Oaklander Chris Burley plants wildflowers for the bees.
Anyone who has tried to maintain a tidy garden knows what a never-ending battle it is. There are weeds, insects, gophers, and other issues. Throw in the ongoing drought, and the urge to just let the yard go native sounds inviting. For Oakland’s Chris Burley, co-creator with his wife Ei Ei Khin of the “Seedles” seedball, turning a backyard and other spaces into wildflower patches isn’t just a convenient way out of the drudgery of yard work. The baby blue eyes, tidy tips, blazing stars, and other wildflowers (all pre-selected, depending on what region of the country you live in) that spring forth from the bird-proof clay-covered seedballs also help to support the declining bee population.
Paul Kilduff: One thing I’ve noticed about wildflower landscaping is that when they’re blooming and they take over, it looks great for a few months, and then it doesn’t look so great after a bit. How long can you really expect the wildflowers to last?
Chris Burley: The way we have our seedballs structured, they have bloom times that go from spring all the way into the late fall. So we don’t guarantee that if you throw a single seedball on the ground that it’s going to produce a flower that’s going to last from March until December. But we do have the types of seeds in our seed balls that will have different bloom times, and some are annual, and some are perennial. So you will get a wildflower patch that just doesn’t just have one great hurrah and then goes away.
PK: Wildflowers are pretty much maintenance-free gardening, right?
CB: Yeah, well, anything needs water. Some people have the idea that they throw these seed balls on the ground in the dead of the desert in the middle of the summer and they’re going to get wildflowers. I may be misleading them, and I apologize for that. They are as simple as throwing them on the ground and letting them grow. The seeds are encased in all the nutrients that they need to sprout, so that they’re preburied, per se. They don’t need you to push them down into the ground. They do need moisture, though. Just like human beings need a glass of water or two a day, plants need water, too, in order to survive. With the drought here in California, it’s a little more challenging for things to grow. I do recommend that people who want results sooner than later water them. If you have a houseplant and you don’t give it water, it doesn’t survive; everything needs water. So they’re not foolproof. But we do make it as easy as we know how possible, aside from me coming over setting up a watering system. This is the way nature does it. Imagine an animal browsing around the woods. It eats some berries. The berry seed goes inside and comes out the other end encased nicely in a little fertilizer. Well, we’re just doing the same thing.
PK: Is planting seedballs literally just a matter of closing your eyes and then tossing them in the direction of a barren dirt patch?
CB: Some people like to toss them on the ground and step on them just a little bit, but that’s not required. It would be helpful in a windstorm maybe, so that they don’t blow away, but that’s not likely. I just recommend people throw them on the ground. They’re meant, when the rain comes or they’re watered, to dissolve. After a couple rains, you don’t see a ball anymore; it’s kind of like this little pile with seeds and material that the seeds sprout out of. Put them in a spot where there’s not a lot of competition with other plants. Because these are wild flowers, they are native; they’re well adapted to the area we’re sending them to. But at the same time, there’s some really incredibly vigorous plants that are invasive and continue to dominate our landscapes that these wildflowers’ sprouts just can’t compete with.
PK: One of the reasons I went with the wildflower approach in my backyard is I got tired of battling gophers and moles. I’m wondering: Are wildflowers gopherproof? Are gophers not attracted to them?
CB: Nothing is gopherproof, other than steel wire underground. Gophers are hungry animals. They’re going to eat any tuber, any root, that satisfies their appetite. If you look at gophers, really you don’t have a gopher problem; you have a lack of predatory birds problem. I would put an owl box in your yard, or create a better habitat for hawks and other preying birds in your area. Then you might have less of a gopher problem. Just like slugs. You don’t have a slug problem; you have a lack of ducks issue. If you had ducks, you could get eggs, and you could have food for your ducks all in the same situation without having to grow any food because you have slugs everywhere.
PK: And eventually you can have Peking duck. Tasty.
CB: Yeah. I don’t know if you can eat barn owls, but there are ways to encourage other predatory birds into your yard and into your area that will manage some of the things like gophers and moles and other ground animals that cause havoc in our backyards.
PK: Under cover of darkness, do you go around throwing seed bombs willy-nilly?
CB: Now I just carry a bag in the car, and whenever I’m driving along and I see a place that needs some, I might. But I certainly encourage people to be respectful of people’s properties. At the same time, I understand that a lot of these vacant lots are not used, and may not be used for years. And so if you throw a few a wildflowers in them, and it improves the property value because it looks prettier for the future real estate producer, it’s not going to do any real damage.
PK: The bees from the declining bee population that we’re going to attract—these are wild local bees, right?
CB: The wildflowers that we’re growing are going to support some of the European honeybees, but not necessarily, because they’re in a different geographic location. The wildflowers that we grow are geared towards supporting a lot of the native bees, which are found just all around. There’s no hives for them. They’re in little holes in trees and wood logs. Some bees actually hibernate in the ground over the winter. Most of the people that purchase our product are helping the urban, semi-urban bee. And that’s really where there’s a huge decline in wildflower patches, because of all the urbanization and development that’s taken out all of our old wildflower patches that used to exist all over the country. So we’re trying to bring that back a little bit at a time in everyone’s postage stamp-style backyard. I believe collectively we can bring back a certain portion of those wildflower patches and help mitigate some of the challenges that we’re currently facing because there’s not enough good, healthy, clean food for the honeybees to continue surviving each year. There’s a lot of pesticide-laden unhealthy wildflowers for them, and that’s causing some of the damage over time.
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Age: 32
Birthplace: Flint, Mich.
Astrological Sign: Taurus
Fascinating Tidbit: “Burley is connected to Michael Moore, Flint’s most famous native, documentary filmmaker, and liberal provocateur. Burley’s mom was Moore’s principal, and Burley’s father was the Moore family’s lawyer. Burley is on first-name basis with Moore. It’s safe to assume, then, that Moore would probably stop and chat with Burley at his next Hollywood premier.”
Motto: “Bee swell.”
Website: www.GrowTheRainbow.com
