Guerilla Gardening: Save the Date

Along the same lines of my “Stealth Gardening” blog post, is a whole group of people dedicated to this exact gardening method to beautify our cities!  Save the date for May 1^st to join in the fun!  More on that later.  The first time I heard of Guerilla Gardening I thought it was a fantastic idea!  In a nutshell, random individuals, or loosely organized groups of gardeners head out in the cover of darkness to add flowers and plants to areas of cities that are otherwise abandoned or overgrown from neglect.  They seek to make their neighborhood more beautiful one flower at a time.  There are some in the guerilla gardening movement that use it as a political platform as well.  However, the premise of the guerilla gardening is to improve these abandoned/worn out areas.  This isn’t a local movement, it’s now in many countries where people are taking out their seeds and planting cheer.

In searching the guerilla gardening website, they have introduced the “seed bomb” (or also called the “green grenade”).  It’s a concoction designed to hold the seeds in place long enough to be tossed into an area that is maybe not the safest to be tending to lengthier gardening methods.   There’s also the Kabloom “Seedbom”, Explosive eggs,  seed balloons, and seed pills (inside capsules).  The inventiveness of the arsenal looks like warfare but it’s all in the name of flowers.

This brings me back to the significance of May 1^st.  This is the international Sunflower Guerilla Gardening Day.  It began in Brussels in 2007 with gardeners planting sunflower seeds in abandoned or neglected areas.  Although I’m not a card-carrying member of the Geurilla Gardening group, I do plan to pick up a packet of sunflower seeds, just in case I happen to see a bare patch on May 1^st.