Greetings from Hull-House! Franziska here. I am an intern at the museum, through a UIC-sponsored program called the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program. My task at the museum is to create a seed library, which will soon be open to the public through Hull-House. What exactly is a seed library? It’s much like a regular library, but instead of books, you can check out seeds, which you can grow, and then return. Our mission is to promote food security—a major problem our city is facing. Currently, there are three major food deserts in Chicago, meaning that many people do not have access to fresh produce and good, healthy food. Jane Addams fought many of these issues in her day, and they are still, unfortunately, plaguing our city. We want to address these problems with an interactive project to get people involved in the conversation of sustainability, food access, and urban agriculture.
Right now, we are getting ready to interview Michael Thompson of The Chicago Honey Co-op. Christian (my partner intern and co-creator of the project) and I are crafting questions to help our future gardeners learn about urban farming and sustainable agriculture from a true expert on the subject. We will create a short film and fill you in on everything you need to know about urban agriculture—from container gardening to composting to water conservation. Michael is the director of the Co-op that manages hundreds of bees and produces delicious honey and vegetables at their North Lawndale bee farm. They are a vital part of their community, as they also offer job training and classes to amateur bee-keepers. The Co-op has been an excellent source of support and donations of seeds to the Seed Library. Michael is truly invested and passionate about sustainable agriculture!
Stay tuned for more updates on the Seed Library!
-Franziska
Image is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
Hey, if you need any help or have any questions I’m available. I’ve started a seed library in Chicago and I host seed swaps around the city. You can find my writings on seeds in the seeds tab of my garden blog.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Wesley Epplin, Jane Addams. Jane Addams said: http://hullhouse.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/announcing-the-hull-house-seed-library/ [...]
[...] about seeds, vegetables, and the whole gardening experience that is. As you may have read in a previous post, my partner Franziska gave you a preview of the upcoming Hull-House Seed Library. The introduction [...]
Delighted to hear about your project. We have a seed lending library in Richmond, California located in our public library. We a page on our website ( http://richmondgrows.org ) called “Create a library” explaining our process and with downloads of all of our resources.