Community Seed Exchange is a free library in Sebastopol just for seeds

It’s still winter but Eytan Navah is thinking ahead to spring and what he wants to eat. On a gray, wet day in Sebastopol he’s shopping the shelves for broccoli, kale, cucumbers, Asian greens and peas — and anything else that might spark his interest.

This kind of shopping takes imagination.

He’s at the Community Seed Exchange, a free library where promises of future food and nutrition are kept in glass jars. There are no colorful photos to entice. But there is something even better - a crew of volunteers who helped grow and collect all the seed in those jars and most likely can tell you what they will look like, their taste and texture and maybe even how to use them.

At a time when food prices are soaring, inflation hasn’t hit the seed exchange, where every seed is free. And while it is a library, you’re not expected to return anything, or really even bring seeds to exchange, although they have accepted donations of seeds that they may grow out and test in their own garden.

For 15 years, this grassroots organization has been supplying home gardeners in Sonoma County with free seed, and not just any seed. Almost all of the seed is collected from crops they grow in their own community seed garden at St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church. Although the organization is not affiliated with the church, St. Stephen’s has also made a room available for them to pack and store seed.

Here, on Wednesday afternoons from 4 to 5:30 p.m. throughout most of the year — they shut down in November and December and this year January, as well — anyone can stop by and browse the shelves and take what they want.

No appointment or membership card or ID are required. They also are open on the fourth Saturday of every month from 9 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.

While volunteers work in the garden, the door to the library remains open for people to pick out their own seed on the honor system. They also offer free classes on the fourth Saturday, with the March 24 class covering the basics of seed savings to empower gardeners to save their own seeds. The class is at 11 a.m.

On Sunday, they are teaming up with Occidental Arts & Ecology Center, which has been growing rare and unusual organic food crops in support of biodiversity for some 50 years, for a Sonoma County Seed Swap at Sebastopol Grange on Highway 12.

It’s not technically a swap because no one is obliged to bring seeds to exchange. Between 2-5 p.m. people can swing by and pick up free seed. There also will be tables where folks can drop off seed to pass along with the caveat that it may not be as reliable as the seed from OAEC or the seed exchange.

Navah, a former farmer who now does regenerative landscape design and education and produces medicinal products from herbs, lives on a 1/3-acre lot nearby, where he grows all kinds of things. The exchange, he said, is a great resource that ticks off so many boxes.

“They’re adapted to where I live,” he said of the seed. “I live three blocks from here. You can’t get much better than that. They’re very trustworthy seed savers here who know what they’re doing. Its free, which is an amazing thing.”

Sara McCamant, a longtime food activist and garden educator and manager, founded and manages the team of volunteers who keep it going.

When they started it in 2009, there were only a few such exchanges in the state. At the time they were calling it a seed bank. But when the commercial Baker Creek Seed Bank opened in an old bank in Petaluma they figured they better rebrand to avoid confusion.

“We started out of the Transitions Sebastopol movement where people were meeting to talk about how to create a resilient food system. You can’t talk about resilient food systems if the seeds are coming halfway across the planet,: she said. “It seems like one of the most important things for a resilient healthy local food system is to be able to have local seeds adapted to your environment. You know where they come from.”

After a couple of years using seed from their own gardens and meeting at Salmon Creek School in Occidental, McCamant, who lives a couple of blocks away from St Stephen’s, noticed how much unused land there was in front of the church.

She approved church officials about using some of the vacant land for a community garden devoted strictly to growing crops for seeds. Currently, they grow about 40 varieties of everything from beans and peas to tomatoes and peppers, and both cool weather crops and summer crops. But they have many more varieties in the library inventory because some seed has a longer shelf life and they don’t always grow the same crops every year.

Beans for instance, can be stored three to four years.

“We’re really passionate about beans. So we have probably 50 different beans in our collection,” said McCamant, who also oversees the food gardens for Ceres Community project, which provides healthy meals for people with serious illnesses.

“We love dry beans. We think people should growing them. We also grow a lot of green beans and peas,” she added.

The shelves are packed with the unusual that you won’t find at Home Depot, things such as Radiant Rosie’s Italian Bean, which came from a woman who started the Richmond Grows Seed Library and collected them from her neighbor.

“It’s a beautiful dry bean and it’s very very productive,” McCamant said.

Another favorite is Rio Zape, reminiscent of a pinto bean and named for the beans found by archaeologists excavating an ancient sealed tomb in Rio Zape, Durango, Mexico in the 1960s.

They also grow some Asian choy like a tatsoi, a Brassica rapa grown for greens and also known as tat choy, that looks like bok choy but is smaller.

Although it’s an uncommon crop among home gardeners, the exchange also grows dried corn.

“There are a lot of us who really believe in it. Corn is such an amazing grain of the Americas and has been so contaminated by genetic engineering that we just want to honor the corn. And even if a lot of people aren’t growing dried corn we believe it deserves to be grown in a way that keeps it genetically clean. We love teaching people you can make corn meal to make your own masa (a corn dough used in tortillas and tamales).

Other grains that have grown include quinoa and amaranth.

“We like to expand what people think is a grain and what you can grow,” said McCamant during a recent work party Wednesday, as other volunteers packed up seeds for an upcoming community exchange. “You can grow these things in your garden and they grow well here.”

They grow seed crops that have been tested and do well in the west county climate. But most would grow well anywhere in Sonoma County, McCamant said. And over several seasons of growing and collecting the seeds will adapt even more to their micro environment.

Seed exchanges are the original sharing economy. When the Sebastopol project started it was one of the first in the state. But the seed saving movement has been growing, McCamant said, as concern has risen over food security, climate change, genetically modified seed and the control of major corporations over the nation’s seed supply.

“The seed industry has been highly dominated by, now, four major massive corporations that also are pesticide companies that really control 80 percent to the industry. We feel that’s a pretty risky thing,” she said. “They’re growing for large farms. They not growing for gardeners. They want things that are uniform and mature all at once and that can travel 1,000 miles, where we want taste and nutrition.

When the industry is dominated by large corporations those things aren’t valued, she explained.

“We’ve lost hundreds of varieties over the years as consolidations result in fewer and fewer companies,” McCamant said. “So, we really support a lot of small seed companies that are keeping varieties going and doing interesting breeding for flavor for gardeners.”

Those concerns became evident during the COVID-19 pandemic as homebound people and food shortages prompted a renewed interest in gardening. Supply chain problems and high demand left the shelves at nurseries and garden centers empty of seed.

“Every single store and every single seed company had to close down and wouldn’t accept any orders. And we had all this seed available,” McCamant said. “We actually switched to an online order system because nobody could get seed. That actually showed us the vulnerability of this massive international seed world. Something happens and all of a sudden there is no seed and people can’t grow their own food.”

Accomplished home gardener Liz Brown is among the regular volunteers, who maintains spreadsheets on everything grown and in stock.

“”It’s an amazing group of people,“ she said. ”Collectively we have an interesting mix of knowledge and we learn from each other constantly. Helping people learn how to grow their own food is so rewarding.“

You can reach Staff Writer Meg McConahey at 707-521-5204 or meg.mcconahey@pressdemocrat.com.