Marrow Creek · Est. 1911 · Borrowing library
Old seed, kept alive by lending it out.
We are a seed library, not a seed shop. Take three packets home, grow them through a season, and bring some of the next generation back to the bench. The strains survive because gardeners keep borrowing them.
Drawn from the packing-barn window box, October light.
Scroll and the vine climbsThis season's most-borrowed
Eight strains live in the register. These six leave the bench most often, which we chalk on the door every equinox.
Grows like a rumor and grains like a promise. The young leaves go in the pan; the seed heads go ...
The strain that started this library. Stringless, early, and generous enough that we measure the...
A small amber pear that laughs at cold nights. We keep it for the sauce that gets us to March, a...
Dark enough that frost makes it look lit from inside. Cut it and it comes back three times; the ...
Plant it in a block, never a single row; corn is a neighborly crop and this one sulks alone. The...
Keeps until the seedlings of the NEXT crop are up on the bench, which is the whole point of a st...
The covenant
Three packets out. One season of care. Some seed back.
That is the entire arrangement, and it has run since 1911 with only two amendments, both about bean spacing. You do not buy anything here. You take the seed on loan and you owe the next gardener your attention.
The returned seed is cleaned at the bench, re-tested on wet paper towels in the back room, and re-registered with the name of the family who grew it. When a strain dies out — and over a century, some do — its page in the ledger stays in the book, written over in pencil, never erased.
Plan a visitThe field season, at a glance
Sowing windows in pink, harvest in green. The calendar is set for Marrow Creek's short-summer valley; gardeners a county over shift it two weeks either way.
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From the ledger
Three surviving fruits rebuilt a strain
In the autumn of 1983 a hard freeze took the whole tomato row at the Vernal farm but three fruits on one vine in the cold frame. The Frost Pear Tomato in today's catalog is the ninth generation back from those three. Read the full account in the field notes.
Read the field note