The purpose of a seed ball is to make it easy to plant seeds without tilling the ground. If you're gardening in a no-till system, you can often just rake the mulch back and broadcast Mixing seeds for earth ballyour seeds on the soil surface, but sometimes your seedlings will perish if they dry out too fast due to sun exposure. Other times, birds come along and snack on the seeds --- this happened to me with some of my forest pasture plantings. If your seeds are enclosed in a ball of earth, they'll be a bit more protected without requiring you to dig up the ground to insert your seed.
In the fall, he seeded white clover, a winter grain (rye or barley), and rice all at once into a field. The seeds were rolled in balls of clay so that they could simply be dropped onto un-tilled soil rather than being pushed beneath the surface.
That autumn, the clovers and winter grains sprouted and grew while the rice seeds waited. The clover formed a groundcover beneath the rye or barley, crowding out weeds and fixing nitrogen to enrich the soil. By spring, the winter grains were ready to be harvested --- Fukuoka threshed the grains and tossed all of the straw back onto the fields, forming a thick mulch. He added in a small amount of manure from his chickens, but no other compost or fertilizer.
Meanwhile, the rice had already sprouted and started to grow. The young rice plants were trampled down when the winter grains were harvested, but quickly sprang back to life, growing amid weeds and clover.
The traditional method of growing rice in most of Japan and China consisted of flooding the rice paddies for the entire growing season as a method of weed control, but Fukuoka realized that rice is actually healthier when growing in damp, but not sodden, soil. So he opted to flood his fields for a mere week in the spring, long enough to drown out most of the weeds and weaken the clover, giving the rice a head start. Then he dried the fields back out and the rice grew happily above its nitrogen-fixing groundcover. In the fall, he harvested the rice and once again returned the straw to the field, along with seeds for next year.
So what did I do instead? Simple:
Mow or simply trample down any weeds or grass. Lay down four sheets of wetted newpaper. Cover with at least two inches of compost (more is better). Cover with one inch of mulch if you want to plant right away or two inches if you want to plant after a season has passed. That is it, no digging! Some tips:
Wetting the newspaper keeps it from blowing around while you are laying it out and gets the disintegration process started.
Using a soil knife or hori-hori to pierce the bed after six weeks or so will help the new layer reintegrate with the soil below without destroying the structure. Don’t overdo it, just once every foot or so. If you plant the bed right away, using a soil knife to set out any seedlings will do this automatically.
Prepare the bed before adopting the no-till method. With new garden beds you need to establish a good, fertile soil structure before you can expect good results with the no-till/mulch method. The soil should be ‘double-dug’ at least the depth of two shovel blades, and large rocks, roots and other obstructions removed. Be sure to remove any perennial weed roots. Amendments such as peat, lime, vermiculite, compost or other organic material can then be worked into the soil.
The main reason for seed ball is to get a delay sprout/harvest.
http://www.permies.com/t/17855/fukuoka/Seed-ball-failure http://craftingagreenworld.com/2015/04/22/do-seed-bombs-work-i-kind-of-dont-think-so/
no farming is "natural". Agriculture is a cultural innovation that requires knowledge and persistent effort.
The important thing is to know the right time to plant. For the spring vegetables, the right time is when the winter weeds are dying back...and just before the summer weeds have sprouted. For the fall sowing, seeds should be tossed out when the summer grasses are fading away...and the winter weeds have not yet appeared.
It is best to wait for a rain that is likely to last for several days. Cut a swath in the weed cover and put out the vegetable seeds. There is no need to cover them with soil: Just lay the weeds you have cut back over the seeds to act as a mulch and to hide them from the birds and chickens until they can germinate. Usually the weeds must be cut back two or three times in order to give the vegetable seedlings a head start...but sometimes just once is enough.
The usual way to go about developing a method is to ask "flow about trying this?" or "How about trying that?"...bringing in a variety of techniques, one upon the other. This is modern agriculture and it only results in making the farmer busier.
My way was opposite. I was aiming at a pleasant, natural way of farming...which results in making the work easier instead of harder. "How about not doing this? How about not doing that?"—that was my way of thinking. By taking this approach, I ultimately reached the conclusion that there was no need to plow, no need to apply fertilizer, no need to make compost, no need to use insecticide! When you get right down to it, there are few agricultural practices that are really necessary.
The reason that man's "improved" techniques seem to be necessary is that the natural balance has been so badly upset beforehand by those same techniques that the land has become dependent on them.
Harmful insects and plant diseases are always present, but do not occur in nature to an extent which requires the use of poisonous chemicals. The sensible approach to disease and insect control is to grow sturdy crops in a healthy environment.