How You Can Make Your Own Seed Bombs For the Garden

wildflowers

I am terribly good at being not good at a lot of different things. I am not an amazing cook (but I sure can bake). I am not an amazing gardener, but I do love a beautiful garden. I am definitely the okayest mom around, and I’m an excellent terrible driver. We all have our strengths and our weaknesses. My one of my biggest self-perceived flaws is the fact that I simply cannot keep a living plant alive. I have such a brown thumb that I’ve found a way to kill my faux plants. But I’m working on it. It was approximately two years ago when my oldest was five and she asked me if we could plant a garden. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t even know where to begin, how to do that and that I’d certainly kill our flowers.

My husband, the darling man that he is, pointed out to me that this was a great way for my daughter and me to bond and to create something together. He also pointed out the fact that she doesn’t know how to garden but if she can learn, I can certainly learn, too. I kept that in mind and I sat down with my daughter to learn how to plant a garden. We started small, with just a few annuals. We chose the flowers we thought were prettiest, put them where we thought they were prettiest and we bought matching gloves and gardening tools. That was the fun part. The next part was a bit more work; remembering to water the flowers and to trim them and keep them looking nice was not all that simple.

Fast forward two years; I’m still not a master gardener and I still kill more than I let live, but I’m getting much better. My daughter is very talented in the garden, and I feel that this is a skill she will appreciate the rest of her life, and I’m very proud of her. Since summer vacation is here and we have a new house with a very big yard that’s a blank canvas, my daughter and I have been talking about how we’d like to plant our new garden. Some research introduced me to something called a seed bomb, and we both thought that sounded a little bit cool. So our next plan of action is to make homemade seed bombs for the garden so that we can see our handiwork turned into gorgeous flowering plants. We’ve done a lot of research, and I thought I’d share with you the recipe for seed bombs we are going to use.

I have no idea if it will work for us, but this is the recipe I found seems the most useful for us. It’s simple and effective, and it is supposed to work wonders. Since I’m bonding with my daughter over flowers, I thought some of my readers might want to take the same challenge. Work on your green thumb and the bond you have with your kids. Let’s all get them up, away from the electronics and out of the house. And since they’re called ‘bombs,’ perhaps you can get your boys involved with the process, too.

Seed Bomb Ingredients

Construction paper (the more colors you have, the more fun the project)

A spoon

A large bowl

A muffin tin (mini muffins are best)

A strainer – a very, very fine one

Wildflower seeds of your choosing

Scissors or a paper shredder – get as cool here as you want

A blender

Get to Work

The first thing you’re going to need to do is shred or cut your paper into very fine strips and toss it all into your blender. Add a cup of water to the blender – hot, cold, doesn’t matter – and mix it up until you get a goopy, papery mess. You’ll then transfer your mess into a bowl and add your seeds. Mix it all together quite well and then strain the water out of the goopy mess. The final step is to place your goopy mess into your muffin tins. You’ll want to let this sit somewhere warm for one to two full days so that the paper can harden and dry out, creating the bombs you will use to plant in your garden.

Plant the Bombs

That sounds so much more dangerous than it really is, don’t you think? The easiest part of the process – and that’s saying a lot considering how entirely easy this whole process really is – is the planting of the seed bombs. They don’t even actually have to be planted in the ground. The best way to plant these amazing wildflowers in your yard is to toss them into the general vicinity of where you want them and let mother nature herself do the rest of the work.

A Few Tips

Since seed bombs are made with wildflower seeds, you need not worry about the mundane things like watering your plants. For this kind of project, however, you’re going to want to do something like plant them on the edge of your property to grow a bit wild. You’re not going to want them in your carefully landscaped areas, but perhaps you don’t mind wildflowers growing rampant around your trees and shrubs. The choice is yours, though I do think that this would be a beautiful addition to around the exterior of your fence, alongside a long drive, in a large wooded space in the back; there are any number of locations throughout your yard where wildflowers growing on their own will make a lovely addition. Simply let them grow and enjoy the beauty that flourishes in the weeks and months following the strategic throwing of your seed bombs.

As a bonus, these also make really cool gifts for those who love to garden and love to spend time in the yard admiring lovely flowers. Try this for someone you love, and you might just be surprised how appreciative they are of you.

Photo by David McNew/Getty Images

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