![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Final-5.jpg\"\/)
<\/p>\nNot long after, on that overcast summer day, we returned to our old address as a family. My kids stood on the brick threshold of our vanished home and hurled seed bombs into the void. Then we all climbed down into the pit and stood in what had been the living room. It was the place where we\u2019d always spent Christmas, with a roaring fire. I thought about our last Christmas there, an especially sweet one, less than two weeks before the house burned down. We put a pile of seed bombs on the hard, scraped earth and, standing in a tight circle, crushed them with our boots, right where the hearth had been.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A seed bomb’s clay casing protects against animals and wind dispersal until rain disintegrates the coating, allowing a seed to germinate.<\/p>\n
For the longest time,<\/b> nothing happened. The summer was unrelentingly hot, and no rain fell. Rummy began to question if the seeds were duds\u2014dead, like so much else. I didn\u2019t blame him for feeling cynical, and I can\u2019t explain why I did not. I just believed the seeds would work.<\/p>\n
In mid-October, two days of heavy rain triggered mudslide warnings in the burn scars of the Palisades and Eaton fires, and I wondered if our seeds were washing out to sea. A couple of weeks later, Rummy and I had plans to meet a neighborhood beautification group to seed-bomb the parkway alongside Sunset Boulevard, which runs through the Palisades. On the way, we stopped by our lot. In the spot where our fireplace had been, there was a soft green mound made from a thousand poppy starts. Rummy\u2019s face broke into a huge, involuntary smile. We had growth.<\/p>\n
It rained heavily throughout December, January, and February. Our rental house leaked, but I did not care. The rain meant only one thing to me now: happy plants. Weekends, holidays, whenever possible, we made seed bombs. Rummy recruited his friends, his sister, her friends, friends of friends. We named our effort the Seed Bomb Project, and we reached out to everyone we could think of who would want to help or who might want seed bombs for their empty lots.We held workshops at elementary schools in Altadena and the Palisades, at school fairs and neighborhood gatherings, at a community center established to aid fire victims. A company donated 10 huge bags of organic compost (the founder had grown up in the Palisades and lost his childhood home). Gardeners and seed companies started sending seeds. With the help of hundreds of volunteers\u2014many of them people who had lost their homes, schools, and communities\u2014we churned out thousands of seed bombs.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, preliminary reports about the fires\u2019 toxic aftermath began to come out. High levels of heavy metals, such as lead and arsenic, were detected on lots in Altadena and the Palisades: So many cars, electronics, and plastics had burned, along with treated wood and leaded paint. As part of our insurance claim, we commissioned a report from a toxicity expert, who determined that our garage was irreparably contaminated with cyanide, lithium, lead, chromium, beryllium, cobalt, and arsenic, as well as various other carcinogens and toxins. When the toxicologist finished her assessment, she made my husband promise never to set foot in the garage again. We resigned ourselves to throwing away the few sentimental items we\u2019d planned to salvage from inside.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not long after, on that overcast summer day, we returned to our old address as a family. My…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":779561,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5123],"tags":[1582,276,2961,49690,319152,224,5608,208039,319151,5337,319150,17254,244255],"class_list":{"0":"post-779560","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-california","10":"tag-la","11":"tag-la-wildfires","12":"tag-la-wildfires-recovery","13":"tag-los-angeles","14":"tag-los-angeles-wildfires","15":"tag-los-angeles-wildfires-2025","16":"tag-los-angeles-wildflowers","17":"tag-losangeles","18":"tag-native-wildflowers","19":"tag-palisades-fire","20":"tag-seed-bomb-project"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/116533148282731802","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779560"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779560\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779561"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}