If you have seed you’d like to share with the community through the Fife Seed Library, here’s how!
We accept:
- Seed you have saved yourself from plants in your garden.
- Seed you have collected locally from wild plants around Fife (please do so responsibly!)
- Surplus seed, when you’ve bought too much.
- Fruit, flowers and vegetables of all kinds.
We will filter out seed that is unlikely to be viable due to its parentage or condition, as well as non-native invasive species.
Seed should be:
- Ready (don’t harvest too early)
- Fully dried
- Separated from branches, stalks, pods and chaff (get in touch with us if you need help doing this!)
Package as follows:
- Put all seed of the same type in a single envelope or jar. Make sure it seals well.
And label with:
- Your name
- Where the seed was grown (the town or village is fine)
- The type of seed and variety of the plant
- The year saved
- The parent plant – wild, grown from saved seed, or grown from bought seed or a bought plant. If you know the provider of the seed or plant, please include that (eg. if it was Real Seeds or Mr Fothergils)
- Any notes you’d like to include about the plant or conditions the parents were grown in (eg. survived a drought / very bright yellow)
If you’re donating shop-bought seed, please include the original packet if you have it.
We never throw seed away, except to scatter it somewhere it might have a chance. But if we don’t know what it is, or it’s very old, or its likely to be descended from F1 hybrid parents, we can’t hand it out in the library.
Seed from promiscuous plants
Some vegetables, like squash and things in the beet family, readily cross-breed with each other over short distances. This means if your next-door neighbour is growing courgette and you are growing a different summer squash, they probably kissed (via bees), and the seeds you get could be a mix of traits. We think this is pretty exciting, and can introduce great diversity! But it does mean that if you are keen for true-to-type offspring, you need to be careful about pollination distances and consider bagging flowers and hand pollinating. If you want to donate seeds from promiscuous plants, and you’ve taken care not to mix them with other varieties – please let us know on your label! Otherwise we’ll share them with a warning that they may not be true-to-type, so people can sow them at their own risk.
You can get seeds to us by:
- Finding the Cabinet at its host.
- Finding us at a workshop or pop-up.
- Coming to a seed swap.
- Posting seeds to or putting them through the letterbox at The Coop, 299 High St, Kirkcaldy, KY1 1JL.
What happens next?
Our core group of devoted seed sorters will check, package and label your seeds in our compostable envelopes, then add them to the Seed Library Cabinet for other people to borrow!