The seed bank will be presented in a kiosk at the Edwards Library in Southampton. The kiosk that will have packaged seeds and an information sheet on the seed variety and how the gardener can save and return seeds for the next person.
By PATRICK O'CONNOR
SOUTHAMPTON - Calling all gardeners: Be on the look out for fallen seeds.
Susan McNamara is starting a seed lending library, based at the Edwards Library in Southampton, and she needs a bank of donated vegetable seeds to get the library started for the next growing season.
"People will take the seeds, grow the food, try to save some seeds, and bring them back to the library to close the loop," said McNamara, explaining how the lending process will work.
McNamara asks that people donate seeds from organic or heirloom vegetables. If interested, and for information on how to collect seeds and where to send them, McNamara can be reached at (413) 527-2230, or emailed at thefarmatavalon@hotmail.com
McNamara says healthy eating has changed all aspects of her life, and she wants to share that with as many people as possible, while protecting the local food supply.
"Food is central," she said on a recent early afternoon in an enclosed porch on her farmhouse.
The farmhouse is located in a heavily wooded area near the Tighe-Carmody Reservoir.
Outside the porch she and her husband grow apple, pear, peach, elderberry, blueberries and raspberries. There are also chickens, and a kitchen garden of mixed herbs and vegetables.
Susan McNamara shows the seeds of a sugar snap pea,
one of the vegetables she plans to offer for exchange in a local seed library. She needs gardeners to donate heirloom and organic seeds to get the lending library started for next year. "I've seen how eating whole foods has change my life," said McNamara. "I've seen how it has kept my family healthy and sane."
About 16 years ago, McNamara was pregnant with her first child, a daughter, Maddie, and she and her husband, Steve Silverman, decided to make a life-shift, eating only whole, organic foods.
Neither of them, she said, grew up eating such foods.
"I hated vegetables as a kid," she said, noting that she ate mostly canned vegetables and iceberg lettuce.
Her watershed moment, as she called it, came in her early 20s when she ate a fresh spinach salad for the first time. She explained it as her first "direct experience" with real food.
"I'm hoping the seeds will encourage people to have that experience," she said. "My life has been completely changed by the change I made to what I ate."
She now works as a holistic health counselor, she teaches yoga and she's an instructor of a relaxation course at Westfield State University. She formerly worked in a bank after she earned a business degree.
"My consciousness and what I started to value changed as I ate differently," she said.
She said people have normalized the anxiety that comes from too much caffeine, and the stomach pains and headaches and other ailments that come from eating processed foods.
She also worries about big business gaining control of the public food supply, in particular seeds.
"That seems like that should be in the common good," she said.
Seeds are life, she added. "Why should someone be able to control life and tell me what I can and cannot grow?"
The seed exchange, she explained, places that control in the hands of the people in the community. Basically, when you walk into the library, there will be kiosk that will have packaged seeds and an information sheet on the seed variety and how the gardener can save and return seeds for the next person.
"I see this as a being a huge experiment," she said. "I want to make food open to as many people as possible."
Although for the seed library to work people will need to save seeds, she said people will not be fined if they do not do so. She said she really just wants as many people as possible to get in the garden and give it a try - for free.