Guerrilla Planting

First, No Planting of Gorillas in any sense! They’re very nifty organisms and quite endangered, plus as strong as four of you, so just leave ’em alone, ok? Also, in no way about humans engaging in unconventional warfare. Guerrilla planting is just sticking some plants or seeds in the ground with little work put in before or after and hoping for the best.

First a hard truth: The most common outcome for a guerrilla planting is failure.

So how’s that a prep? Two main ways.

Guerrilla planting as an ecological strategy

Every species of organism has some built-in strategy for how it’s going to successfully reproduce. 

There are three main strategies. 

Type I survivorship is what humans do: Put all your eggs in one basket, and watch that basket. We make relatively few offspring, but lavish a lot of care on each one. As a result, the few we do have enjoy a high likelihood of surviving to reproduce themselves. 

Gardeners, especially those with small gardens who buy young plants, work this way. We put in a few plants but care for them so well we expect pretty much all to produce.

Type II survivorship species make more offspring and care for them less. Not all of them will survive, but a fair number will. In gardening, this is planting a line of carrots then thinning out the seedlings.

Guerrilla planting is “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket”

This is Type III survivorship, in ecology-speak. Make Lots of offspring. You can’t afford to care for them, and most of them are going to die young, but who cares? That oak tree made two million acorns. If two of them survive to adulthood, the parent has been successful. Most of them, frankly, were spares.

In guerrilla planting you give the plants or seeds very little care, before or after planting. Most will die. But if any make it at all, you’ve gotten a big payoff for very little invested.

Guerilla planting as experiments

You can find answers to almost any question on the internet. Bonus: Some of those answers are even accurate! Others, not so much. Sure, you can look up the requirements of a plant. You pick a plant and try it. I’ll display my psychic powers.

Lets’s see:  I predict your plant likes good sun, soil that’s not too clay and not too sandy, moist but not soggy. That’s your plant. And 97% of the other food-producing plants. 

So what if that’s not what you’ve got? Who will tolerate some shade? Some bad soil? Being planted late? Being frosted? How much will the insects and weeds trash it if you don’t protect it? The best way to find these things out is try it.

Guerrilla planting is not ‘high quality research’

*Good*, scientific experiments would have controls, where you had a big sample size of plants that had all the same care as the ‘good’ garden plants except one variable you wanted to test. But who has that much time, space, and energy? Not me.

So if you do a poorly designed, unscientific experiment like just stuffing some poor seedling in a bad spot and seeing what happens, what do you learn? Depends. If it survives…you learn it can take All the negative conditions you gave it. If it thrives until the ground dries up, you get a clue that that species can’t tolerate drought. It’s not good science, but it’s better than no science at all.

How do you do guerrilla planting?

Here’s my key definition for guerrilla planting: Don’t spend much time, effort, or other resources at any time in the process. Stick the thing in the ground. Come back every now and then and look at it when you feel like it. If you see food on it, pick it and eat it.

Salty and I did a bit of guerrilla planting today. We got the home garden planted and didn’t have space for everything. The plants were stupid cheap — good quality seedlings at 3 or 4 for $1. So we bought a big variety, planted the best in the best spots, and ran out of room. What to do?

Compost healthy seedlings? The horror! Hey, we’re going to do some work at The Place today. We’ll just stick them in the ground under some young tree. The tree won’t care, and since the ground’s already been worked it’s literally thirty seconds worth of work. 

But does guerrilla planting ever actually work?

Two years ago I had some spare zucchini … again, because they take up a lot of space and come in four-packs. And each plants makes So. Much. Food.!! (When Salty was a kid, a new guy from the city moved in next door and started his first garden. He planted like forty zucchini plants. Because he thought you got one squash per plant. Um, no sir. More like twenty squash/plant…)

I also had just planted little trees at The Place. So I stuck a couple of zuc plants under them. One died. And the other provided my entire zucchini harvest for the year, enough for fresh eating all season long. The ones I took good care of at home? Evil squash bugs got them all. My super internet find of a natural insecticide wasn’t All That.

A few spare onion sets I stuck under a tree four years ago came back up again this spring. Onions if I need, them, insect discouragement at the tree if I don’t.

So yeah. A lot of it fails, but not all. And since you’ve got so little invested, it’s still a net win.

One caution … OK, two

Please don’t guerrilla plant species that might ‘escape captivity’ and become invasive.

Where gardeners have been growing a species in your part of the world for decades and it’s not a problem, it’s pretty safe for you to guerrilla plant. If you’re putting it somewhere where you’ll see and can easily remove any unwanted offspring, that’s ok too.

If it’s a new species to your region, you don’t know. Invasive plant species can do real damage to ecosystems. Please then, don’t be the one to create a brand new invasive problem in your corner of the world.

I understand some people use the term ‘guerrilla growing’ to describe sneaking plants onto someone else’s land. I’m Not suggesting that. It’s not how I roll. 

* Rayhusthwaite at English Wikipedia [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)]