A Prairie Haven - a Recommended Blog


I've been meaning to add to the category of recommended blogs, but haven't done so for over 6 months. I have a French aggregator I want to add, and a Tumblr photoblog - but I'll start with A Prairie Haven.

It was perhaps 30 years ago that I encountered Edwin Way Teale's book A Naturalist Buys An Old Farm, which thoroughly intrigued me. Some time thereafter I did try living on the remnants of an old farm in the semi-rural Kentucky countryside and discovered that doing so while working a 60-hour week wasn't practical.

A 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 (!), 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. One reason I didn't write anything for TYWKIWDBI a few days ago is that I spent hours exploring this site.

The property being "unfarmed" is a beautiful western Wisconsin site with an impressive variety of microhabitats, which the owners are enhancing. Inspired by the blog, I've now requested Teale's book from the library for another reading.

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