Fairfield Gardens Grow With Seed Sharing

Nutritionist Joyce Alvarado is making good progress in starting a community garden at her son’s school, Fairfield Warde High. The grounds have plenty of land to use, and Warde’s Club Green will provide the manpower to get it started. But Alvarado and teacher Tim Foster were missing a key component — seeds. That’s why Alvarado stopped by the Fairfield Woods Branch Library on Saturday morning for the unveiling of Fairfield’s Seed-to-Seed Library.

Run by the Fairfield Organic Teaching Farm and the Fairfield Public Library, Fairfield’s Seed-to-Seed Library will be the first of its kind in Connecticut.

Fairfield Woods will keep stores of vegetable and flower seeds on hand in the reference department throughout the year. Anyone interested can register and sign out packets of seeds. The only suggestion is that when harvest time comes around, gardeners leave a few plants out to produce seeds and then bring those seeds back to the library to continue the cycle.

“It’s a perfect marriage for the library,” said Nancy Coriarty, deputy town librarian. “As an institution, we support learning, entertainment and community. Growing a garden follows all of those things.”  

The seeds Alvarado picked up Saturday will start a vegetable garden behind Warde (if they can gather enough donations of topsoil to get started). It will be modeled after the community gardens already at Fairfield’s elementary schools.

If the garden program takes off, it will provide a hands-on learning experience for science classes and fresh vegetables for cooking courses. “There’s so many ways to incorporate gardening into the curriculum,” Alvarado says.

But the library and the Organic Teaching Farm hope that the Seed-to-Seed library will encourage novices all over Fairfield to start up their own vegetable or flower patches. Coriarty says the ultimate goal is to have a garden of some kind at every home in Fairfield. “With all of these different gardens coming up — with the schools, the senior center, community gardens … it’s a very doable goal.”

Do you have a vegetable garden in your back yard? What do you grow there? Share some tips for those just starting out in the comments below.

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