The Seed Library at the Watauga County Library has been pursuing its goal of feeding the local community as well as educating it on historical traditions and seed handling for over half a decade. 

The people working within the seed library have seen and strongly believed in the need for food availability. Watauga county’s poverty rate of 24.9% has led the volunteers to the calling of providing that food while informing the community about its past. The process of seed acclimation, or gradually acquainting a seed from another region to its current one through increments of outdoor exposure, has helped in providing as much as possible.

Monica Gowan, the library seed coordinator in Watauga County for the past three years, has displayed her passion for gardening and the community after taking over for former coordinator Judith Winecoff. Gowan has since placed an emphasis on food sovereignty, a community-focused way of sharing food resources.

“If we acclimate seeds to our regions, we’re helping to grow crops that are going to be less susceptible to local pests or diseases,” Gowan said. “And then we can share those freely through communal seed libraries like the Watauga County Seed Library.”

The year-round Seed Library also emphasizes the importance of keeping local history through educational programs. Mary Daly, a long-time local Boone resident who works with Gowan at the Seed Library, has been a part of seed and plant swaps as well as education workshops that protect the community’s knowledge of past heritage and tradition. 

“We’re in an area where people have been growing food or wildcrafting or wild harvesting food for, you know, since people walked around on this land,” Gowan said. “The ground is incredibly old, so that heritage and keeping those seeds available and alive and those stories, I think, is also a really important aspect of a local seed library.”

The Watauga County Seed Library’s services are available to anyone who visits the Watauga County Public Library. By registering as a member and selecting packets of seeds, they can be checked out and taken home to be planted and grown.

Currently, the Watauga County Seed Library is scarce on seeds, but personal and community collections of them are an important factor in keeping it available. A workshop held Oct. 4 with Laughing Springs Farm aimed to educate the community on seed saving.