InBerkeley

Chloe, the pennywise reporter on Broke-Ass Stuart’s Goddamn Website, recently posted a wonderful account of how to make a garden in Berkeley for free. In the course of it, she introduced me to something I’d never heard of — the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library, or BASIL.

BASIL is part of Berkeley’s Ecology Center, on San Pablo Avenue. It’s a natural counterpart of another Berkeley social innovation, the city’s Tool Lending Library. Here’s BASIL’s own description:

The Bay Area Seed Interchange Library (BASIL) Project is part of a growing network of concerned farmers and community gardeners dedicated to conserving the remaining genetic diversity of our planet’s seed stock. We have created a library of healthy vegetable, herb, and flower seeds that are being made available free to the public.

Members of BASIL can sign out seeds for free, with the agreement that they try to grow them and will “return” seeds of the next generation at the end of the season. A fabulous idea.

Lance Knobel Environment, Green, Green living