Ellen, can you tell me more about where to get the flower shells ? I have a friend who teaches gun safety, etc. especially to women and she might be interested in these. You might want her to come to your place to demonstrate the use of a shotgun for this purpose!   Wouldn’t be the first time you did something radical !  Thanks, Sandy

Gotta say, I LOVE this idea!   Imagine shooting Greensboro’s empty fields full of wild flower seed … could be “guerilla gardening” at it’s best!  Yes, Sandy I will be ready for a demonstration as soon as these hit the market!  (Hopefully in the near future.) Meanwhile, would anyone really complain if we threw some extra flower seed on some abandoned ground?   Here’s the story…

(For the video click  treehugger.com…)  Done under cover and out of plain sight, guerilla gardening aims to green abandoned land with seed bombs, moss graffiti and clay grenades. Now you will also be able to shoot a 12-gauge shotgun to plant your garden too — thanks to Swedish marketing and advertising agency Studio Total, which has successfully crowd-funded the Flower Shell, a new kind of guerilla gardening tool that features flower seed-filled ammunition shells that are shot and planted by shotgun.

Classifying this eccentric (ingenious?) take on gardening as a faster, ‘shoot-em-up’ endeavour, Studio Total founder Per Cromwell writes:

From early on I liked gardens more than gardening. Hour and hours of weeding, seeding and cutting and all I could think of was, how could this be made more fun? One day when seeding some meadow flowers it struck me, this could be made much easier, faster, better using a shotgun. Said and done, soon I had emptied a shotgun shell of lead and filled it with flower seeds.

© Studio Total

Cromwell had his skeptics though, but stubbornly refused to give up:

This only made me more motivated, I tested different seeds, different ways of closing the shell after modification, different amount of gunpowder, different angels of firing and different guns.

Walking through a field of meadow flowers, cornflowers, daisies and poppies an early summer Sunday morning made me realise this was working. This flourishing field was my creation, it was all done with 142 shotgun shells. Finally I’ve cracked it, I was done. It worked.

Cromwell’s product is an interesting twist on the terrible history of the gun, transforming it from a deadly weapon into a gardening tool:

Instead of lead (or bismuth, steel, tungsten-iron, tungsten-nickel-iron and even tungsten polymer loads polluting the nature) my shell is firing flower seeds. The shell is a standard 12 gauge (0.729 in, 18.5 mm diameter) shell. The amount of gunpowder has been reduced and adjusted to fit the different seeds.

Cromwell’s Flower Shells will be made in the US, with a set of four shells costing about USD $50, which he hopes will lower once production volumes increase. A bizarre but strangely fascinating idea with modern overtones of violence, as you literally shoot the earth with seeds.

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Ha! Ha!  The snow is melting.  It will be time for planting new seeds in the garden very soon!

Ellen