The Waiting Game Begins. . .

For just about three years, we have worked on restoring our land. Prior to that, I have worked on improving the outdoor classroom I designed for our school. My favorite part of that is an absolutely gorgeous restored prairie. The flowers the very wet spring we had and showed it with creating a vibrant season of color. I have hoped to bring a splash of that color to our won backyard. However, being mostly wetland, I thought this would be impossible. Luckily, there is a smaller section of land before it gets to wet that we could have a more colorful and diverse prairie. Up until this point, it has been dominated by some undesirable plants. However, we did some work to kill off much of this land and planted an annual rye grass last year to minimize a weed takeover. However, next year rather than continuing planting a boring cover crop, we prepared this land for a prairie. When the first significant snow of the season came, we threw down a plethora of prairie seed. These seeds need to go through a process called cold stratification to potentially grow and bloom the following growing season. I’ll go into more details about how this process goes in future posts, but for now, we play the waiting game.