permaculture

[ChildrensPeaceGuild <childrenspeaceguild@yahoo.com>]

Scattering Solutions: Seed Balls as Art and Sustenance 
by Roman Shapla 
“the world is mud-luscious” - e.e. cummings 

During one of my first kids classes I woefully underestimated the time 
allocated for making seed balls. Not that they take time, mind you. Not at 
all. A batch can be whipped up within a few minutes. But the children were 
having so much fun, they didn't wish to stop. 
I had planned on spending half the workshop making seed balls and the other 
half playing cooperative group games. When it came time to transition 
however, the students (ranging in age from five to early teens) were so 
completely engrossed in playing with the clay that they asked for more time. 
Naturally I was thrilled. We saved the games for another day and instead 
spent the remaining time sharing our creations and ideas (“Would a seed ball 
molded into a python grow flowers in a snake shape?”) 
Despite the negative connotations found in modern society, there's something 
magical about children playing in the mud. During a time when they have 
little say over events in their life, for a short while they are in control. 
They are the creator. The destroyer. The storyteller. The artisan honing 
their craft. 
Playing with mud and clay is a primordial activity that transcends all 
boundaries. It is a creative outlet crucial to the child's kinesthetic 
development. A medium that allows their dexterity to improve and their 
imagination to flourish. Which is why, in this technological age of 
blinking/moving/noisy battery-operated toys, one can still find Play-Doh on 
the shelves. 
Most importantly though, playing with clay reconnects children to the Earth. 
Numerous cultures from around the globe have creation mythologies based on 
mud and clay. Furthermore, the time spent shaping clay in early childhood 
imprints so deeply in us that most adults still enjoy dabbling in it. 
“When I was little...we didn't have any toys to play with. We made our own 
things. I used to make clay dolls and animals. We made a lot of mud dolls. 
Even now, as old as I am, some days I'll be going along and I'll see a puddle 
and bend down and make a face or an animal's head in the mud. Just model in 
the clay.” - Delfina Cuero: Her Autobiography, An Account of Her Last Years 
and Her Ethnobotanic Contributions. The Japanese natural farmer Masanobu 
Fukuoka developed seed balls as a way to efficiently plant polycultures on 
land. The balls are roughly ½ to 1 inch in diameter and containing any number 
of seeds. The clay helps protect the seeds from insects and birds until they 
sprout. The seed balls should be scattered about leaving nature to decide 
which plants should grow where. The act of sowing could be almost meditative. 
Perhaps this is why Fukuoka was fond of saying that children make the best 
distributors of seed balls. 
While there are many different methods of mixing seed balls, each with their 
own advantages, the recipe I use is taken from the excellent 'Food Not Lawns' 
by Heather C. Flores. 
Mix one part seed mix (your choice), three parts compost (semi-dry, living), 
and five parts clay (powdered red). Stir until the mix is grainy and crumbly, 
then slowly add two parts water. Continue mixing “until you get about the 
same consistency as cookie dough.” Normally at this point you would pinch off 
a small piece and roll into a ball, but you can also allow the kids to play 
with the clay for a spell. This is also a wonderful teachable moment to 
connect the activity with various subjects. For example, and depending on the 
child's age, you can teach about: 

fauna (have children mold an endangered or local animal) 
landscape (sculpt terrain, bioregion, etc) 
art (create sculptures, modeling) 
math (adding 1+3+5+2, ratios, fractions) 
language (bolas de arcilla) 
botany (parts of a plant) 
ecology (the seeds role in habitat development) 
natural building (miniature cob buildings) 
As Kiko Denzer points out, “Mud is a perfect material for art & building: 
easy, durable, beautiful.” 

We are living in a time when funding for art in public schools is being cut, 
children are spending more and more time in front of a computer screen, less 
time outdoors interacting with the natural world, and each day we become more 
disconnected from healthy, local food. Seed balls can provide a sustainable, 
natural remedy to all these issues. 

“Passion is lifted from the Earth itself from the muddy hands of the young” – 
Richard Louv 



Towa prayer to Nan Chu Kweejo (Clay Mother) 

Nan chu Kweejo, na ho uvi whageh oe powa, 
di huu joni heda di aweh jonihey bu hanbo di koe gi un muu. 
Wayhaa ka yun un maa bo, wi un tsi maai pi. 

Clay Mother, I have come to the center of your abode, 
feed me and clothe me and in the end you will 
absorb me into your center. 
However far you travel, do not go crying. 


Recommended Reading 
Adults: 
The Natural Way of Farming - Masanobu Fukuoka 
One Straw Revolution - Masanobu Fukuoka (translated by Larry Korn) 
Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood 
into a Community - Heather C. Flores 
Dig Your Hands in the Dirt! A Manual for Making Art Out of Earth – Kiko 
Denzer 

Youth: 
Cool Crafts with Seeds, Beans, and Cones – Jen Jones 
Grow Your Own Soup – John Malam 
How Seeds Travel – Cynthia Overbeck 

Early Readers: 
How a Seed Grows – Helene Jordan 
A Tiny Seed – Eric Carle 
From Seed to Plant – Gail Gibbons 


Children's Permaculture Guild

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Subject: [permaculture] Message from Mexico: U.S. is Polluting Water it May
 Someday Need to Drink | Ecology Global Network
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http://www.ecology.com/2013/01/28/fracking-polluting-deep-water-aquifer/?#038;%23038
 Message from Mexico: U.S. is Polluting Water it May Someday Need to
Drink<http://www.ecology.com/2013/01/28/fracking-polluting-deep-water-aquifer/>
  By Guest <http://www.ecology.com/author/guest/>, January 28, 2013

*Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica
 <http://www.propublica.org/>**Republished under Creative Commons License*

Mexico City plans to draw drinking water from a mile-deep aquifer,
according to a report in the Los Angeles
Times<http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-74114584/>.
The Mexican effort challenges a key tenet of U.S. clean water policy: that
water far underground can be intentionally polluted because it will never
be used.

U.S. environmental regulators have long assumed that reservoirs located
thousands of feet underground will be too expensive to tap. So even as
population increases, temperatures rise, and traditional water supplies dry
up, American scientists and policy-makers often exempt these deep aquifers
from clean water protections and allow energy and mining companies to
inject pollutants directly into them.

As ProPublica has reported in an ongoing
investigation<http://www.propublica.org/series/injection-wells>about
America’s management of its underground water, the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency has issued more than 1,500
permits<http://www.propublica.org/article/poisoning-the-well-how-the-feds-let-industry-pollute-the-nations-undergroun>for
companies to pollute such aquifers in some of the driest regions.
Frequently, the reason was that the water lies too deep to be worth
protecting.

But Mexico City’s plans to tap its newly discovered aquifer suggest that
America is poisoning wells it might need in the future.

Indeed, by the standard often applied in the U.S., American regulators
could have allowed companies to pump pollutants into the aquifer beneath
Mexico City.

For example, in eastern
Wyoming<http://www.propublica.org/article/on-a-wyoming-ranch-feds-sacrifice-tomorrows-water-to-mine-uranium-today>,
an analysis showed that it would cost half a million dollars to construct a
water well into deep, but high-quality aquifer reserves. That, plus an
untested assumption that all the deep layers below it could only contain
poor-quality water, led regulators to allow a uranium mine to inject more
than 200,000 gallons of toxic and radioactive waste every day into the
underground reservoirs.

But south of the border, worsening water shortages have forced authorities
to look ever deeper for drinking water.

Today in Mexico City, the world’s third-largest metropolis, the depletion
of shallow reservoirs is causing the ground to sink in, iconic buildings to
teeter, and underground infrastructure to crumble. The discovery of the
previously unmapped deep reservoir could mean that water won’t have to be
rationed or piped into Mexico City from hundreds of miles away.

According to the Times report, Mexican authorities have already drilled an
exploratory well into the aquifer and are working to determine the exact
size of the reservoir. They are prepared to spend as much as $40 million to
pump and treat the deeper water, which they say could supply some of Mexico
City’s 20 million people for as long as a century.

Scientists point to what’s happening in Mexico City as a harbinger of a
world in which people will pay more and dig deeper to tap reserves of the
one natural resource human beings simply cannot survive without.

“Around the world people are increasingly doing things that 50 years ago
nobody would have said they’d do,” said Mike Wireman, a hydrogeologist with
the EPA who also works with the World Bank on global water supply issues.

Wireman points to new research in Europe finding water reservoirs several
miles beneath the surface — far deeper than even the aquifer beneath Mexico
City — and says U.S. policy has been slow to adapt to this new
understanding.

“Depth in and of itself does not guarantee anything — it does not guarantee
you won’t use it in the future, and it does not guarantee that that it is
not” a source of drinking water, he said.

If Mexico City’s search for water seems extreme, it is not unusual. In
aquifers Denver relies on, drinking water levels have dropped more than 300
feet. Texas rationed some water use last summer in the midst of a
record-breaking drought. And Nevada — realizing that the water levels in
one of the nation’s largest reservoirs may soon drop below the intake pipes
— is building a drain hole to sap every last drop from the bottom.

“Water is limited, so they are really hustling to find other types of
water,” said Mark Williams, a hydrologist at the University of Colorado at
Boulder. “It’s kind of a grim future, there’s no two ways about it.”

In a parched world, Mexico City is sending a message: Deep, unknown
potential sources of drinking water matter, and the U.S. pollutes them at
its peril.