By Dana Carter – Motueka Catchment Collective
Ollie Langridge, a member of the Biodiversity and Restoration Thematic Group, involves his children in his passion for native restoration and it seems to be rubbing off on them.
One of the latest activities is making and distributing seed bombs. These seed bombs have around 50-100 seeds that go in either wetland or dry hillsides.
Seed bombs can be a really useful way of establishing plants without having to dig the soil.
Ollie’s daughter, Anna, loved rolling the seeds into muddy balls, ready for throwing (or launching via catapult) onto their restoration sites.
How to make seed bombs
You’ll need one-third seeds, one-third clay, one-third sand. Don’t overthink it!
Mix by hand in wet materials, all sourced from the land (no purchases or tools necessary at all).
Shape handfuls of mixture in round balls about the size of a golf ball. Allow 48 hours for your seed bombs to dry. Once dry they are ready to use.
How to distribute your seed
You can either use seed bombs, or you can directly seed areas. For more remote areas that are hard to reach, you might like to try a catapult system.
For this method to work, you’ve got to get lucky with how you design the trailer-mounted slingshot, as there’s a bit of physics involved with making sure all the bungie cords are equally tensioned and firing together.
Ollie says after woofers built one for them initially, they got lucky on the first few attempts, mounting the device onto a wooden pallet (free from Mitre 10) and then onto a trailer, so they could drive up and down the driveway firing seeds into the gullies.
“Then disaster struck – the blue funnel split, and I could never get it right again after that, it just kept firing incorrectly or self-destructing. In the end I got frustrated and just walked around throwing seeds directly into bracken and gorse by hand, sometimes also with a fishing bait catapult… all part of the learning process. You’ve also got to have a good reasonably heavy seed source, and lots of it,” he says.
“I probably launched/threw around 6-8kgs of seeds and I aim to keep doing this every year. The three species I have tested are ti kouka, totara (in particular) and whauwhaupaku. In the past, totara has definitely worked, and seedlings have sprouted.”
