Just a wee heads-up that a most encouraging initiative is being launched in Sydney this coming Saturday 6th Feb. Namely CarriageWorks' Kitchen Garden Project. Another nudge in the direction of local food security. Huzzah!

If you're a Sydneysider you're probably already familiar with CarriageWorks' Saturday farmer's market, which has a darn fine range of yummy regional produce and is fast becoming the biggest farmers market in Sydney. With this Kitchen Garden Project, CarriageWorks are pushing the notion of 'creative sustainability' through a series of events and workshops which I hope will result in more kitchen gardens outside (or inside) more local kitchens.

The launch on Saturday includes talks and stalls from 1pm after the farmers' market and will generally be good fun and a chance to talk about important things like how to grow stuff where you live and the finer points of how to make Kale tasty (there is a way!).

The whole Milkwood family will be there with our bicycle-powered seed ball machine, a bunch of great books on Permaculture and urban farming, Permaculture course information, and many little brown paper bags containing stealth salad seed balls, for you to take away and try a bit of guerilla gardening on your home turf.

Come by and say hello!

In the case of our top dam, wet is an understatement. Small babbling brook, gushing forth from beneath the pipe in the dam wall, is more accurate. Hmm. What to do.

Suffice to say an unfortunate combination of road-base like soil (ok not really soil, more just small rocks), bad luck and something called 'dispersive clays' all played a part. Usually when you build a dam, if you find some good clay down the bottom you get all excited. And then the dozer driver carefully spreads that clay over the inside of your dam wall, to make it hold water. And your dam doesn't leak, and you feel very chuffed. Unless your secret valley is, unbeknownst to you, locally famous for having 'dispersive clays' - which, wait for it, disperse in water. Creating the opposite effect from what you would normally expect from a clay-like medium and henceforth, doing less than nothing to seal your dam wall.

 
The leak in our dam wall was also next to the pipe. This pipe sat in the bottom of the dam and delivered water to a tap on the outside of the dam wall, from which we could water plantings via passive water pressure. Carefully constructed, with baffle-plates to stop water passing along the pipe as it went through the dam wall, with removable filters at either end, this was our pipe of dreams. It would be our food forest's lifeline in dry summers, and eventually supply our bathouse with water.

Following some decent rain, the leak in the top dam got worse and produced a rivulet which ran through the food forest planted directly below the dam. This food forest was sited specifically to benefit from the slow plume of water which would emanate from the dam uphill via osmosis. Our carefully selected, hardy, drylands food trees that were in the direct path of this rivulet promptly turned up their toes and died from wet feet.

Following a bunch of research and talking to Permaculture earthworks experts, we were still at a loss. It turned out that all the dams along the valley leaked, regardless of their having a keyway or not, or a pipe or no pipe through their dam wall. We tried attempting to seal the dam with lucerne and bentonite (which was easy to apply as the leak had helpfully emptied the dam entirely), to no effect. We considered various techniques, and in retrospect perhaps should have borrowed some pigs and attempted to seal the dam via a method called glaying - a technique which uses a large number of animals, penned into a dry dam for a short period of time, to seal the dam by smushing their manure into the surface of the inner dam wall so effectively that it seals the deal. Apparently works great with pigs, even on pure shale, according to Joel Salatin.

So unless we wanted to seal the top dam with a very expensive, condom-like, custom-made, non-food grade, emanating who-knows-what plastic lining (we didn't), or just hope the leak would reduce in time (and have no irrigation water in the meantime without constant pumping - no thanks), our options were few.

The one other thing was that the top dam was not quite in the best spot. It was a little close to the building envelope that was slowly developing downhill, and I was having visions of my family tumbled out of their beds by a wall of water when a once-in-a-lifetime earthquake shook the top dam wall to bits. So we made a deal with our earthworks operator (who, as I mentioned above, luckily felt terrible about the leak) and decided to move the top dam south a bit.

Believe it or not, this all worked out quite well. We turned the 'old dam' into a north-facing amphitheater / suntrap which will be great fun as an experimental microclimate. I have hopes for bananas in about 5 years, once the protective ring of bamboo gets up. The 'new dam' we took no chances with, however, and lined it with plastic the minute it was finished. Yes, builder's plastic. I know. Most un-permaculture. But let me tell you something: it worked a treat. And now we've got water.

And so a note on lining dams on the cheap, for the poor wretches among us that suffer from similar disasters:

• First of all we put down a thick layer of lucerne hay, all over the inside wall of the dam. We basically stood large, cylindrical rolls of the stuff on the dam wall and unrolled them down the slope to the bottom of the dam. This was then wetted down with a pump and hose. This will rot down under the plastic in time, and also helped to protect the plastic from punctures from below as we laid topsoil ontop of it. If you can't get lucerne you could use other hay, but lucerne is great because of its high nitrogen content which will help it turn into a more sludgey impermeable layer as it rots down under the plastic.
• Next we unrolled long rolls of black builders plastic down the slope of the inner wall, covering the lucerne hay. We made sure the strips overlapped by a good 40cm on each side, and weighed the whole palava down with rocks. Carefully, so we didnt puncture the plastic.
• Then we got the dozer driver to place loads of topsoil on top of the builders plastic, to a depth of about 30cm, starting at the bottom of the dam wall and working his way up so it didn't slump off. This way he also didnt have to risk puncturing the plastic by driving a great heavy bulldozer over it. The depth of topsoil on the builders plastic means we aren't so concerned about our catchment coming from a giant plastic cup.
• Then, when it was all covered, sealed and looked just like a new dam, we said a little prayer and crossed our fingers.
  

At time of writing, 6 months later, the top dam is full to the brim of water and the most water-tight dam on Milkwood. We ended up using a simple syphon, held a meter below the surface, to provide water to the food forest and other plantings below. We've still got great passive water pressure (about 6m of head) and no babbling brook at the base of the wall. The new dam is on the same contour as the old dam, and so is still fed by the 2km of top swale to the north and south.

We've mulched and planted the dam wall with oats, vetch and clover, and we look forward to a long, loving and hard-won relationship with our passively harvested water supply.

The poetry of the Seedball concept is simple, yet immense. Encase a seed (or seeds) in a protective jacket of clay, creating a Seed ball. Distribute Seedballs across ground, not worrying if this day, or this month even, is the best time to 'sow'. Protected from insects, buirds, heat and sunlight until the time is right, the seedball activates with a rain event which is sufficient to soak through the clay coating to germinate the seed. Which incidentally is the sort of rain event that you want to have directly following the perfect seed sowing day. And that's it. But that's not all.

Let's talk ferment. Add compost to the clay. Now you have something to kickstart those seeds after germination. Add more growing medium to the Seedball. Even better, for some situations. Add more that one seed. Different seeds. Compatible seeds. Now you're companion planting in the palm of your hand. Seedbombs the size of mandarins, which contain the beginnings of a field of wildflowers, or a hardy herb patch, or a bunch of soil-conditioning legumes. Now you're talking revolution.

Seedballing was probably initiated by Masanobu Fukuoka as part of his experiments in gentle, non-invasive farming methods at his family farm in Japan. A gentle pioneer of the organic farming movement, Fukuoka practiced a system of farming he called 'Do Nothing Farming', which is code for setting up a passive system that is as self regulating as possibe (how very permaculture). Fukuoka used a combination of powdered clay, fine compost and seeds, with simple tools like a series of screens, to make hundreds of seedballs every year as a part of his farming regime.

Fukuoka called seedballs 'a small universe in themselves'. His seed ball theory and methods are well outlined in his small manifesto on farming, eating and the limits of human knowledge, the delightfully readable One Straw Revolution, which incidentally has just been re-issued as a new translation in paperback (yay).

The beauty of the seed ball principle is not only its simplicity and economy of production. Seedballing can be used like a sort of amplified natural selection... Nature, ultimately, still decides what to grow where, but if the conditions in a particular place are right, you now have a crop. Or a stand of fast-growing pioneer trees, or a meadow.

There is a patience needed for this method - call it stealth sowing. The seeds may germinate next week, or next Spring. Or not at all. Wait and see. And in the meantime, move on to another chore. Or make more seed balls and seed elsewhere!

Seed selection is of course a fundamental factor in this method. You will be broadcasting these seedballs and probably leaving them to fend for themselves. The hardier and more appropriate to the environment the plant, the greater the chance of success. Here at Milkwood we are currently seedballing a wide mixture of acacia seeds and nitrogen-fixing tree seeds, with a sprinkling of woody ground covers and hardy native grasses. These are all being broadcast along our riparian zones, swales and future shelter belts.

We can now 'plant' thousands of trees in a day, in un-favourable conditions, and leave Nature to do her thing...

Since Fukuoka got the ball rolling, so to speak, many others have since been getting their hands dirty and producing seed balls, seed bombs, seed grenades and other heroic-sounding lumps of clay with seeds in. There is a heap of info out there on technique, but not much documentation on results that I have found, apart from anecdotes and Fukuoka's plainly successful examples.

Moving from the rural to the urban, seed balls and seed bombs are now firmly in the domain of the worldwide guerilla gardening movement. If your community doesn't have one, it's probably time to start a guerilla gardening group, which is both a funky way to spend your spare time (or all your time) and might just increase your food security. And a seed balling workshop would be a very fine, inspirational and easy inaugral event to hold.

Milkwood is currently being sprinkled in seed balls, and we will be sure to document the results (and how to make a bicycle powered seed balling machine - stay tuned!). In the meantime, here's a smattering of where the seed ball craze has spread so far:

Masanobu Fukuoka: Firstly, Fukuoka's texts, including Seed Balling technique, are all bunked at the Soil Health Library, an amazing online resource which has thousands of seminal farming texts available for download. Make sure if you use this option to donate, to keep this resource breathing.

Jim Bones: Who used to have an extensive website on the subject called seedball.com which is now defunct. Happily, his how-to and why-to video, The Seed Ball Story, has found its way to Youtube.

Kathryn Miller's Seed Bombs: an early example of Seed Bombs as art from 1992. 'As a form of urban and suburban guerrilla activity, it was a small scale, non-sanctioned intervention in the landscape. The seed bombs were made available to museum visitors to take and throw somewhere they felt needed native plants, and in the process they assisted me with my project.'

The Vancouver Guerilla Gardening Group: have done various seed balling workshops, with great success. Probably the best bunch of urban seed ballers i know.

Seed Bomb how-to: there are heaps of videos up now in this technique, but this is one of the most concise. The host, Richard Reynolds, also has the best hair.

Seed Ball land art by Anne Cooper: Anitya is a gorgeous piece from New Mexico set in a field involving seed balls, clay balls, the land, and time. 

It seems strange somehow that something so simple and small can hold so much power, but I'm beginning to think that's the way of things, these days. And of course it comes back to the power of the seeds themselves. Just the idea of it - portable, potential ecosystems, folded in on themselves many times over. Amazing. I think I'm in love. Thanks, Nature! Thanks, Masanobu!

Happy holidays, everyone. May your next seed experience, whether it be on your salad, in your garden or just out of the corner of your eye, fill you with wonder, joy, and a sense of renewal.

If only building it was as easy as making this mock-up, we'd be done by now...