ALTADENA, Calif. — For avid gardener Jessica Yarger, each seed she plants tells a story.

“No matter how small they are, they all have what they need to sit around for a while and when the environmental conditions are right, come to life,” she said talking at her home in Altaden. 

She has been gardening for 20 years in her own yard and in community gardens. Yarger said she never gets tired of watching seeds germinate and begin to sprout, but as she spent more time with seeds, she learned about how some species of fruit and vegetables were disappearing — which was of major concern to her.

“Agriculturally speaking, big farms benefit from having plants that grow a certain way, resist a certain pest. In favoring those over maybe varieties that are more delicate or more susceptible to disease just because there is more cost, they’ve stopped growing,” explained Yarger.

Even on a small scale, different types of seeds available at traditional gardening stores can be limited, so four years ago she founded the Seed Library of Altadena to create more biodiversity on a hyper local scale.

The Seed Library functions like a traditional library. People become members and check out seeds, most of them are different types of vegetables and plant them in their own yards. After the plants have grown, Seed Library members return new seeds to the library for someone else to check out.

The collection is typically housed at Yarger’s local library in Altadena, but when the pandemic hit and libraries closed, she retrieved the seeds and began sending members their orders herself.

They are stored in small brown packets and organized by vegetable type. There are currently over 200 library members who can order different types of seeds each month. For Yarger, it is an exciting way to learn and share information about different seed types.

She has over 40 varieties of tomatoes, colorful corn, fava beans, black-eyed peas and many more. The benefits of reusing seeds from the same family or crop is that the seed and plants become more resilient and adapted to one specific area.

“If we’re doing it right, we are selecting seeds from the strongest plant. We are not taking seeds from a plant that is struggling. The hope is that you are capturing the genetic information that is making that plant thrive in this environment,” she said.

Yarger was inspired to create the library by David King, a horticulturalist and Garden Master at The Learning Garden in Venice. He founded the first iteration of the Seed Library of Los Angeles in 2001.

“You end up with a whole new kind of gardening, a whole new kind of eating,” he said of the library. “For many of us, the reason we garden, is because we want to eat and we don’t want to eat the same old, same old, same old.” 

However, beyond creating more culinary options, King said the library also serves an ecological purpose and can help gardeners learn which plants thrive in our changing and warming climate.

“This summer has been a really hot summer, so we have some beans out there that have survived really well. We have some beans that have not survived so well. We can take the ones that have survived well and plant those out in the coming years when we expect it to be much hotter,” King said.

For Yarger, the resilience of seeds and plants keeps her returning to her own garden year after year.

“It’s always amazing to me, every time seeds germinate there’s just something sort of miraculous. It is just amazing that it works,” she said.

She plans to continue sharing her love and awe for seeds and all the plants they produce through the library — cultivating more biodiversity throughout Los Angeles.