On Third Street, between Quesada and Revere, in a building that used to be a laundromat called Sparkle Wash, the Bayview Seed Library has been quietly distributing free seeds to anyone who walks in the door for almost twelve years.
Andre Booker, 58, founded it in 2014. He is a fourth-generation Bayview resident. His grandfather, who came to San Francisco from Louisiana in 1947, kept a tomato garden behind their house on Newcomb Avenue for forty years. Andre learned to plant from him. He learned to save seed from his grandmother, Bernice, who, he says, would have called the seed library “a perfectly normal thing for grown people to do, child.”
The library lives in a single converted room. There are 28 wooden drawers along one wall, sorted by category: greens, brassicas, alliums, beans and peas, herbs, nightshades, roots, flowers, native plants, and grains. Each drawer contains small paper envelopes labeled by variety, source, and the year the seed was harvested. The current count, by Andre’s estimate, is 1,800 varieties.
You walk in. You sign a clipboard. You take what you need, up to ten packets per visit. There is no fee.
The one rule is on a hand-painted sign above the door: “Bring something back. Anything. Seed, story, time.”
“A community library only works if the community puts in,” Andre says. “Books work the same way. Seeds work the same way. Time works the same way. We are not in the business of free. We are in the business of return.”
The library is open Saturday mornings, 9 to noon, and Wednesday afternoons, 4 to 6:30. It is staffed entirely by volunteers. There are nine of them. Six are former students of a community college course Andre taught on urban gardening between 2011 and 2017. Three are former clients of a Bayview HIV prevention program where Andre worked from 2003 to 2014.
About 600 people use the library a year. Some come once and never come back. Some come every season. A woman named Mrs. Park comes every March for the Korean radish seed she has been growing on her plot in the McLaren community garden since 2017. A man named Reggie, who is 31 and who Andre has known since Reggie was a kid in the after-school program at the YMCA on Bryant, comes every August for the collard seed he is teaching his son to plant.
In 2020 the library lost its lease. The owner of the laundromat building was selling. Andre raised $34,000 in three weeks from a flyer he taped to the door and a single email to a list of 800 people. The new owner, a developer, agreed to lease the room to the library at half-market rent for ten years. Andre says he believes the developer’s grandmother grew tomatoes.
The seed catalog is on a paper binder by the door. The binder is updated by a volunteer named Lucia, 73, who used to be a public school librarian. She has card-cataloged everything. She has alphabetized by Latin name. She has cross-referenced by region of origin. She has added a column called “story” with one or two sentences about where the variety came from.
“This bean,” she says, opening the binder, “is the Italian heirloom from a Russian Hill grandmother who was Sicilian. This one is a Cuban black bean from a man named Hector who lived on La Salle Avenue. This one is a Native cosmos seed that the Ohlone descendants who consult with us asked us to keep stocked. The story is who I imagine when I pick the packet.”
On the Saturday I visited, a woman named Tanya came in with her two-year-old son on her hip. She wanted seeds for her first garden. Andre walked her to the easy drawer, which is unmarked but well-known to the volunteers. He gave her radish, lettuce, sugar snap pea, marigold, and basil. He told her, “if all five come up, you owe us nothing. If any of them goes to seed and you save the seed, you bring it back next September.”
Tanya signed the clipboard. She left. Andre returned the empty seed envelopes to the drawer. The drawer was lighter by five envelopes. By next September, if the five came up, the drawer would be heavier again. That, he says, is how the math has worked for almost twelve years.
