The new Monterey Seed Library aims to help gardens and the community grow together.

I’ve kept gardens for about 10 years now, but I’m still a relative novice, layering new skills on like mulch. A few years back I built my first raised beds. The next year I added a home compost bin. Last year I finally added drip irrigation. This summer, I’m determined to cut back spending on organic starts by planting, harvesting and saving seeds myself.

I’m not sure why that feels intimidating. People have been saving and sharing seeds since the dawn of agriculture – but it takes a certain bed of knowledge. You need to know things like how to avoid cross-pollination, when to harvest the seeds and how to dry them. Saving pea seeds is easy, but it takes more advanced skills to pull off celery.

Luckily, I can lean on a brand-new resource: the Monterey Seed Library, which launched softly this spring.

The small brown table inside Monterey Public Library is easy to miss. There, a mini old-school card catalog holds four drawers labeled “Bean,” “Pea,” “Lettuce” and “Tomato.” Sliding them open, I find neat little yellow seed envelopes labeled with each variety’s common and Latin names, their sources and planting notes. I choose Lolla Rossa and Mantilla lettuces, a Gold of Bacau bean and a Dwarf Gray sugar pea. Then I sign them out in a log book, as about 70 people have done before me since the seed library opened in April.

The idea is to create a free exchange of edible, flowering and native plant seeds. Big-picture benefits: more garden biodiversity, stronger food security and a broader network of local gardeners.

The seed was planted, so to speak, in 2012, when Francesca Garibaldi, the library’s administrative assistant, had the idea to add a lending library to Monterey’s collection. She presented her managers with examples: East Palo Alto Library checks out guitars, UC Santa Cruz lends out bikes and Montpelier Public Library in Ohio loans cake pans. But the spreading crop of seed libraries, like the one in Richmond, Calif., resonated most. “It didn’t take much convincing,” Garibaldi says. “They were very receptive.”

She soon had a key assist from CSU Monterey Bay environmental studies student Heather Cunningham, who made it her capstone project to study how the seed library could integrate with traditional lending. She reached out to community groups, organized meetings, drafted some educational literature and applied for a $500 grant from the CSUMB Alumni Association.

A community seed donation day brought another wave of seeds. Garibaldi estimates she has thousands under her desk, but it’ll take a while to inventory and vet them to the seed library’s standards. The seed library project is largely volunteer-driven; Garibaldi hopes to work with groups such as Monterey Bay Master Gardeners and Monterey Green Action to offer classes and build a demonstration garden.

For now, the seed catalog only offers the most easy-to-save seeds. Garibaldi plans to add a 12-drawer catalog donated by Pacific Grove Public Library and frame them in a cabinet donated by Sand City artist Barney Cullen of Sylvan Design Studio.

Garibaldi has a stalwart supporter in Ruth Ann Flowers, a Monterey park volunteer who’s attended most of the planning meetings and stuffed countless seed envelopes. “My major push was no GMOs,” Flowers says, fondling the silver cross pendant on her chest. “I just don’t think God wants us to have things that are genetically modified.”

Today the older woman, with cropped silver hair and dark shades, seems to be providing moral support for the media-shy library staffer. When Garibaldi gets flustered, twisting the ends of her long blond waves, Flowers chimes in. They laugh a lot together.

Garibaldi grew up in Gold Country watching and helping her mother garden. In her 20s, she started saving seeds from her own garden. She photographed what she calls her “tomato journey,” documenting the seeds’ harvest from a “divine” Monterey farmers market tomato. She was delighted that the first seed to pop through the soil’s surface was the last to shed its casing.

“We all grow at different speeds,” she says, stretching out her slender arms like roots. “Seeds give us a lot of metaphors for life.”

Seeds hold all the elements: sun, water, soil and air, she says. The cycle of harvesting them, saving them, planting them and nurturing them back to flowering is part of a mindfulness practice that helps her deal with life’s stresses.

“Sometimes,” she says with a smile, “it’s just pulling out the weeds and letting in the sun to make our gardens healthy.”

Explore the MONTEREY SEED LIBRARY inside the Monterey Public Library, 625 Pacific St., Monterey. 646-3932,  montereyseedlibrary@gmail.com. Financial and seed donations are welcome.