I am interested in easy ways to spread the word about how important native wildflowers and plants are in supporting the ecological functions of an environment, especially providing food and shelter for the native wildlife that have evolved with the particular plants.
Wanting to share this with my neighbours here in Pemberton, I shared the attached poster in the village to gather interest for a live workshop regarding how to make seed bombs, using wildflower seeds purchased and/or collected from my garden.
The idea was to have people come at the end of the growing season to learn how to harvest and collect dried seedheads from wildflowers, how to separate the dried seeds from the chaff and then how to use those seeds to create small seed-filled clay balls that can be tossed into bare corners of yards and streets to let Nature do her own thing and grow without much input.
However, the weather had other plans as we had weeks of torrential storms, atmospheric rain and localized flooding and my yard where I was to host the workshop was a mud pit and not conducive to 20+ people!
I then planned on working with the local public library for a virtual event but they informed me that their Programming staff member had moved to a different town and they had not filled her position, and offered for me to contact them in spring 2025.
I was pretty disappointed and speaking to a neighbour mum about it and she suggested that I invite some of the local neighbourhood kids to come to my place and learn how to make the seed bombs, which I did!
It was a lot of fun, the kids were having a ball (pun intended!) mixing clay, compost and seeds into small round ‘bombs’ in my kitchen despite the winds and cold outside.
Now they are able to tell family & other friends of theirs’ of what they did and show other people how to do it as well as I told them about the benefits of wildflowers and native plants.
Hopefully they also learned a little about the local ecology, and feel proud that they can do something, however small, in helping our planet.
If I have the opportunity to do it again, I think I will just provide for all the seeds and aim for earlier in the spring instead of wishing for them to harvest the seeds themselves in the fall. The weather is too unpredictable up here in the coastal mountains at that time.
