GreenAid’s Guerrilla Gumball-Machine Gardening

“We were part of a guer­rilla gar­den­ing group in Los Angeles, but L.A. is so huge that it was a big pain to sync up with oth­ers who lived so far away,” Daniel Phillips told Organic Connections. “GreenAid was born par­tially from that frus­tra­tion; we wanted to make seedbombs—which are really amazing—more acces­si­ble to everybody.”

Kim con­tin­ued the story. “We had that thought and then my dad, who lived in Pittsburgh and had a hobby with candy machines, moved and donated a bunch of the machines to us. He told us to do some­thing inter­est­ing with them.”

The bright idea was then born to load the gum­ball machines with seed­bombs and place them around urban areas. Early in 2010, they placed the first pro­to­type in L.A.’s Chinatown. It all went upward from there.

“It has sim­ply taken off,” Daniel said. “We have about 40 machines in the world right now, mostly in the US—many right here in L.A.—but we’re start­ing to get a lot of inter­est inter­na­tion­ally. We just did a few machines for Italy, a few for Mexico, and some for Canada as well. It’s been a pretty wild ride, and we’re hav­ing a lot of fun.”

GreenAid’s seed­bombs are made from a mix­ture of clay, com­post and seeds, and can be used to green up and col­orize any unused space that might oth­er­wise be an eye­sore. They can be thrown anony­mously into derelict urban sites to tem­porar­ily reclaim and trans­form them into places worth look­ing at and car­ing for. The clever dis­pens­ing method makes these guer­rilla gar­den­ing efforts more acces­si­ble to all by appro­pri­at­ing the exist­ing dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem of the quarter-operated candy machine. Using the loose coins from a purse or pocket, a per­son can make a small but mean­ing­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the beau­ti­fi­ca­tion of his or her city.

“We like to call our ini­tia­tive change for change, because if you put 50 cents in the machine, you get a sin­gle seed­bomb out,” Daniel explained. “Most of our mix­tures con­tain native wild­flower seeds. You can plant one in a for­got­ten cor­ner of the envi­ron­ment, such as a side­walk crack, a vacant lot or even your own back­yard. If it gets a lit­tle water, then it will sprout in about three days and become a small mushy pocket of vegetation.”

Daniel and Kim knew it would be impor­tant to work within local ecol­ogy. “We have con­ducted a lot of research on plants native to var­i­ous areas,” Kim pointed out. “We stress that we are very, very care­ful not to intro­duce inva­sive species. We take our time and work closely with dif­fer­ent com­mu­ni­ties to make sure we have the right seed selection.”

GreenAid has sev­eral dis­tri­b­u­tion meth­ods. A per­son or group can pur­chase their own machine for $375; they can rent the machine and keep it for as long as they like for $75 per month (includ­ing seed­bomb refill); or they can sim­ply obtain the seed­bombs them­selves to sell, give away or use. Seedbombs sell for $.25 each.

Click any image above to see a larger version.

Daniel and Kim are now look­ing at the big­ger pic­ture of what their GreenAid project could mean for the future. “We’ve recently been in a num­ber of dis­cus­sions with dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions that want to reseed aban­doned lots that are quite large,” Daniel related. “For exam­ple, we’re cur­rently talk­ing to the Culver City [California] Redevelopment Association, which has tons of vacant lots that they really need to find some interim uses for; and they’re start­ing to real­ize that seed­bomb dis­pensers are a great way for get­ting the pub­lic involved in tem­porar­ily trans­form­ing a site that would be oth­er­wise totally use­less. That’s really exciting.”

“Our dream down the road is that seed­bombs in some capac­ity could be used for really large-scale inter­ven­tions for places that have been dam­aged by nat­ural or man­made dis­as­ters, such as wild­fires and floods,” Kim said. “There’s plenty of oppor­tu­nity, and we’re think­ing a bit larger scale and longer term about part­ner­ing with dif­fer­ent orga­ni­za­tions to fit seed­bombs into exist­ing mis­sions of what other peo­ple are doing across the world.”

For more infor­ma­tion on COMMONStudio and the GreenAid project, visit the web­site at www.thecommonstudio.com.