GreenAid’s Guerrilla Gumball-Machine Gardening

The entirely fun, mad concept of guerrilla gardening involves planting gardens on someone else’s land. The term was coined in the 1970s, and at that time involved the use of “seed grenades”—containers (actually condoms) filled with local wildflower seeds, water and fertilizer—which were tossed over fences onto empty lots in New York City in order to beautify neighborhoods.

Today, two young innovators, Daniel Phillips and Kim Karlsrud, who run an interdisciplinary design studio in Los Angeles called COMMONStudio, have combined the concepts of seedbombs and guerrilla gardening with a seemingly unlikely mechanical invention: the gumball machine. The project is called GreenAid, and its popularity is rapidly catching on.

“We were part of a guerrilla gardening group in Los Angeles, but L.A. is so huge that it was a big pain to sync up with others who lived so far away,” Daniel Phillips told Organic Connections. “GreenAid was born partially from that frustration; we wanted to make seedbombs—which are really amazing—more accessible to everybody.”

Kim continued the story. “We had that thought and then my dad, who lived in Pittsburgh and had a hobby with candy machines, moved and donated a bunch of the machines to us. He told us to do something interesting with them.”

The bright idea was then born to load the gumball machines with seedbombs and place them around urban areas. Early in 2010, they placed the first prototype in L.A.’s Chinatown. It all went upward from there.

“It has simply taken off,” Daniel said. “We have about 40 machines in the world right now, mostly in the US—many right here in L.A.—but we’re starting to get a lot of interest internationally. We just did a few machines for Italy, a few for Mexico, and some for Canada as well. It’s been a pretty wild ride, and we’re having a lot of fun.”

GreenAid’s seedbombs are made from a mixture of clay, compost and seeds, and can be used to green up and colorize any unused space that might otherwise be an eyesore. They can be thrown anonymously into derelict urban sites to temporarily reclaim and transform them into places worth looking at and caring for. The clever dispensing method makes these guerrilla gardening efforts more accessible to all by appropriating the existing distribution system of the quarter-operated candy machine. Using the loose coins from a purse or pocket, a person can make a small but meaningful contribution to the beautification of his or her city.

Click here to read the rest of this article at Organic Connections Magazine.