leah settler, Seed balls are meant to stop animals eating the seeds. If you are a nice green person who wants to save the world you should make them and then throw them on needy bits of ground, i have just been looking it all up. Get school children to make them and spread them etc. A way of keeping children occupied.
i suppose that the observers of nature observed how rabbit droppings held seeds and helped distribute them and got their ideas from there. Sparrows eat the seeds out of horse manure don't they.
I have looked up seed balls in youtube to know how to find them and tell the information here and if you want to see Fukuoka making them, open up youtube and tap, into the space meant for your requests, "permaculture fukuoka" and then search, and even if you spell fukuoka, fukoaka, as i do sometimes, you still get a video of him making seed balls and a choice of other videos featuring him and those inspired by him but as fukuoka's video on seed balls is in japanese, if you want to understand the process, if you want it in english, tap in, "the seed ball story" catfishbones, is the youtube name of the man, Jim Bones, who made this video and all will be explained in english.
There is a method for producing lots of seed balls without hand rolling them at the end of catfisbones video. He has a hand made drum attached to a motor that turns the drum and makes his, seed balls in mass, in this. If you whatch the fukuoka video on seed balls to the end he does the same with a cement mixer which seems to be a bit more handy for most people, my skills at making turning drums are nil.
The recipe for seed balls as given by catfishbones is, 1 part seeds, 3 parts
compost, 5 parts powdered clay, you mix first the compost and seeds and then add the powdered clay and mix that and then the water, bit by bit because you dont want the mix to be to wet, just wet enough for a small ball of seeds, marble sized, to hold together. There will be variouse seeds in one ball.
If you don't have comopost use bag of brought earth for flower pots or for the garden. The soil in these bags, at least in the ones i know, is all humus, you can't find any gritty bits of sand in them.
If you mix your seed balls in a concrete mixer, turn it on, throw in the dry ingredients while its going, and spray in water every often, so that, stuck together bits of clay and seed appear and gradualy grow like a rolled snow ball. I suppose this might need some practice.
fukoaka puts in his seed balls, these seeds, according to the video "agricultura natural masanubo fukuoka which is of him and in spainish, "artemisa, peas, sweet potatoes, grass seeds, barley and white radish. He says this should be enough to turn a poor soil into a good one. With two types of the many clovers and in japan of the chinese algarobo, the last word is spanish in don't know the transalation. i can look it up i know there is a tree of this name and a groungd cover plant i think but i am fed up with writting this just now.
I read somewhere else about his rice feilds, in which he sows rice oats and barley and clover all together in autumn the oats and baerley and clover grow first and the rice grows after the oats and barley have been harvested kept damp with the clover, The straw of oats barley and rice go as mulch for the soil. agri rose macaskie.