It may be hard to believe, but this is the culmination of our recent serendipitous day. Here’s what happened.

Since this summer, we’ve had a good portion of our fridge occupied by prairie seed, both the mix we buy and the mix we make. After the building site was cleared, I purchased more of the local premixed seed because those cleared areas will receive full sun for quite a while.

However, the local company had changed their shipping practices. Orders placed after a certain date would ship out November 10th, because doing so would allow them to include the freshest seed that had just been harvested and would also be more in line with ideal planting time. Prairie stands are most diverse with dormant seeding because many forbs (wildflowers) need cold stratification in order to germinate. They like periods of moist and cold, and the freeze thaw cycle works them down perfectly into the soil. Some will take two, or sometimes three, years to germinate and may not flower for three or four.

Anyway, the November 10th ship date became November 12th because of a delay in harvesting one of the seeds for the mix, no big deal.

We had had some snow forecasted, but it was looking like a for sure thing on Monday, November 14th; two inches were expected overnight and one more inch the next day.

This may be starting to sound more like Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, but for us it turned out to be quite the opposite. That’s what I love about serendipity. Whether people believe in chance or fate or both, to me “serendipity” is just a series of fortunate events, and that’s exactly what we got.

Since February, we’ve been playing musical cars in the driveway. Three cars and a two car garage with no street parking has required us to shuffle around vehicles most days, depending on who leaves for work first and who gets home first. With the impending storm, we decided we didn’t want to play musical cars in the snow. Since our Morton was complete, we opted to store the truck at the property for now. This is celebration-worthy.

Plans began to evolve over the course of the day on Monday, November 14th. If we were going to drop off the truck at the Morton, we might as well load it up with door parts and other extras we had tucked in the corners of the garage and basement, right? Masters of efficiency, we are. The thoughts kept coming. Perhaps, we should load up my car too since we’d take that down as our ride back home.

This after-work errand really started taking shape. Talk about killing a few birds with one stone! Trust me, it gets better.

Now, if prairie seed is spread over deep, hard snow, the wind and animals who feed on seed are likely to take it before it gets worked down to the soil. One of the best times to seed prairie is right before a snowfall, because the snow protects the seed from wind and predators. It makes perfect sense. See where I’m going with this?

If we’re going to the land anyway, and we’re taking a couple car loads of stuff to store in the Morton, and it’s supposed to snow, then we should obviously spread the prairie seed too. We had a bunch of seed in the fridge ready to go. The other seed order that was coming could be planted later.

The after-work to-do list was growing fast. In addition to the usual chores, we needed to load up the vehicles and get the seed ready to go. I picked up the mail, and low and behold, the additional seed order had arrived! Serendipity. The vehicles got loaded, and we had all the seed too.

We arrived at our building just after 5:00 pm; that’s sunset here right now. Unloading the vehicles went quickly, but it got dark really fast. Now, I don’t have any pictures of this next part, because it was literally pitch black outside.

We broadcast seeded by hand several hundred dollars worth of prairie seed by the light of a lantern. At times, we were aided by the headlights of our vehicle too. Never have I hoped for snow so much—well, maybe when I was in grade school wishing for a snow day, but—at least not in the last two decades.

And snow, it did. The perfect heavy, sticky snow. We didn’t play musical cars the next morning. We didn’t have half our fridge taken up by seed. We didn’t have tons of door parts and other extras filling every corner of the garage and basement. Ok, maybe we do have that last one yet, but I’m still basking in the glory of that serendipitous day.

Now, the suspense will build through a predicted long winter in hopes of seeing the beginnings of a prairie come spring.