Some like the below-the-waist, underhand lob. Others use an inconspicuous flick of the wrist – after a couple of furtive glances around – while walking past an empty lot. A few prefer to deliver the payload over fences with an arcing overhand throw.
Many more are satisfied with simply stuffing the marble-sized balls into pots of soil or a patch of garden and waiting for Nature to work its magic.
No matter how you drop them, seed bombs – little eco-grenades of clay, fertilizer and seeds – are one of the most potent weapons in a guerrilla gardener’s arsenal. A campaign to revitalize New York’s urban areas by putting more community green spaces on the map is stepping up in the city, and Brooklyn stands at the frontlines of the ongoing war for grass, gardens and greenery.
Guerrilla gardening, so-called because its operatives often engage in drive-by-planting tactics without first informing landowners, is not a new trend nor is the practice limited to the United States.
“I’ve seen places in China and South Korea where people grow cabbages on a highway,” said Kimberly Sevilla, a small business owner and 10-year guerrilla gardening vet. “Median strips on roads in some countries are used to grow food where we just have grass here [in the US].”
Hurling earthen balls around may not seem like an effective way to satisfy a hardcore urban gardener’s horticultural fix, but seed bombing is one of the more successful means to quickly turn publicly owned empty lots into verdant oases of flowers, fruits and vegetables amid the concrete desert of urban life. A handful of homemade or store-bought bombs, a throwing arm and an empty plot are all that is needed to create an explosion of greenery on a previously desolate piece of land.
Sevilla, who runs Rose Red & Lavender, a floral boutique on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg, is a long-time urban gardener whose passion for the subject cannot help but leave the impression that if guerrilla gardeners had a generalissimo, she would be it. She explained that the movement also takes aim at current health and neighborhood issues, like childhood obesity, urban blight and poverty, in addition to environmental and sustainability goals. Sevilla sees opportunities in every abandoned lot and on every blank brick wall or unused rooftop.
“I started planting vegetables in tree pits and testing different methods of growing like vertical gardens on walls,” she said. Sevilla has also taken to planting leeks in a tree pit just up the street from her shop.
Helping the borough’s urban and guerrilla gardening enthusiasts is 596 Acres, a mapping service that catalogs vacant public land in Brooklyn. The web-based project made its debut in August 2011 and connects urban farmers with local government agencies that manage empty plots on behalf of New York’s Department of City Planning. Interest in these vacant lots among various Brooklyn-based groups looking to begin local food production has been growing, according to Eric Brelsford, the project’s lead programmer.
“There has been a great deal of interest from the start,” said Brelsford. “People contact us by email, sign up on a lot as an organizer or as a watcher. Roughly 150 people have signed up [so far]. We’ve had around 6,000 unique visitors to the site since it launched [last year].”
Organizers are people or groups looking to secure a lot for a project, and watchers are observers who opt to receive email notifications when something develops on the piece of land they are monitoring.
But in spite of support networks like 596 Acres, successful projects – Brooklyn’s newest community garden opened on April 1 this year at 462 Halsey St. in Bedford-Stuyvesant – and the growing ranks of eco-soldiers, urban and guerrilla gardeners who work on the fringe still face challenges that go beyond picking which plot of land to (seed) bomb. Civil law issues like trespassing may still apply in situations where public land is involved.
Paula Z. Segal, the 596 Acres facilitator and founding member of the NYC National Lawyers’ Guild Street Law team, said the 596 Acres project includes lot ownership or custodianship information on all land marked in the database as being publicly owned. She stressed the importance of using the database to its full advantage by following up with any city agency associated with a lot and working with it.
“All of the land is owned by New York,” Segal said. “It’s managed by the city, which decides whether to withhold the land or distribute it to other agencies to parcel out.”
Although nobody in New York has been arrested for seed bombing empty lots under the cover of darkness, at least one person in the United Kingdom has been questioned about his night-time gardening activities. By and large, however, guerrilla and urban gardeners who err on the side of caution and work within the confines of the law should have little reason to become entangled with authorities or hostile landowners.
And despite the impressive roadside veggie displays she saw abroad, Sevilla said eating strange food growing in an empty lot next to a gas station may not be the wisest thing to do; sensible advice when hazardous amounts of lead have been detected in urban gardens across the nation. Soil conditions close to areas of high vehicle traffic are, in many cases, less than ideal for growing certain types of produce for human consumption due to toxic run-offs like cadmium and arsenic that are absorbed by plants. Leafy and root vegetables, in particular, are at risk of drawing in large amounts of heavy metals from soil while fruiting crops, like tomatoes, peppers and beans, had no measurable amounts, according to a 2003 study.
“I wouldn’t let my children eat leafy greens from a vacant lot,” Sevilla said. “I don’t know what’s in it.”
But all things considered, Sevilla does whatever she can to encourage urban agriculture in any shape or form. In addition to selling planting supplies and tools, Rose Red & Lavender also offers classes on a variety of topics that cover urban gardening, including sessions on how to make seed bombs.
“Land is a very precious thing,” she said. “Americans have been spoiled by the amount of land and space that we have, and we misuse it. But now we have opportunities to bring about some change, and I see the urban gardening movement as a chance to save ourselves from ourselves.”
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