Are you the kind of person who likes to grow flowers, but doesn’t want to spend time getting on your knees, preparing the soil, and carefully spreading out your seeds in a furrow? Seed bombs are for you! And a fun project to make with kids. Thrown into neglected round-abouts, planters, flower beds and ditches, seed bombs can spread the goodness of planting flowers around.

A little preparation of creating these fun little time bombs and you are ready to go to work throwing them around in neglected areas to sprout and thrive. With our heavy constant rain in the mid-Atlantic region, many areas are ripe for germination.

Throw the balls onto bare soil, not turf

These balls germinated in about 5 days during a warm rainy spell; the clay has almost disappeared into the soil

About 6 weeks later, zinnias have sprouted up to 18″ tall already

Best flowers for seed bombs: for sunny areas, annual meadow flowers including poppies, cornflower, marigold; Californian poppies; cosmos; hollyhocks; nigella; verbena bonariensis; viper’s bugloss. For shady areas, use a woodland seed mix; foxgloves, tobacco plant, honesty.

Wildflower Seed Mix collections for various growing zones including Texas, California, Midwest, and Southeast are $5 apiece from Urban Farmer Seeds & Plants.

Ingredients:

Flower seed
Potter’s clay powder, from any craft shop or Amazon
Peat-free compost or potting medium
Water
A bowl
A baking tray

Instructions:

Mix the seed, clay, and compost together in a bowl to a ratio of three handfuls of clay, five handfuls of compost, and one handful of seed. Then carefully add water slowly and gradually (you don’t want it too gloopy), mixing it all together until you get a consistency that you can form into truffle-sized balls. Lay them out to bake dry on a sunny windowsill for at least three hours.