Journey back Inside The Blanket Fort this week as we continue our conversation with SIU Press authors Fred Delcomyn and James L. Ellis, who co-wrote A Backyard Prairie: The Hidden Beauty of Tallgrass and Wildflowers. In 2003, Fred imagined his two-and-a-half-acre backyard, which had been farmed for corn and soybeans for generations, restored to a tallgrass prairie. For the next seventeen years, he and his friend James scored, seeded, monitored, reseeded, and burned those backyard acres into prairie. Their book documents the journey of their restoration and reveals the incredible potential of a backyard to travel back to a time before the wild prairie was put into plow rows.