Seed Bombing has its roots in guerrilla gardening and proactive environmental protests, but it also shares some history with places like Hawaii and Africa, where seed bombing can be a useful technique for introducing wildlife into landscapes that have been cleared out by volcanoes or wildfire.

The idea is simple. Make a small clump of seed mix by mixing clay, compost, and seeds(preferable native species) and form it into a ball that can be thrown into empty or abandoned lots that suffer from a lack of wildlife. You can toss them over fences, off of bridges, or wherever you want to see a little more flora. The clay helps hold everything together, and the compost provides the base and nutrients for the seeds.

Shadyside Worms was able to provide some worm castings to the Teen Department at The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh for their seed bomb program. The worm castings were made available by two of our customers in the Compost Exchange program who decided to donate the exchange from their first 3 month subscription. We always encourage people in the compost exchange to donate their castings if they don’t want to use them, and we were more than excited to be a part of the seed bomb making!

Vermicompost in particular works perfectly for seed bombing. The nutrient content allows you to skip using fertilizer, and more importantly, the beneficial bacteria contained in the castings actually help prevent disease in seedlings by warding off harmful spores that invade the seed as they germinate. If you would like to know more about this, check out our link from Cornell University on our previous post, and keep up to date on our blog as we show you our own controlled experiments with growing seeds in vermicompost!

Now go make some seed bombs and lively up your neighborhood or yard. KABOOM!

I can’t wait to see this guy grow real soon. Come on rain…just one more storm…