Seed Birds and Volcanoes for Guerilla Gardening

This Spring Break we got excited about making wildflower seed balls to throw into a local empty field. This Heal This Field poster was our inspiration.  We ended up with a lot of experiments and variations, some of which turned out great.

This fuzzy Seed Bird is one of the favorites, covered in aster seeds and filled with wildflowers seeds, it will almost be a shame to turn it loose in the earth. But the reward will be flowers later this summer.

To make the seed balls we used newspaper mush and wildflower seeds. We also used toilet paper tubes, paper bags, napkins and rice glue. Many tutorials on making Seed Balls are out there on the interwebs. This one that uses newspaper was our inspiration.  We made our own rice glue from short grain rice. It's basically free and will dissolve in the rain allowing the seeds to sprout out. Instructions for making rice glue were found here.

As usual, the project somehow turned into a experiment and creativity fest. Some seed balls did take the standard ball shape, but of course we weren't content to sticking to one shape.

Some seeds were sandwiched between paper and covered in rice glue and formed to a jar lid shape. The hope was they would fly like flying seed discs.  This had only limited success. Maybe if they were bigger with more weight. The rice glue really makes the paper hard as anything.

One of these discs ended up as a mushroom. The red discs have tomato seeds in them. Next time I think I will make seed balls with more vegetable seeds in them. I will have to research which vegetables would fair well in an unattended field. 

The Seed Birds are newspaper mash with seeds formed into a simple bird shapes then covered in scrap paper using rice glue.  The color really added the needed cuteness factor.

We dipped the beaks into a turmeric and rice glue mixture.

This is one of my favorite little birds, it may be hard to let it go flying away into a field somewhere. The ones in the background were covered in rice glue then rolled in aster seeds.

The owls were made of toilet paper tubes stuffed with seed mash and covered with brown paper or tissue.  More detailed information on making this owl can be found here.

Some newspaper balls were wrapped with Keep Canada Clean messages. These were made with lavender seeds I'd saved from my lavender plants. The newspaper mash smells wonderful as bits of flowers and leaves were mixed in.

Seed sticks with a message like 'Keep Canada Clean' or 'Plant Flowers not Garbage' were made by using rice glue to stick seeds onto scraps of paper. The ones that turned out nicest were formed around straws so it made a neat spiral tube.

The seed volcanoes are pretty much my favorite ones though. They are so festive and exciting looking.

We pressed the mash into cone shapes using a small plastic funnel as a mold, tore strips of red paper and used rice glue to give the vocano lava.

With spring rain coming today, and warmer weather in sight,  we'll see how long it takes this one to sprout.

The cat grass seed bomb amuses me as it really is cat grass seeds around the base. Maybe catnip would be more useful and appreciated. Not only could you plant flowers, you could lure cats away from your vegetable garden.

I hope you enjoyed our variations on the seed ball. This is a fun activity for kids and the crafty, and don't forget the second part of the project which is the planting. Think about taking this project the extra step by visiting a nearby field that needs cleaning up, pick up some garbage and then plant some wildflowers.

Plant Flowers not Garbage!