Today@Dal

From University Affairs:

Twenty years after transitioning to digital records, Dalhousie University’s MacRae Library has dusted off its wooden card catalogues to house its latest collection: seeds.

MacRae’s seed lending library, located at the heart of Dalhousie’s agricultural campus in Bible Hill, Nova Scotia (formerly the Nova Scotia Agricultural College), consists of about 875 packets of heirloom and organic seeds. As seed library coordinator Jolene Reid explains, users can thumb through and take home the packets for their own gardens. In return, borrowers are asked to donate a portion of their eventual seed haul to the library. “It’s a self-sustaining collection. Seeds returned to us will become our inventory for the next growing season,” Ms. Reid says.

The library offers students and local community members access to more than 86 varieties of edibles, ornamentals and herbs. Each packet, labelled according to the level of skill required for seed saving, contains enough seed to grow 10 to 15 viable plants. Among the collection’s gems Ms. Reid notes a pink-flowered Painted Lady scarlet runner bean; a Lancashire Lad climbing pea, with its striking blue pea pods; and a thousand-year-old tobacco plant, said to have been discovered in an earthenware pot in the Great Lakes.

Read the rest of this story online.