Hello we’re Emily & Ana, the creators of Seedball – we want to fill the world with wildflowers and we’re starting with your garden!
We’re on a mission to help increase the abundance of British wildflowers and wildlife that depend upon them. We believe that if we can all better use whatever space we have available to us (whether a back garden, balcony, window box, little patio etc) we can together have a hugely beneficial impact on our local ecosystems. The last 50 years has been witness to huge declines in pollinators and other garden wildlife, but together we can really really do something to reverse this. For us we want Seedball to inspire a wildlife gardening revolution while providing a very handy way of going about it! Conservation is in our heart and soul and one day we dream to fund our own Seedball wildflower reserves. Watch this space!!!
Thank you for joining us on our journey!
Emily & Ana
Through The Years
2010/11
At this time we were both still working at Aberdeen University, finishing off our PhD's (both in conservation related topics). We developed the idea for wildflower seed balls having had a terrible time ourselves trying to grow wildflowers (to help the bees!) when we came across the work of Masanobu Fukuoka. A Japanese natural farming innovator, Fukuoka strongly promoted using seed balls for sowing crops in desert areas with unpredictable rainfall – the clay balls prevented the seeds from being eaten until the rains arrive and seed germination starts. We quickly realised we could apply the same concept to wildflower seeds and help protect the seeds from predators. We spent the next two years testing and developing our Seedball recipe!
2012
On Ana’s kitchen table, we made lots of Seedballs to go in very home made packaging for our first Seedball ‘product’ and visited a whole bunch of fairs and market stalls with Rigby the Seedball puppy. We had so much fun!
2013
We launched the ‘Seedball Tin’ !!
2014-16
We built a shed! The Seedball team grew and we were stocked in about 150 shops (including Kew Gardens) and featured in the Guardian Christmas Gift Guide!
2017
We won two amazing awards! Gift of the Year (Eco Friendly Category) and Garden Retail Awards (Best New Gardening Growing Product). And we built another garden shed.
2018
We moved out of the garden!! Our team is now 14!! Including Rigby. And we were on the telly! Channel 4’s Buy It Now (Episode 13) – a show where you have to pitch your product to the audience and a panel of retailers – scary but oh so much fun too! We also launched a range in collaboration with the Natural History Museum – we are still pinching ourselves about !
2019
We made super cute matchboxes for wedding favours (and won an award for these too!) and we have something very exciting up our sleeve too to announce later in the year!! Still loving what we do!!
2020-2021
We hibernated a little during the covid years, but kept on developing new products, launching our promotional matchboxes, grab bags and a Wildlife Trust collaboration (Artist Meadow Tin). We also won the P.E.A Nature Award!
2022
Everything was go go go! We moved into a downstairs unit (no more carrying boxes and balls up and down stairs hurrah!), our team reached 22 people and we made 1,000,000 seed balls for the BBC to be donated to schools as part of The Green Planet TV series.
2023
It’s been ten years since we launched the Seedball tin! Crazy! In this time we’ve sold over 30 million seed balls - enough to cover 210 football pitches! This year we launched our new ‘Tube Range' and we’re exhibiting at Chelsea Flower Show in the Spring, do come say hi!
