Cuplet Fern Holds First Seed Bomb Class

Cuplet Fern held our chapter’s first-ever seed bomb making class on September 2nd at the IFAS auditorium in Sanford.

Materials for making seed bombs

Our workshop, led by member Susan Carpenter, invited members to participate in a historic tradition of crafting seed dispersal methods. As Susan Carpenter explains:

Seed bombs are little balls of clay, seeds, and soil that were developed by the Ancient Egyptians to help plant their crops after the Nile’s seasonal floods. They are an easy and sustainable way to disperse seeds.

In Japan they’re called tsuchi dango or earth dumplings. Masanobu Fukuoka, a Japanese farmer, used them in agriculture in the 20th Century to facilitate a no-till method of farming which greatly reduces the amount of soil lost to erosion. Fukuoka published several works which had a global impact and helped farmers revegetate desertified and deforested lands.

In the 1970’s Guerilla Gardening became popular. There was an effort to beautify abandoned and neglected areas in New York City using seed bombs and other methods of planting. This movement has since spread to numerous other cities. Care must be taken to avoid breaking any laws when engaging in this type of gardening and it is best to join a co-op of some kind to avoid inadvertently breaking any laws.

There are several different ways to make seed bombs using the same basic materials. Our seed bombs were made with no-bake natural clay, soil, and Florida native plant seeds collected and donated by fellow members of Cuplet Fern. Native seed bombs are a wonderful way to enhance the diversity of our native wildflowers and share the bloom.