Seed ball workshop February 16, 2008; 10:30-12 noon

We had a lot of fun at the second seed ball workshop January 27th. It was great to meet so many new people interested in this process and foraging. Also, thank you to everyone who helped spread the word.

This Saturday will be the first day we begin broadcasting the seed balls. We will begin at 10:30 making more balls and after everyone will be able to take some with them to broadcast at the chosen sites if they would like to. The fava beans will be the first seeds to be broadcast. It's hard to know if they will reseed next year but even if they don't they will act as a mini cover crop. Currently I have nine really good sites and hope with your help to find many more. Please send me your ideas for sites. If you are out with a camera, even better, send me a picture with the address. Again the criteria are: 1) the site is fallow, untended land 2) within the city limits 3) have public access 4) not obviously toxic 5) not be land set aside for native restoration.

I look forward to seeing you Saturday.

Interested in wild bees? Check out Gordon Frankie's website. See link to the right.

Seed balls: promoting urban foraging in San Francisco

In remote or rural areas, berries and greens can still be freely foraged. By reclaiming many of our city's under utilized sites Urban Growth promotes the possibility of reclaiming the commons by seeding bare and untended earth under freeways, vacant lots, spaces between buildings or soil just emerging from abandoned and broken concrete. Land, which has been left abused and fallow, is revitalized and will offer it's bounty to feed the surrounding people and animals with plants that will nourish only those who eat them but also the ground they grow in.

The project:

Urban Growth will create and broadcast thousands of seed balls filled with native and edible seeds around San Francisco on fallow urban landscapes. Seed balls are known throughout the world as an efficient and successful strategy to reclaim difficult or abused land. The seeds are rolled up in mud and humus containing a high degree of clay, and strewn over the ground creating a self-sustaining mini-community (for information about seed balls, see links to the right). The clay protects the seeds from being eaten by birds, and when the rains come, the humus and clay help hold moisture and nutrients so the seeds germinate. Some of the seeds I plan to use include, miner's lettuce, burdock, mint, nettle, wild leeks, dandelion, chicory, mustard, lambs quarter, wild spinach and purslane.

Support materials, including maps of the planting sites, will be handed out in neighborhood communities or through this blog so that those who want to gather the food will know where edibles have been planted, what they look like and what to do with them. When these plants grow, they become part of a living sustainable community of relationships that includes billions of soil micro-organisms, worms, insects, other plants, birds, and humans, all of which work together to create the possibility of more foraged foods within our everyday landscape.

Join us to make seed balls, find the sites, broadcast the seeds and finally to harvest our labors.

Watch for postings of events here.