The Hartford Public Library seed room is not in fact a room. It is the corner of the second-floor reference area, behind the periodicals, where in 2014 a librarian named Estelle Manjarrez moved an oak card catalogue cabinet from the basement and labelled the top drawer Beans, Bush.
The cabinet has thirty drawers, each holding between eight and twenty small paper envelopes. The four hundred and twenty varieties currently in the collection are catalogued in a notebook on top of the cabinet and, since 2022, in a small database that runs on a desktop computer Manjarrez bought used.
Sage Marchetti, who edits this section, visited Hartford on May 1, 2026, to spend an afternoon with the seed room and the woman who has run it for twelve years.
Manjarrez, who is fifty-four, came to seed librarianship by accident. She had been the library's reference coordinator since 2009. In 2013 a patron asked her whether the library would consider stocking vegetable seed, the way some California libraries had begun to. Manjarrez said she would think about it. The card cabinet went upstairs four months later.
The first collection was donated entirely by one grower, an elderly Italian-American gardener named Carmine Trinca, who had run a quarter-acre kitchen garden in West Hartford for fifty-one years. He brought in twenty-six varieties, all selected from his own line, all labelled in his own hand. Several of them, including a flat romano bean and a paste tomato he called Brontolone, are still in the collection.
By 2016 the collection had grown to about a hundred and forty varieties, mostly from local growers. In 2017 the library board considered closing the program after a brief panic about whether the library was technically required to be licensed as a seed distributor. A lawyer in Wethersfield named Patricia Liu wrote a six-page memo establishing that the library was not, and the program continued.
The current rules are taped to the side of the cabinet. A library patron in good standing may take up to six envelopes of seed per visit, up to twenty per growing season. Returning seed is encouraged but not required. Returned seed must be labelled with variety, year of harvest, and the grower's first name and library card number.
Manjarrez catalogues every returned envelope herself. She tests germination on a sample from each return: ten seeds on damp paper towel, eight days, counted at room temperature on the windowsill of her office. Returns that test below 60 percent are composted. Above 60 they go into circulation. Above 80 they get a small green dot, which patrons have learned to look for.
The four hundred and twenty varieties span the usual home-garden families. There are sixty-eight bean varieties, forty-one tomatoes, twenty-three lettuces, fourteen squashes, eleven peppers, fifty-one flowers, and a long tail of less common things: amaranth, ground cherry, sorrel, lovage, four varieties of dent corn that a grower in East Hartford has been selecting since 1997.
The most-checked-out variety in 2025 was a bush bean called Hartford Early, which Trinca selected over the course of his garden's last twenty years for early production in a short-season urban backyard. It is not available from any commercial source. There are roughly six hundred envelopes of it in circulation across the greater Hartford area.
The catalogue notebook on top of the cabinet is updated by hand. Each variety has a half-page entry with the year first donated, the original grower, the typical maturation time, and Manjarrez's notes on storage and germination history. The notebook is in its seventh volume.
Manjarrez has trained four volunteer seed librarians over the years. Two of them, Esther Park and Domenic Ricci, are usually in the room on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. They handle the bulk of the patron transactions: checking that the patron has a card, recording the envelopes taken, answering basic questions about when to sow.
Most patrons take three or four envelopes. A few take the full six. Manjarrez has noticed that the seed taken correlates closely with what is in season at the local grocery store. Tomato seed peaks in late February. Bean seed peaks in late April. Flower seed runs all year.
The collection's biggest annual contributor is a community garden on Park Street that has been saving seed collectively since 2011. They donate around four thousand envelopes a year, mostly beans, peppers, and basil. The community garden's coordinator, Jacinta Aponte, runs a small seed-saving workshop at the library every March.
There is one growing problem the library has not solved. Squash and other cucurbits cross promiscuously, and the seed returned from home gardens is often, by the third generation, genetically uncertain. Manjarrez accepts cucurbit returns but labels them unstable, second-generation and asks patrons to grow them with that caveat.
Tomatoes, beans, peppers, and lettuces are self-pollinating and remain true to type without isolation, which makes them ideal for a seed library. The bulk of the Hartford collection is in those families, which is not an accident.
Manjarrez has been quietly building a second collection of locally adapted seed selected over multiple years by individual growers. The shelf, in the back of the cabinet, currently holds nineteen varieties. Each one has a multi-year provenance written on the inside of the envelope: From Carmine Trinca 1974-2019, then Hartford Public Library Seed Room, ongoing.
The library does not advertise the seed room beyond a small flyer at the circulation desk and an occasional mention in the patron newsletter. Word of mouth has been more than sufficient. The 2025 circulation count was just over fourteen thousand envelopes, which is more than triple what it was five years earlier.
Manjarrez intends to retire in 2029, at which point she will train a successor for at least a year. She has not identified one yet. The library board has, as of the spring 2026 budget cycle, agreed to fund a half-time position dedicated to the program after her retirement.
The seed room is open whenever the library is open. The cabinet is not locked. The notebook is in pencil. The varieties go home with people who plant them in soil Manjarrez will mostly never see, in gardens that will, in turn, eventually return seed to the cabinet. Which is the entire point.
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