Alt Op #43 Seed Balls

Okay. So here I sit considering the idea of Seed Balls. I can almost see you now, gentle readers. You are either blinking and saying “Huh?” or rolling your eye’s and thinking:  “Hooo Boy. Here we go again!” Most of you are likely asking what the heck I mean by seed balls. Do you eat them or what?

Well, you toss them. As to where you toss them, it depends on what you've made them of. If you made them of a mix of wild flower seeds then you toss them into whatever area of your yard, field, or drainage ditch that you want decorated with bright flowers this spring. On the other hand if you made the balls of say, winter wheat, clover and other assorted small, winter hardy grains then you toss them around your pasture. Then you maybe shred the weeds that are all over it (well, you do if it’s like my pasture) and then just let those weeds lay there and protect those seed balls while the seeds in them sprout. Nope. You don’t plow, till or otherwise tear up the soil. The most you do is mow. Then you turn your cattle, horse, or goats out on the stuff for short times as each seed starts to mature. Ideally you've used a mix of seeds that grow and mature at different rates so that you get plant A coming up first. It gets eaten down or pulled up by the grazing critters or by you harvesting it. Then as plant B has already germinated and just started to come up you don’t have naked ground showing while the next crop comes in. Then plant C starts coming up and you graze or harvest plant B. Get the picture? There’s this guy in Japan that does something
similar with rice.

Bear with me now, his name is Masanobu Fukuoka and he’s written this neat little book called “The One-Straw Revolution.” Yes! Of course it’s been translated to English!

Mr. Fukuoka is a proponent of what he calls “do-nothing” agriculture. And no you don’t get out of doing any farming. You still have to sow, and harvest but mostly you have to watch what’s going on. He claims he can get his whole years sowing done in a week or so then just wait, and watch, while he floods, and drains, his fields. He doesn't even leave the water in his rice fields as long as most other rice farmers do. He uses no insecticides, no fertilizer (other than an occasional thin coating of chicken manure, he used to use ducks but that’s another story) and no big machinery. Not even the old style water buffalo. Yet he has harvests at least equal to the per acre output of the big factory farms in the most ‘productive’ part of Japan.

Mr. Fukuoka points out early in his book and often later on that while his methods work very well for his particular farm in his particular area of Japan, they must be tweaked to work on other farms in other parts of Japan. He stated flat out that his exact method will not work here in North America. Our weather is different, our wet seasons come at different times and, well, it’s just different here. He even points out that he doesn't do the exact same thing every year! After all one year is never exactly like the last one, now is it.
Some times the rains are a little late or a lot lighter than before. So while you planted say in the middle of September last year you have to wait until October this year. In case you wonder, I do recommend this
book to all my fellow gardeners, and local farmers. Mr. Fukuoka holds farming in high regard as both a physical and spiritual activity.

There is a good deal of philosophy in this book and spiritual references but he does not ‘push’ any particular religion. He quotes the Buddha and the Bible with ease.