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Seed Bombs A Guide To Their Various Forms and Functions
The Seed Bomb (or Green Grenade) in whatever form it takes is designed to enable seeds to be sown in a hard to reach place and in locations where a gardener is unable to spend long preparing the ground for conventional sowing. They are therefore potentially of great use to guerrilla gardeners who have ambitions to garden in challenging locations or who fear trouble if they spend too long tending the ground and can enable very spontaneous floral attacks.
I have come across and experimented with several different designs. Some are easy to build at home while others are so high tech they are currently only lab prototypes. This guide details my research and may encourage more inventiveness and testing. It’s certainly fun. But truth be told, if you really want great results in the garden then you’ve got to hang around a bit, and many of more attentive and involved horticultural methods (e.g. planting) work best.
 
1 Classic Clay Seed Ball
A mixture of clay soil (or potter’s powder), compost and seeds in the ratio of 5:1:1 with water to bind. This is the most widely used method and their invention is credited to Japanese biologist and farmer Masanobu Fukuoka. PROS: Easy to make at home, cheap and easily customised to local conditions, moulded into any shape. All the ingredients are entirely natural. CONS: Messy to make, clay is fairly hard to come by and using ordinary clay soil will be polluted with seeds you may not want. If left to harden they will need decent rain to enable germination.Kathryn Miller seed bombing
Making them is like cooking.Watch me explain on a TV cookery show.Kathryn Miller seed bombing
Documentary
Documentary
 
2 NYC Green Guerilla Grenade
In the trash-strewn dereliction of 1970s New York guerrilla gardening thrived. The Green Guerillas created two designs for grenades made from rather controversial ingredients. Peat moss and chemical fertilisers are dubious for starters but on top of this eco crime is the instruction to contain this within either a glass Christmas bauble or plastic balloon! PROS: Easy to make at home, cheap and easily customised (for starters improve on this 1970s eco time bomb by using peat free compost and organic fertiliser).  CONS: Chucking around glass and plastic is dangerous and polluting, better to use a different method.  Diagram of Green Grenades
Full Instructions
Green Guerillas
 
3 Kabloom "SeedBom"
The SeedBom is beautifully crafted moulded grenade made from recycled paper, egg boxes, compost and seeds (plus the occasional tea bag) to a secret blend by Darren, an ingenious entrepreneurial Scottish guerrilla gardener. PROS: Available to buy ready made online. Beautifully clever with detailed instructions about how to use them. CONS: Unless you’re very clever you’ll need to buy these from Darren! Like real grenades they are quite delicate to handle and like clay balls they require plenty of rain to grow.        Kabloom - information about the SeedBom. SeedBom
Kabloom
Facebook
 
4 Explosive Eggs
Ella 1305 and Aime 1306 invented the explosive egg method of seed bombing in 2007. They showed me how through a tiny incision in the shell of a raw chicken egg are first sucked the yolk and white and then seeds and a little dusty peat is dropped in. They write a message of hope on the outside. PROS: Simple natural ingredients which are also very easy to handle (if you pack them back into the egg box). CONS: You made need your grandmother to suck those eggs because these are a fiddle to make and the lack of much soil makes them little better than scattering seeds (though being in egg shells makes them easier to throw further). Explosive Eggs seed bombs for guerrilla gardening
Full Instructions
 
5 Seed Balloon
Vanessa 6111 is a very high-tech and industrious guerrilla gardener. In 2009 she developed a wide range of seed dispersal methods of which the Seed Balloon was the simplest. It is a biodegradable rubber balloon filled with a few seeds and helium, held with a string. PROS: Long distance projectile that can traverse great heights. Simple to make if you have some helium! CONS: Totally lacking in any kind of accuracy, you are at the mercy of where the wind takes the balloon, and the slow decomposition rate of the rubber is likely to detract from the seed’s effective germination. Vanessa has gone on to create more effective methods!
Vanessa's site
 
6 Seed Pills
Another creation by Vanessa, the seed pill is a versatile micro seed bomb. Seeds and compost are packed into a biodegradable pill capsule. This can either be thrown  manually or loaded into an airpistol-like device to shoot the seeds further and more accurately away. The pill is designed to fracture on impact with the ground. PROS: Very easy to handle and versatile (if you have a specially adapted air rifle - Vanessa uses a rifle that is ingeniously disguised as an SLR camera!) CONS: Fairly fiddly to make and currently not for sale. Seed Pill
Instructions
 
For more tips visit the short TIPSpage and (if you've not already) do please read a copy of My Book.