**UPDATE: After enjoying a large amount of media coverage, Flower Shells has just launched a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo. You can currently pre-order a box of four shells for $50 dollars.
Still toiling away with trowels and rakes to tend your unruly garden? Skip the hands-and-knees routine and show your soil who’s boss with Flower Shells.
What’s a Flower Shell you ask? It’s exactly what it sounds like: a shotgun shell loaded with flower seeds. And no, just to clarify, you don’t stuff these things in the ground like little biodegradeable bulbs and wait for ’em to sprout either – you actually load them into a shotgun and blast them into the soil like Rambo. The shells are standard 12 gauge (0.729 in, 18.5 mm) shotgun ammunition, but instead of being filled with birdshot or buckshot, they’re loaded with one of twelve different seed types. You can currently blast your choice of cornflower, daisy, poppy, sunflower, clematis, columbine, lavender, sweet pea, lupine, carnation, peony, or an assortment of wildflowers.
To ensure that you’ve got the proper level of firepower for the seeds, the amount of gunpowder in each shell has been reduced in proportion to the type of seeds it’s loaded with. That means they’re ideal for violently reseeding your garden beds, but probably not so great for home protection and self defense. Then again, threatening intruders with a face full of hot peony seeds might be surprisingly effective, but we don’t recommend that you give it a shot (no pun intended).
Unfortunately, Flower Shells aren’t in large-scale production at this point, but it’s creators have made and tested a handful of them, which you can see in the video below. We’ll keep you posted on availability, but for the time being you can find out more at flowershell.com
