Winter planting

Yes, you can sow seeds on top of snow.

The photo above is the second in a sequence posted by Marcie O'Connor on her incomparable blog Prairie Haven.  I first wrote about her blog back in 2009 -

Prairie Haven is a blog describing the process of "unfarming" - helping restore a conventional rural farm return to its natural, "wild," state. It's not a laissez-faire process of benign neglect; instead it entails lots of hard work with controlled burns and eradication on nonnative invasive plants.

The blog is presented as a journal, stretching back for nine years (!) [now 21 years!!!], with supplemental categories documenting the flora and fauna that have appeared during the restoration process. Photographs are large-format and professionally composed and edited. More importantly, the accompanying text, while brief, shows a deep and broad knowledge of the natural world. 

- and then in 2015 I described a memorable walk down her driveway during a butterfly census.  This week I visited the blog again to read the latest post, and while browsing the manifold richness of material there, I saw her post about restoring Buffalo Ridge Prairie.  Here is the baseline photo (from 2001) when the previous owner had planted it in soybeans:

This is a 20-acre field on a hilltop in the center of their property in the Driftless Area. After the soybeans and corn stubble had been removed by mowing and glyphosate, the former prairie was reseeded with native plants in 2004/5 - " There was lots of snow that winter, so I did most of the planting on snowshoes" (top photo).

Here's the result, in July of 2009, when the restored prairie was 4 years old.

Awesome.  

Prairie Haven has a 21-year compilation of information on prairie restoration, moths, butterflies, raising silkmoths, spiders, mosses, lichens etc.  It rewards deep exploration.