Every great quest starts somewhere. Ours starts with seeds.
Badgerton is the name we gave our land in Ridgeway, Wisconsin. You'll find us about 30 minutes due west of Madison in the rolling hills of the Driftless region. The land has sparked our creativity, and we're in the opening chapters of several new stories.
Badgerton Prairie is an in-progress ecological restoration of 107 acres of tallgrass prairie, oak savanna, oak woodlands, walnut woodlands, and wetlands. We're at the very beginning of a large-scale, long-term project to bring it all back to life.
Someday this land will also be home to our family homestead — Badgerton Farms — and a small village of round-doored, hobbit-inspired retreats — Badgerton Cottages — where guests can come stay, slow down, and enjoy simple pleasures like long walks, bird songs, and second breakfasts made with food grown by us and our neighbors.
We hope we'll get a chance to host you and yours when we finally get to that point, though it's still going to be years in the making. Until then, we invite you to follow along as we learn to steward this beautiful land and slowly build our lives upon it.
Katie writes about the land, the restoration, the plants, and the slow work of building a new kind of life. We share the wins, the setbacks, and everything we're learning along the way. Subscribe to get periodic updates on our progress delivered right to your inbox.
Starting with the 110 native species in our tallgrass prairie seed mix, we are logging and learning all the plants we encounter across the many habitats of Badgerton. We've created a Field & Study Guide with fact sheets, flashcards, and quizzes for every flora friend — built for us, open to anyone who loves the native plants of the midwest.
We recently installed wildlife monitoring systems across Badgerton — trail cameras and acoustic monitors that capture the sights and sounds of the wildlife living on the land. Someday, those recordings will become interactive maps tracking biodiversity year over year. Follow along with our Listening to the Landscape series on our blog.