The technique for creating seed balls was developed by Japanese natural farming pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka. Seed balls or seed bombs are very easy to make. The secret ingredient is clay, this holds the seeds and fertilizer together and makes it difficult for birds to eat the seeds before they get a chance to get growing.
Dokonjo Daikon “Gutsy Radish”
With seed bombs you can make a beautiful variety of gardens! When you know the type of soil you are planting on etc you can adjust your seed mix accordingly. I have tested out several mixtures of seeds, the one that worked the best on hard, depleted, stony and packed urban soils, was a mixture of crimson clover with diakon and wildflowers. Any kind of clover is great for nourishing the soil. Diakon radish is added because it is such a powerful plant. Huge diakon have been known to grow out of asphalt, breaking it apart in Japan — diakon are great at helping to break up earth that is packed and rocky so that roots can grow deeper. Wildflowers add some diversity. (Check out images from the garden started with these seed bombs here)
I have been reading The One-Straw Revolutionby Masanobu Fukuoka over the last year. It is a small book, but each essay/teaching/experience/chapter packs a powerful punch and I have taken my time, savoring each section. Usually I am quite greedy when I read a book and devour it too quickly, but this ...
A big thanks to everyone for their kind words of support over the past week or so since we found out that my mother has cancer in her pancreas. :-( Sorry I haven't been communicating this last week, we got the news and then had to get our taxes done, which was a bit pain in the neck. We are also tak ...
The One-Straw Revolution is Masanobu Fukuoka's manifesto about natural food and farming. It is a collection of short essays that were translated from Japanese. Masanobu was trained as a scientist, but rejected modern agribusiness and centuries of agriculture lore. He perfected what he called the ...
I first broke ground in Vancouver BC, on June 7th, 2009. For me this was a very symbolic act. This was the day I finally got the stamp in my passport that said I was an official resident of Canada. Living in an apartment I didn't have a piece of ground of my own, but I had been scouting out th ...
From my favorite inspiring Little Green Book The One Straw Revolution...this book makes great bedtime reading, as you get such lovely images to dream about. It is basically a collection of some of the things he said, so some chapters are only a couple pages long--if you tend to fall right asleep whe ...
Published in Far West Almanac, September 2009. Perhaps I have been watching too much Al Jazeera, but that, along with the film Blue Gold: World Water Wars, has got me worrying about folks down in LA. I honestly still can't believe that Arnold Schwarzenegger is really the governor of California— ...
There are as many ways to guerrilla garden as there are stars in the sky, and that is the best thing about it. The best way to do it is your way and to just get started. Many people love to make seed bombs and drop them as a group, other people love sneaking privately about the city -- planting plot ...
