Earth Dumplings

[talon]

I've decided I dislike the term "seed bomb" (see, I'm all contrary today) and will henceforth call them "earth dumplings". Now is the time to start planting the waste spaces of town and the best way to do that is with luscious little earth dumplings.

There are many different recipes for making these earth dumplings and many ways to distribute them. I am going to share with you how I make earth dumplings, and a few methods I've gleaned from other activists. It really doesn't matter which process you use. The goal is to plant the waste spaces with edibles. I'm really not caring what kind of edibles. My goal is to naturalize food sources so the hungry people can eat when and where they want. Food should be easily available even in the barrenest inner cities. Especially in the barrenest inner cities.

Half of all Americans are food insecure - that means they either don't have the money to buy food, are unable to get to a grocery store that carries real food, or can't find real food among the fried fast food places in their neighborhood. Feeding the wastes in those areas with earth dumplings may change that. When you can walk down the street and pluck a tomato off a vine twining up a broken fence or pull up a carrot from a dirt packed cinder block or harvest peas growing up a stop sign post, when food is everywhere just for the picking, that's when we'll all be food secure.

Sure, I know people will have to be taught what's edible and what isn't, and shown where the food grows, but once they learn, they can teach their friends and children and parents - and maybe they can spread some earth dumplings themselves and maybe even cultivate some of the more fertile patches.

My goal is to eliminate food insecurity by growing food everywhere!

If you want, you can join in. Making earth dumplings is simple and distributing them even simpler.

The very minimal basics of making an earth dumplings is to have compost, seeds, and a binder material.

The Eggshell Earth Dumpling: I like to blow eggs for making omelettes and scrambled eggs and packing them with compost and seeds. They don't need a binder that way. Just mix the compost with enough water to make a thick mud, mix in a few seeds, pack into the eggshell, and you're done! You can also use egg shells you've cracked in half, but then the halves need to be put back together again. In that case, you can wrap the egg in a layer of clay soil - wet the clay enough to make a thick, pliable clay and wrap the entire seeded eggshell in it. Let it dry and - earth dumpling!

Of course, it's hard to eat that many eggs, so unless you're making angelfood cake or some other egg-intense dish, eggshell earth dumplings aren't terribly feasible. Then you need other methods.

Redworm Earth Dumpling: This one is good if you have a very active earthworm colony. Mix 1/3 earthworm castings, 1/3 compost, and 1/3 clay soil together. Add enough water to make a thick, heavy clay. Pinch off egg-sized pieces and work a few seeds into each piece, Shape into a ball or disk or triangle or whatever shape you want. Let dry.

Recycled Earth Dumpling: Those egg cartons (assuming you get the paper egg cartons) are the perfect medium to recycle into earth dumplings. Shred them well, add used tea bags, coffee grounds, crushed eggshells, finely chopped banana skins. You'll want 1/3 egg carton binder and 2/3 kitchen scraps finely minced, crushed, or chopped. Now add seeds. Small seeds should be as populous as the poppy seeds in a poppy seed cake and large seeds like chocolate chips in a chocolate chip cookie. Add enough water to make a thick paste of it all and pinch off egg-sized pieces to shape as you will. Most people just make balls or egg shapes, but you can make flower shapes, disks, polar bears, cylinders, or whatever. Let them dry and you have recycled kitchen waste and made earth dumplings!

Papier-mâché Earth Dumplings: If you have a lot of old newspapers you've been meaning to throw away, you can use the non-glossy black and white pages as the binding material for earth dumplings. Shred the paper into small pieces, as if you were going to make paper, only you won't be pulping it so much. You want it a bit coarser than for paper-making because you will be making dumplings and need the coarseness to hold it all together. Now, cover the paper shreds with water and let it soak up the water for an hour or two. Once the paper has soaked up most of the water, squeeze the water out - not all of it, because you'll need some to soak into the compost. You'll need 1/3 papier-mâché and 2/3 compost. Mix the compost and papier-mâché well until it looks like a thick clay. Now, add seeds. Small seeds should be as populous as the seeds in a poppy seed cake and the large seeds like chocolate chips in a chocolate chip cookie. Shape it how you want. Let it dry.

That's four different kinds of earth dumplings so you can see just how versatile these are. Binder, compost, and seed. That's it.

To plant them, just toss them into waste areas and Mother Nature will have her way with them. If you take walks or bicycle, put some earth dumplings in a bag and toss them when you pass likely-looking waste areas. It's more complicated tossing them from a car - the passenger should do it, not the driver! If you ride the bus or the L or whatever other public transportation, don't toss your earth dumplings from them, drop them along the walk to and from the bus (or whatever you ride). Take earth dumplings with you when you go visiting friends and drop them around. Take them to the office with you and give them to co-workers to drop around.

What seeds do you use?

I recommend ones developed for your area. Your nursery where you'd buy the seeds would be the best place to find out what is suitable to grow in your area or you could look up growing zone maps. I happen to be in Zone 7, so if you are between Oklahoma City and the Dallas-Fort Worth area along I-35, you'd be in Zone 7, too. I know it extends east and west, but it fluctuates up and down, so best to look it up if you aren't close to I-35 between OKC and DFW.

I'd recommend edibles - edible flowers like nasturtiums, edible chrysanthemums, edible daisies, edible marigolds, pansies, wild violets or Johnny jump ups, and squashes (summer or winter - yellow crook-necks, zucchini, pattypans, pumpkins, spaghetti squashes, even loofahs - the young fruits are edible and the older ones useful), tomatoes, peas, beans, cattails (swampy areas, pond edges, wet ditches), cucumbers, carrots, potatoes (I'd recommend only one "eye" or quarter potato per earth dumpling), rutabagas, turnips, lettuces, radishes, spinach, Malabar spinach, and so on. Browse your nursery's seed racks.

I don't mind at all if you choose to feed the earth dumplings with pretty flowers in them, wildflowers in particular that are native to your area. We need to feed the soul as well as the belly.