In certain parts of Seattle, opium poppies (papaver somniferum) grow from cracks in the sidewalks. Many people who walk or use public transportation make a habit of picking off a dried poppy pod as they pass and crack it open to spread the seeds as they walk along, shaking the pod like a salt shaker over parking islands and any exposed patch of dirt. Of course many national parks and wilderness areas have hidden plots of cannabis. Both of these plants can be useful medicinal plants (Thomas Jefferson used to keep opium poppies in his herbal medicine garden in Monticello, as they have potent painkilling properties even when just made into a tea (but um, don't do that, it's illegal). The DEA later tampered with history and dug up the original species of poppy from the display garden and replaced them with more innocuous ornamental poppies so as not to set a bad example for good Americans visiting the home. But for others who wish to harvest other hardy plants for food, beauty or general contribution to the environment, (without problems from the DEA) there are a number of methods that it can be done.
GUERRILLA GARDENERS: Pack up your ammo and attack your neglected environments -
Got an air pistol? You can attack the matter with seed-bullets like these:
Or you can buy ready-made seedboms from Kabloom, which can be thrown into derelict land, neglected spaces and anywhere you want to make some environmental impact. Their outer casing is made from recycled materials that break down into a nice fertile compost with a bit of rain.
A great guide to a number of funky improvised environmental devices along with many tips is at:
Guerrilla Gardening Seed Bomb Guide
These are a couple prepackaged items available through Plant the Piece with some added novelty, including the more advanced version of a seed gun and some bombs that even children can play with:
For most, the most inexpensive way is to simply get our hands dirty and make your own seed-bombs from easily available materials such as clay, moss, compost and peat. Many people make a group activity of it. On the east coast there are the Green Guerillas which is a group that has been around since the 70s, gardening in the trash-strewn dereliction of New York.
On the west coast, I just got word of an event in which a bunch of people are getting together in February for a Seed Bomb (Bar) Crawl. Their guerrilla gardening mission is to ride the Metro Red Line (in L.A.) on a certain route and at every stop plant, clean and throw seed bombs as they go. The goal is to create 13 new spaces along the metro line and do it in record time - each stop 12 minutes or less. Not only that, they will be wearing evening attire (with tennis shoes) and RUNNING.
If you want some instruction on preparing seed-bombs, below is a how-to video on seed-bombing, based on ideas of based on the ideas of Masanobu Fukuoka, who has written books such as The One-Straw Revolution: An Introduction to Natural Farming (New York Review Books Classics) and The Road Back to Nature: Regaining the Paradise Lost
. He is an advocate of permaculture, which is essentially the manifestation of a core set of design principles, in which people design their own environments and build increasingly self-sufficient human settlements — ones that reduce society's reliance on industrial systems of production and distribution that is fundamentally and systematically destroying Earth's ecosystems.Once I am settled a little more, I'll take before and after photos of my personal guerrilla gardening moments and we'll see what manifests. IF I get back to the same spots. Even if I don't go to the same place twice and just toss seeds while passing through, the nice thing is that it doesn't matter.
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