and into the fall.”
“Peas are the same way,” she said. “If you keep picking them, they’ll keep producing.”
Peas mature best in cooler temperatures and should be planted as soon as soil can be worked in April, the library said.
Open Seed also prefers an “open pollinated variety” whose seeds can be saved from this year’s plants and used year after year.
If Seed Library users are confident about saving seeds, “they’re welcome to . . . bring them back to the library and that helps us continue with the collection,” but it’s not required, Campbell said.
“We want people to get some seeds, learn a little bit about growing and hopefully help a little bit with the food insecurity situation. . . these days” by producing their own fresh vegetables, she said.