Take up guerrilla gardening to beautify your city and provide food for bees and other insects!

So this clearly is not a novel idea (I actually took this screenshot from a website, though the listings on said website weren't working) but we all know about seed bombs, right? Well, get ready for

Guerrilla Droppings

Seed bombs made to look like animal droppings!

I'm not sure how necessary it is to make them in this shape (though I can 100% appreciate the extra sneaky feeling factor), and I did end up finding the listings on Amazon, but surely it wouldn't be too hard to make something like this at home with a custom seed mix, right?

https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8JE22dj/

Seed Bombs are little balls made up of a combination of compost, clay and seeds. The act of using the ball is called Seed bombing, which is the practice of introducing vegetation to land by throwing or dropping the seed bombs. The structure of the bomb enables the seeds to be launched over walls or distances, as the compost and clay act as a barrier to protect and nourish them, so they don’t need to be planted.

This technique is used by Guerrilla Garderners. Guerrilla Gardening is the act of gardening – raising food, plants, or flowers – on land that the gardeners do not have the legal rights to cultivate, such as abandoned sites, areas that are not being cared for, or private property.

might* fuck around and make some seed bombs

🌱🌸🪻🌷🌼🌿

*this is not a might, i absolutely will be doing this and inviting all my friends over

GUERILLA GARDENING💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼💪🏼‼️

It Started with Crows

I live in an apartment by a park, and in that park there’s a pond. It’s a small pond that didn’t have anything but geese, ducks, some turtles and catfish. No plants around the edge outside of an errant tree or two with a trunk no thicker than your index finger. It bothered me, that and how much trash would come around it, but I was sort of dejectedly accepting of it, because that’s what all ponds are like around here. My focus was on the crows at the park. I had heard you could gain their trust with peanuts, so I went and got unsalted in the shell peanuts, because I had been told they were a favorite. I didn’t have the patience for it though, and so I gave up rather quickly. So, instead I went and sat by the only part of the pond that was more shore than ‘sudden drop into mud’, and I started opening up the peanuts and tossing them out for the geese. As it turns out, its far easier to get geese to like you. I named the specific goose Matthew for no real reason. Matthew realized that I had the bag of peanuts in my messenger bag, so they started coming up and trying to take food from the bag. I realized he wasn’t entirely scared of me, so little by little I coaxed him into eating from my hands over the next few weeks. It was a habit after a while - I would fill a jar with bird food and take it out to the pond around sunset, feed the geese, and then just sit there with them while they were eating, even after I had run out of food. It got to the point that I was actually able to pet Matthew, and two others (Micah and Ridge) were coming close and eating from my hands (Ridge was named after a chip on the ridge of his beak - he was also greedy and bit me a lot before I started closing my hand when he did and stopped him from getting to the food). 

I got into the habit of picking up trash around the pond, because at some point during the process of goose friendship I started to see the pond as my own sort of territory. I was there often enough that I felt like I should have a say in things, you know? At some point someone dumped a shopping cart into the pond. That Bothered me - its a very specific feeling where it doesn’t leave my mind until I fix it, so I grabbed some thick twine (originally meant to be used for fixing my cats’ scratchers) and a large stick that I’ve had since I was a kid (called only “My Stick”) and I went out, using my Stick to nudge the twine around the axles of the cart so I could pull it out of the water, and then I rolled it over to the park trashcans for lack of better options. Something else had caught my attention in my time living here: There weren’t any frogs. I had lived here for two years and saw no frogs, no snakes, no minnows... Nothing. I noticed the way algae grew and overtook the pond for a few days before dying off then coming back, and when I looked into it I learned about toxic algae blooms, and how they could kill off wildlife in the ponds while feeding off of the runoff fertilizer that ended up in the pond.

And slowly that went from just being something I was disappointed about to something that Bothered me. So I decided I had to fix it. I couldn’t just find wildlife and drop it in, of course, but I decided to make it friendlier for animals to move into: I needed plants around that pond. I emailed our conservation society in my county, and got a small list of some plants which I took as permission to plant things. I started to get seeds for native wildflowers and spread them over the pond’s shoreline back in November, and I understood that it was too late in the season and I was likely not going to get any progress.

But I was wrong. This is what my pond looks like as of a week ago, where before it was nothing on the shore by the water there are flowers and plants, and that’s not all! This summer, there have not been any noticeable blue-green algae blooms that I have seen, and there are snails around the plants in the water, just there on their own! I have to say, I am so much happier now than I think I would have been if I had actually managed to just befriend crows. Thank goodness that they’re far more patient than I ever was.

Here are some plants native to Wyoming that you can put in gardens or seed bombs!

Sagebrush steppe

Badlands mules-ears

Indian paintbrush

Bitterroot

Porter's sagebrush

Blazing star

Fuzzy tongue penstemon

Rocky Mountain iris

Ute ladies'-tresses

Arrowleaf balsamroot

Showy milkweed

Columbian monkshood

Red windflower

Rock jasmine

Nodding onion

Spreading dogbane

Mountain deathcamas

Androsace septentrionalis

Anthemis cotula

Agoseris glauca

Orange agoseris

Amelanchier utahensis

Leafy Arnica

Please let me know if I got any of these wrong or if you have other flowers native to Wyoming!

2024.04.17

we sowed flower 🌼 seeds, a special mix of wildflower species that attract and feed the bees 🐝 i couldn’t wait to find out how the flowers would look like, so i drew them to help me imagine the future little bee garden.

wildflowers for bees:

china after single mix

lance-leaved coreopsis

purple coneflower

black-eyed susan

bergamot monarda fistulosa

plains coreopsis

You can just throw cool and useful invasive plant seeds or seed bombs on golf courses and they’ll water them for you.

Things like mint, basil, parsley, and cilantro grow really well when planted on golf courses.

What Are You Proud Of?

Rosemary has some new friends recently! Do you have something your proud of that you'd like to show off? Reply with a picture or story and we will reblog it! This can be any gardening adventure or community effort (guerilla gardening, community garden, seed bombing, wildlife rehab, etc). We want to recognize the work you have put into caring for our environment! Optionally, you can also submit anonymously.

Hey guys quick question to the guerrilla gardeners of Tumblr

Have you guys made seed bombs? Do they work?

I’ve seen plenty of seed bomb recipes online but never success stories afterwards, and I’ve had people tell me in their experience the process of making the bombs was too wet and the seeds germinated too early, or that you have to scratch up the soil first before placing the bomb, and at that point it feels kinda… why not just plant seeds the regular way?

I’m not necessarily saying seed bombs are dumb, I’m just curious about their success rate short and long term. If anyone has any knowledge or advice on this, it’d be greatly appreciated!

(Via: smokeyrgreens https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTdWmgDUv/)

Seed balls! I decided to just throw all the seeds in together, flowers and veggies (minus the eggplant because I don’t know what to do with eggplant? And minus the squash because squash bugs give me RAGE.) So when I get peas and carrots growing next to zinnias and cornflowers, it will be a delightful mix.

This was so fun! I think it would be great for kids too. It was very much like making cookies. You could use these for guerrilla gardening and throw them into an empty lot or a ditch that doesn’t get mowed, but I’m keeping these for myself.