This is a post about a news article about Guerilla gardeners that showed up in the Asian Pacific Post a few weeks ago. I mentioned it in some Twitter posts when I found that they had used some of my images without my permission. This has been corrected.

The same article appeared yesterday in the Sydney Morning Herald. It is ephemera of the news cycle that I find interesting. The story is a filler that editors can add when they need more content. The Asian Pacific Post added a local angle which they were not required to do but I’m glad they did. I’m surprised the Sydney Morning Herald could not do the same [from their own publication!]

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It costs me as much to get them myself as it does to have them delivered. When that happened a huge truck came to my street, made much noise, used a lift to get a shrink wrapped pallet of 50 buckets down to the ground. When I get home with this, they are in the door within five minutes.

A few minutes away was the West Coast Seeds store where I bought supplies for a seed ball making workshop happening on the weekend. Here’s the view of their front yard:

Seed balls “are one half inch diameter models of the living world. They can contain all the seeds for a complete habitat, or a wild or domestic garden. In a holographic way, each ball can contain the whole plant potential of the entire ecosystem.” Source [archived]

I have written about them here and provided some links here as has Andrea Bellamy on Heavy Petal. [3 links]

Here is a seed ball planting I did a few years ago at 12th and Cambie across from Vancouver City Hall:

March 2005

The setup:

I scored the ground with a ski pole to rough it up a bit

The placement:

Now all I have to do is wait.

May 2005:

June 2005:

I thought I took some picture in 2006 but apparently not.

April 2007:

August 2007 – In the middle of the RAV Line construction zone:

They take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’. Nature is beautiful that way.

Back in February, I added some seeds to a new patch of dirt near Cambie Street

March 17, 2007:

They got smart later in the spring and added a huge stone, which prevented people from driving over it. Now look at the results:

Three weeks after planting this small corner, I can see a green carpet developing:

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Technorati Tags: guerrillagardening, guerrilla, gardening, vancouver, bc, clover

This event went so well.

Read about it here* and see more pictures here

The next step is to plant them. April 1st seem like a great day for that.
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*08April07 – Meetup.com changed their message format from online writing/storage to email only. What they didn’t tell us is that they would be deleting all existing messages. Grrr!

16March07 – More about seed balls from workshop participant Andrea Bellamy here and here

Technorati Tags: guerrillagardening, guerrilla, gardening, vancouver, bc, urban, landscaping, public, spaces

All the construction near Cambie St resulted in a lot of side streets being dug up, so in a move to restore the ground, earth was put down and grass seed was spread.

What an opportunity to add to the diversity.

I took seeds of white dutch clover and
crimson clover

and spread them thickly over the area.

Want to do some guerrilla gardening yourself but need the strength of numbers?

The Vancouver Guerrilla Gardening Meetup Group has links to GG info in other parts of the world.
ooo

Technorati Tags: guerrilla gardening, guerrilla, gardening, white dutch clover, crimson clover, clover, vancouver, bc

Sign up on Meetup.com website….

Seed ball making workshop – The Vancouver Guerilla Gardening Meetup Group (Vancouver, BC) – Meetup.com

When: Saturday, March 10, 2007, 1:00 PM

Where: Mount Pleasant Community Center
3161 Ontario Street
Vancouver , BC V5T 2Z1

Description:

We will be supplying

Seed – Crimson clover, White dutch clover, grass seeds, wild flowers
bring your own seeds to add to the mix – California poppy welcome

Red Clay

Compost

Mixing bowls

You will need to bring

a container for taking your seed balls home – something like a small pizza box so that the seed balls won’t be stacked too high on top of each other, they will be fragile.

At the end of the day…

You will be able to take 1/3 of the seed balls home for your own use and experimentation
The other 2/3 will be used to populate a guerrilla garden site at 7th and Hemlock

A planting day will be arranged within three weeks of the workshop date.

There is a $5.00 fee for this event.
ooo

Technorati Tags: guerrilla gardening, vancouver, seed balls, urban landscaping, gardening, changeeverything.ca

Links to all people mentioned on original page:

Inspiration overload

As I mentioned last week, a guerrilla gardening group recently formed in Vancouver. We met last weekend, and I’ve been thinking about how to introduce the group to Heavy Petal readers. You see, there are just so many cool people involved! It’s inspiring and exciting.

First, there’s our founder and fearless leader, Oren, a landscape architect with a focus on urban ecological design.

There’s Al, who some of you might know from his blog Urban Wilderness but who is now blogging from Al’s Bokashi Blog about Bokashi composting (Al, I must find out more about this!).

There’s Ward, the “boy” behind cityfarmboy.com, a company promoting urban farming and related products and services.

Read it all…

I attended this meeting as I said I would here

I don’t have reporting skills to take word for word notes, so I’ll let the pictures do the talking instead:

A very diverse group….

…with many interests and agendas. Some want to plant flowers in grey/concrete spaces. Others want to grow food in abandoned spaces and community gardens. Some have access to garden and growing space while others don’t.

The co-ordinator of this event is Oren

wearing the cap.

Ward is beginning a business making and selling turn-key raised bed gardens and is chatting with Eileen who grows flowers in over 900 square feet of garden space in a number of community gardens.

Justin – who went out and built his own community garden near where he lives – wants to setup a non-profit group to organize offical community gardens in various parts of the city, is talking with Jan who has done similar work in the U.S.

It will be interesting to see where this leads.

The meeting was held at the Foundation Lounge which served a great food platter for all of us.

http://commgardens.meetup.com/56/?gj=sj5
ooo

Technorati Tags: guerrillagardening, vancouver, bc, changeeverything, guerrilla, gardening, urban, landscape, activism, community