Improve Your Soil With Seedballs: Morag Gamble - Our Permaculture Life

How to Make Seedballs. Visit Morag Gamble's blog www.our-permaculture-life.blogspot.com for more information.
Seedballs are a natural way to seed a landscape and restore degraded environments. Seedballs can be filled with all types of seeds - natives, pioneer species, green manures, salad greens, wildflowers .... whatever your climate, landscape and situation.
Seedballing is an ancient technique from Egypt, China and the Romans and renewed in the 1940's by the late, Masanobu Fukuoka, who is considered the founder of Natural Farming, and an inspiration for permaculture Fukuoka used seedballs extensively to rehabilitate damaged lands and practice no-till farming.
The mix we use is:
5 parts clay
1 part compost
big handful of seed
We mix the clay and compost together with the seeds until a firm ball can be made. I try to keep the balls just bigger than a 10c piece and allow them to dry before distributing them
The idea is that the seeds are protected inside the seedball from birds, rats and other seed-eating creatures until the rain comes and moistens the clay. The seed makes the most of this moisture and then the compost nutrients help it to continue to grow.
You can read more about seedballs on my blog:
Muddy hands, happy hearts: seedballs for healthy soils and diversity: our-permacultur...
and setting up a kids seedballing event:
A Wonderfully Easy and Fun Way to Seed a Garden: Seedballing with Nature Kids: our-permacultur...
Books by Masanobu Fukuoka:
One Straw Revolution
The Natural Way of Farming
Sowing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Restoration, and Ultimate Food Security