Guerrilla Gardener's Blog

We are working on a beautiful project, take a look at this (italian) PRESENTATION

Reusing is a great topic.
When we reuse items, we re-invent their possible combination with the enviroment.
With our imagination, everything could do anything: it’s a magical power.
Sometimes it works, many other times it does not.

This garden is made with plastic bottles, which have a little technological variation, in order to become subirrigated planters.

The experiment seems working pretty well, especially with the aromatic herbs and flowers. I’m trying tomatoes and eggplants too, but obviously they are not very productive.
This urban way to cultivate let us spare space, money and time.

The black thin pipe is the automatic drop watering system. It makes it even easier!

Instructions:

Ikea found this technique so interesting that they organized with us a first beautiful workshop for 15 families, offering one “Snalis” container full of plants to each family.
Everybody was involved in setting the container and planting tomatoes, zucchini, lettuces, eggplants.. It was a success and we all are looking forward to repeat this experience.

We created even some clear instructions, with the Ikea design:

We started!
Finally we created the pilot project for more Community Gardens like this to come.
This first garden will have 50 containers in total, in this picture you see only 30 of them:

Everyone can “adopt” a container for 25 € for 6 months, and harvest it.
With a daily coffee we could support 7 containers!
Plus, every 4 containers adopted, we create one just for the underprivileged of the neighborhood.

We are very excited about a new project going on here in Florence.
We are creating a group of volunteers to set up the first urban community vegetable garden based on the subirrigation.
Subirrigation is a very efficient and simple technology that is known since centuries and centuries but is still not very popular, especially among urban citizens.
Here’s a presentation (in italian) for more details:

Our goal is to create a network of little city vegetable gardens and share this knowledge with everybody interested.
We’ll post surely the progress of the project!

The exact day Melissa and Giacomo got married (10 of July 2010) this picture was published by Io Donna (Corriere della Sera).
It was part of a very nice article about special gardens in Italy..
This hanging vegetable one, on the Florentine roofs, was included for its originality, we suppose.

More gardens of this article HERE

Johnny Kelly is really an amazing visual poet.
In this fantastic video he mixes stopmotion and classical drawing animation, crating a beautiful story about the cycle of a seed.
I thank him for having generated such an incredible work, and I’m proud to share it with all of you!

Yesterday Guerrilla Gardener took part to the Eco Parking Day in Florence.
It’s a great idea born in San Francisco in 2005, that has been sprouting all over the world and finally arrived to Florence. It was superbly organized by Kindi which created even this site to celebrate the event.
We had such a fun!
Many kids came to play with our seedmatches… let’s just hope they’ll plant them next spring.

For our wedding keep-sake we created the seedmatches with daisy and lavender seeds.
Our guests loved them!

We’d like to share with you this 2 minutes interview (in italian) where we present some of our green ideas.
It was recorded the 25th of june and was shown the exact day of our wedding, the 10 of july.
Nice coincidence…

After a workshop where we produced hundreds of seedbombs, we went for a green mission along the river Arno, in Florence.
The goal is to capture the attention of the city regarding an area that could be used, instead of being left abandoned as it is.
We dream to have a big, community vegetable garden there, next year.
So the plan was to draw a SMILE using the seedbombs as pixels, and throw others randomly all around…
Even if we should have been doing this at least one month ago, we still think that something will… explode soon.

Here we have a great amount of beautiful ideas for urban green revolution, just click on the image to see them!

…gently collected by Genomicon

Finally the sun seems having come back definitely!
We are still working on new sack installations, soon we’ll show how many they are… if we don’t fall from the roof into the street, of course.

That’s a simple idea with the ambitious goal to make people more sensitive to the value and potential of a few seeds.
It’s pocket-size and can be used anywhere: in our garden, on the balcony or in other abandoned public spaces of the city.

It recently won a design competition!!
Check it out HERE:

Here’s some card-pieces after 2 weeks:

It’s a short brochure with our products.

In Brescia, in the Galleria dell’Incisione, next sunday we’ll celebrate Easter with a green and sustainable idea.
With many children we’ll play a big game for hunting all the “ingredients” needed for the seedbombs, then we’ll produce them with egg shape…
Stay tuned to see how it was!
More infos: HERE

Finally the first plants are sprouting out of the hanging sacks!

“Victory gardens, also called war gardens or food gardens for defense, were vegetable, fruit and herb gardens planted at private residences and public parks in United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Germany during World War I and World War II to reduce the pressure on the public food supply brought on by the war effort. In addition to indirectly aiding the war effort these gardens were also considered a civil “morale booster” — in that gardeners could feel empowered by their contribution of labor and rewarded by the produce grown.
Making victory gardens become a part of daily life on the home front.”
(Wikipedia)

We think it’s never too late to create our own victory garden.
If we can eat what we produce at home… it’s for sure a little, daily and important victory.

Using empty-used-plastic bottles for hydroponic colture at your window is something more then just city-farming.
This idea is simply great!

These guys are doing it right, in NYC!
Let’s be inspired by their experience.

What if… we were be able to grow our vegetable garden in hanging natural-sacks?  And solve, this way,  some problems related to space needs?

This could be quite interesting for urban areas, where some citizens had to give up with their “green sensitiveness” and,  resigned,  had abandoned this idea.

There’s a nice project behind this, that will start in march, in Florence. Stay tuned.

This is a recent and nice documentary from Report (Tv-doc. Program) about Guerrilla Gardening in Milan (italian).

Here’s a list of the best plants for our future.

If you plan to plant a seed and would like to know more about plants proprieties, that’s for you!

Seed balls, simply put, are a method for distributing seeds by encasing them in a mixture of clay and compost. This protects the seeds by preventing them from drying out in the sun, getting eaten by birds, or from blowing away.

Seed balls are scattered directly on the ground, not planted. Self-sufficiency and sustainability website Path To Freedom says seed balls are useful for seeding dry, thin and compacted soils and for reclaiming derelict ground (which is why they are often used in guerilla gardening). Seed balls are particularly useful in dry and arid areas where rainfall is highly unpredictable.
You can “sow” your seed balls on a sunny day – and just leave them. When sufficient rain has permeated the clay, the seeds inside sprout and are aided by the nutrients and beneficial soil microbes surrounding them.

In fact, the seed ball method has been working for centuries. It seems that North American First Nations’ tribes used seed balls. More recently natural farming pioneer Masanobu Fukuoka has experimented with them. And in New York City, seed bombs were used in 1973’s revitalization of the Bowery neighbourhood and the development of the city’s first community garden.
(Taken by blog: http://heavypetal.ca/archives/2007/03/a-brief-history-of-the-seed-ball)

Here’s a picture of these first seedbombs, probably less “eco-friendly” than the new ones made with clay:

Click to enlarge

Another problem we have still to solve…

Hi everybody!
Just another group of green people, with green and common goals…

Little miracle.
This is what happens just a few day’s after dropping a seedbomb.
The rain melted the clay and the compost, feeding the soil surrounding the bomb allowing for the plant growth.