Hoping to spread her own love for gardening with other young people, one Belmont teen built a seed library for others to try their hand at the skill.
“It’s about the size and shape of a Little Free Library, but instead of books, you have seeds, like carrots, turnips, lettuce — I wanted it to be healthy, for people to enjoy eating them,” said 14-year-old Julia Spitznagel, a student at Belmont High School.
With the help of her younger brother, Samuel, she put together the library, which the family bought off Amazon.
“I helped to paint it,” said Samuel, 10.
Though the project was largely an independent effort, Julia reached out to the Parent-Teacher Organization, Chenery Upper Elementary School Principal Laura Smith, and the leader of the Belmont After School Enrichment Collaborative (BASEC) about setting up the library in the courtyard of Chenery Upper Elementary School.
“I didn’t really want to [put it at] the middle school,” she said. “There wasn’t really a good space to put it. At the elementary school, the kids are too young, so I figured the CUE was the logical choice.”
Smith said the library has already “ignited curiosity and passion in other students.”
“We have a dedicated group of students and families who volunteer their time during the summer to care for the courtyard while school is not in session,” Smith wrote in an email to The Voice. “One of the students was in [the courtyard] with her mom recently and shared that she grew tomatoes, corn, squash, [and] so many vegetables in their home garden this summer— all of which she had grown from seeds in Julia’s library.”
According to Smith, that mother and her 10-year-old kid spent hours in their garden together this summer.
“She may never know the impact she has had, but this mom was able to spend hours in the garden with her 10 year old this summer, sharing a skill she loved,” Smith wrote. “These are precious moments that have literally grown from Julia’s seed library.”
At home, Julia is an avid gardener. She has planted potatoes and pumpkins, and sometimes tomatoes. Deciding to create a seed library as part of her Silver Award for the Girl Scouts was a natural choice.
“I just really like to garden and I wanted to share my love with gardening,” she said.
For the first season, the library was stocked with seeds Julia bought for it. Going forward, she hopes to see it become a community effort in keeping the library stocked.
“For the second year, I’m hoping that if people grew plants this year, they can take the seeds from those plants and use it to refill the library,” Julia said.
