Dormant Seeding: Starting Your Native Garden Has Never Been Easier

​As native plants become trendier, gardeners have seemingly endless options to beautify their spaces with these climate-resilient, ecosystem-supporting plants. From your local SWCD’s plant sales to native-exclusive nurseries, you can easily get overwhelmed by making the “right” choice with sun, soil, and water conditions in mind. Buying and installing native plant plugs is an excellent option for our planners out there to curate their spaces, but what about our more type-B gardeners and native plant enthusiasts?
 
I’m quick to admit that my house is not an example of ideal landscaping - pruning, raking, and mowing all rank very low on my priority list. But I still love to see bees, beetles, and butterflies surrounding my flowers, birds and rodents stopping for a snack in my garden, and the improved soil quality in my beds. Thankfully, native plants have a really cool establishment hack that creates more diverse and naturalized plant communities than I could ever hope to design myself.
 
Dormant Seeding
Dormant seeding – sowing native seed mixes in the late fall and over winter to come up in spring – is a common technique for restoration projects and planting prairies in Indiana. This approach works because many flowers native to Indiana require a cold stratification in order to germinate. In other words, the plants that survived our natural selection thunderdome also had to have seeds make it through Indiana winters, which has resulted in species that need to have a cold snap to grow properly. Additionally, dormant seeding takes advantage of the freezing and thawing of the ground to maximize seed-soil contact as the ground settles under snow covers. This, in turn, improves germination and nutrient uptake by the plant.
 
The results of dormant seeding vary from case to case and often within the same acre because of variable site conditions like soil type, ponding/dry spots, or seed-eating critters. That uncertainty is part of the risk and beauty of dormant seeding – your plant communities will be determined by what your local ecosystem supports, not just your seed mix. Still, ensuring you responsibly select a seed mix for your site is important and can cut down on “wasted” seeds that may not be suitable for your area. Learn more about responsible seed sourcing and other site prep concerns here. This is also a great exercise in delayed gratification – because of varied growing patterns, some species won’t become apparent until three years after planting.
 
The basics of dormant seeding are straightforward and can be easily adapted to your specific site. After prepping your area to minimize the risk of old or current undesired vegetation coming back, you can either broadcast or no-till drill your native seed mix in the area. Your choice in method is a bit restricted by timing – although dormant seeding can be done from mid-November through February, the ground may get too hard to use a no-till drill later in the season. Additionally, you should be mindful of sloping in your planting area, as a drill disturbs topsoil and can worsen erosion. Broadcasting seed is essentially scattering seeds on the soil surface, but there are techniques of site preparation and seed preparation that can improve its effectiveness – learn more about those here. These methods could also be used as a “spot treatment” to add some extra diversity or address sparse patches in an existing planting.

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​Leaning into nature’s way - or biomimicry - is an approach that taps into the time-tested methods that our ecosystems created over the course of thousands of years of trying and tweaking something until it fit. Humans taking influence from nature is not new – Indigenous Americans use diverse land management strategies grounded in natural relationships and that traditional ecological knowledge informs modern sustainability initiatives like prescribed burning, rotational cropping/grazing, and terraced farming.  Native plants in Indiana are a foundational piece of that evolutionary puzzle and dormant seeding leans into that story. Take advantage of this method to kickstart your native habitat this winter, wait, and see what blooms!

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