[To see photos and stories of this prairie in other years, go to the links on the main Buffalo Ridge Prairie page.]

In January and February I planted the seeds into the snow. Usually the snow wasn’t deep, and it was easy to walk, but sometimes it was deep enough that I had to wear snowshoes.

Here are the snowshoe tracks that I made while I was planting one day in January.

I finished the planting at the beginning of March – just in time.

Since this was the first year of the prairie, we mowed it every three weeks. It looked like a giant lawn all summer. Here it is in the spring, before many of the plants had come up.

And here it is later in the summer, being mowed.

We did see a few prairie flowers – Black-eyed Susans and Sweet Everlasting – in between mowings. At the end of the summer the Foxtail bloomed, in spite of being only about 6 inches high. The one white flower in the middle of all the Foxtail is a Sweet Everlasting (Gnaphalium obtusifolium)