While seed bombs or “seed grenades” are usually an organic affair, they can take on numerous forms. The New York City Green Guerrillas, founded by Liz Christy in the 1970s, filled balloons with local wildflower seeds, water, and fertilizer. Today, innovative designers are coming up with all kinds of creative distribution techniques, such as Bloom, a device that is affixed to a bicycle and blows seed bubbles while you pedal.
But lest you think the seed bomb is cutting-edge technology, it is actually part of the ancient technique of “no-till farming,” which was reintroduced by the famous Japanese farmer and microbiologist Masanobu Fukuoka in the 1940s. Alongside the organic and permaculture movements, Fukuoka pioneered farming techniques that work with instead of against nature, an approach that good guerrilla gardeners should consider before getting their hands dirty.
If you’re going to throw seed bombs or cultivate a patch of bare soil on a sidewalk, it’s best to pick plants that will thrive without too much effort. Since “these plants need to look after themselves a lot of the time,” London guerrilla gardener Richard Reynolds explains, you should focus on plants that don’t need a lot of water and that are known to thrive in your geographic region.
Just as guerrilla filmmakers are sometimes stopped by the police for not having a location release, guerrilla gardeners have been met by resistance by property-owners and authorities. Surely there is nothing more tragic for a guerrilla gardener than spending a night planting flowers only to find them uprooted the next day. But more often guerrilla gardening beautifies, starts conversations and ultimately strengthens communities.
And sometimes what starts underground gains mainstream acceptance. Spike Lee made She’s Gotta Have It in 1986 for under two-hundred thousand dollars, and, after much critical acclaim it grossed over seven million dollars in box office sales. When Brooklynite Milton Puryear started planting what he calls “crack gardens” under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, his main objective was to make his neighborhood greener and safer for local kids. His guerrilla gardening efforts inspired others in his community and over time transformed into a full-fledged nonprofit initiative called the Brooklyn Greenway Initiative, which is creating a continuous pedestrian-friendly, plant-filled path along the Brooklyn waterfront.
So with summer here, we can all do our part to turn this concrete jungle into a real jungle. Here are some tips and resources to get you started:
Books
On Guerilla Gardening: A Handbook for Gardening Without Boundaries by Richard Reynolds
Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto
Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden And Your Neighborhood into a Community by Heather Coburn Flores
How Tos
Earth Tones: Growin’ Guerrilla Style from Etsy
Seed Bomb Recipe from funtimehappygardenexplosion
Guerrilla Gardening Tips from GuerrillaGardening.org
Inspiring Films
Seed Bombing by Fresh Cut Media
Guerrilla Gardening by Adidas
The Media That Matters: Good Food Collection
The Gleaners & I by Agnes Varda
By Shira Golding
