Native seeds might be just the thing for those who are too busy to plant a garden on a schedule and don’t have a sprinkler system on a timer–or who didn’t have the money to buy dozens of potted plants this spring.

Like anything that grows, they can be fussy, but plants designed by Nature to survive also can also be forgiving.

“We’ve been experimenting with this over the past 10 years. We even did a dormant-season planting workshop last December where people came in and planted a restoration plot. We had been experimenting with it on a smaller scale but installed them in December and those plants are doing fine,” said Jane Breckinridge, who is co-director of Tribal Environmental Action for Monarchs and Tribal Alliance for Pollinators which partner with Monarch Watch and Native American tribes to restore habitat on tribal lands.

The plants grew through the summer in pots and had well-established roots, but they were naturally fully dormant, she said.

Tribal Alliance for Pollinators Coordinator Brandon Gibson chuckled at the act of planting the dormant root balls. “Yeah, sometimes it does kind of look like we are just planting dirt in the dirt,” he said.

But it works, he said. They have learned strategic placements for some plants, for example, buttonbush or other water-loving shrubs can be planted just above the water table and not require watering when springtime comes.

No question, early spring, is a great time for starting the vegetable garden, and planting annuals (be they native or cultivars), and autumn is prime time to sew seeds. But wild, native perennials don’t seem to care much about those ideal windows.

Seeds of many native perennials may lie dormant in the soil for years, even millennia, and sprout when conditions allow. On the flip side, sewing seeds where conditions might never be right probably is a waste of time. If you think the seeds are in a good spot, however, all that might be required is patience.

“It’s so easy to give up on them, and I’m impatient sometimes when they don’t come up,” said Ray Moranz, a grazing lands pollinator ecologist with Xerces Society and a partner biologist with the Natural Resource Conservation Service at Stillwater. “Sometimes they come up the next year and sometimes I’ve put seeds out in March and they don’t germinate until September or October and are tiny–or maybe they germinated earlier and were just so small I didn’t notice.”

There is absolutely no wrong time to put native plants or seeds in the ground, he said. It just means you might need to do some extra watering or provide other advantages to help those plants to get established.

Would-be planters of native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees should learn about an online tool offered by BONAP. It is The Biota of North America Program, but even those who use it regularly have to look that up. The acronym does the job.

BONAP is a collection of experts who have, and continue to, gather voluminous information about thousands of plants and, most notably for home gardeners, maintain a state-and-county level species map of thousands of native plant species.

Learn the common and scientific names of plants you want to grow and simply look them up in the BONAP North American Plant Atlas. If it’s already present in your county, that’s a good sign, Moranz said.

“That’s not to say you can’t try plants that are native to Kansas or Missouri, but they might need a little more water, or less if they’re native to western Kansas,” he said.

Stratification, the mimicking of a winter period that basically cues the seeds to break dormancy once they warm up, is the first key to growing your own native plants from seed, Breckinridge said.

“If you’re thinking about seeds now you can stratify those and have plants ready for fall. They need cold moist stratification first, whether is 60, 90, or even 120 days for some species,” she said.

Some people use moist sand, some use a little soil and vermiculite, it’s just putting the seeds in a moist medium in an airtight container–typically wrapped in a plastic baggie– in the refrigerator for a designated period prior to planting.

Breckinridge recalled that during a hectic period some years ago she forgot about a selection of seeds in a refrigerator for more than a year.

“I think it was actually about a year and a half, but we just planted them anyway after sitting there all that time and they did fine,” she said. “I think you probably can’t stratify too long, but you can make it too short.”

In May or even June, seeds can be spread in garden starter trays, transplanted to larger pots or plugs after they sprout, and planted when they have well-established roots, she said.

Different species have different requirements, but most sold commercially come with guidelines, she said.

Okies for Monarchs provides a list of sources for Oklahoma native seeds and plants at okiesformonarchs.com. Across the country, several nurseries sell native plants online. Moranz said that the more local the seed source the better odds for good performance, however.

The Alliance, which has an expanding native seed repository currently at 226 species, experiments with the propagation of these plants in greenhouses and on farms. Many of them have never been planted in this way before.

The Alliance is dedicated to informing Tribal partners but shares with the general public and may begin holding monthly classes as a fundraiser this year, Breckinridge said.

Learn more about the alliance and how some native seeds grow at the websitetribalallianceforpollinators.com.