So another nice Citrus Glean hosted by Arizona Homegrown Solutions.

So today I attended the, Seedballs 101 with Ruby Sheffer, at the Dolce Verde Solutions Hub. It was a very interesting class. For those who do not know, seedballs are made of clay, potting soil, and a variety of seed species that are all rolled up into little balls. The balls can vary from the size of peas, Coco Puffs, or Whoppers candy balls. They look so much like candy balls that I almost ate one.

In the class we spent sometime going into what seedballs are and how they can be used to help create plant life in an environment. We also discussed how seedballs can be very destructive to a natural existing ecosystem if one is not careful about what seeds are being introduced. Now this isn’t a huge concern if placing them within a downtown residential area, however as you start to get farther away from developed areas and closer to the desert this becomes a very important thing to consider. There are way to many occurrences of people introducing problematic and pervasive species, like Bermuda Grass, into natural environments. So importance was placed on researching and knowing what kind of seeds are being placed into the ball and what works well for where you live. I figure when in doubt, use native seeds. After the lecture we began to make the seedballs. Not a complicated process. Just pick some seeds, get some potting soil, get some clay, and add water. The recommended ratio was about 1 quantity seeds, to 3 quantity of potting soil, to 5 quantity of clay, so about 1:3:5. I use quantity because Ruby said you could use whatever measuring tool you had. We used teaspoons. Then we just made some seed balls. I enjoyed the class and thanks goes out to Ruby Sheffer for hosting it. We will have a follow up class so I will be planning a small seed project this week to see what kind of seedball mix I can come up with.

Mountain View Community Center

So all this talk about community gardens and the planting party at the Wesley Community Center, got me wondering what could be done up here in North Phoenix. So I drove to the park next to me and took a few pictures of the area:

Mountain View Community Center is a really nice facility. Just by chance I happened to meet Anna and Alex as they were leaving. After mentioning the growning interest in community gardens, they began talking about how they would like to have people with special skills come in and speak with the kids and elderly of the center. She even mentioned how the idea of planting a few things could be looked into. She did not offer any guarantees of this but at least it was not a no. Both Anna and Alex seemed interested and so I’m going to stop by Monday and see if we can talk about the details a little more. It was a nice way to end the day. If anymore develops I will post it. C ya.

Not as many people as last time but we still managed to pick a lot of fruit. I think somewhere around 1200 pounds. The cool thing was that a friend from work Alfonso Elenes decided to come along for the trip. He’s the one who took most of the pictures this time. Enjoy.

From what I understand this is becoming more popular with people who have fruit trees. They are also very grateful that we are doing this since it would normally cost them about $150 dollars to hire a person to come out and pick the tree for them. After that the fruit is usually just thrown away. So in the end the Citrus Gleaning is working out well for everyone.