Community Crew Training:

Become a part of our ecosystem of learning and action!

By joining the Horn Farm’s Community Crew volunteer program, you’ll have access to training and specialized workdays that support both land stewardship and community education across our landscape.

Attending an orientation day is the only requirement for joining the Community Crew.

Learn more about the program and join an upcoming training day below:

Ecological Restoration Workdays:

Forested areas along streams–also known as riparian buffers–act like safety nets for local waterways. Without plenty of plant life to catch sediment, stabilize soil, intercept nutrients, and provide habitat, waterways become eroded, polluted, and inhospitable for us and our more-than-human neighbors. That’s why the Horn Farm Center is has spent the past five years planting thousands of trees across dozens of acres of streamside land. We are responsible for healing and preserving environments both upstream and downstream, and we need plenty of volunteer hands on the land to help nature thrive.

The Horn Farm’s riparian buffers are not only healing to soil, water, and regional biodiversity. They’re also multifunctional–full of plants that provide usable materials like weaving products, food, fuel, and cuttings called “live stakes” that can be replanted for future restoration work. Volunteers are helping us build a landscape that’s not only good for wildlife and the watershed, but that we can interact with in positive and nurturing ways–through learning, responsible harvest, and reawakening our connection to local nature.

Wild & Uncommon Weekend:

The signature event of the Horn Farm Center’s Wild & Uncommon Weekend is the York County Pawpaw Festival. Each year, over 70 volunteers join our team to help make this fun and flavorful event possible. From managing traffic to selling pawpaws, facilitating youth activities to documenting the event, there is a niche for everyone to fill as a Pawpaw Festival volunteer!

Volunteers enjoy free admission to the Festival, lunch and snacks, and priority access to purchases pawpaws as perks for helping out.

Agroforestry Workdays:

Agroforestry is the integration of trees and shrubs into crop and animal farming systems. With their environmental and economic benefits, trees make farms more resilient, diversify local goods, and enrich our understanding of what agroforestry can be.

Visitors to the Horn Farm will find agroforestry in action. Edible tree crops like elderberries and hazelnuts grow alongside other valuable agroforestry goods, like live stakes and basketry willows. Throughout the seasons, we invite volunteers to help our team with tending and harvesting these climate-smart farming systems. Join us to learn more about agroforestry while enjoying an active day in the field.

Winter Willow Workdays:

The dormant season is the ideal time to harvest willow rods for basketry, biochar, brushwood bundles, and other uses. Spend a cool morning outside with us while helping us gather willow branch bundles and learning about the Horn Farm’s transition to agroforestry!

Yearly maintenance through “coppicing,” or cutting trees to ground level, enables many wetland-adapted species like willow to resprout robustly, benefiting our other-than-human residents during the growing season while outfitting our harvest needs when the winter arrives. With over a dozen varieties of basketry willows as well as native willows planted as part of our first multifunctional riparian buffer, our annual willow harvest is a big event that can benefit from many hands pruning, sorting, bundling, and transporting.

Annual Plant Sale

The Horn Farm’s annual Plant Sale is a beloved community event ringing in the spring growing season with a wide variety of organically-grown plant starts for sale. In 2025, we’ll be offering vegetable, herb, and flower starts, medicinal plants, trees and shrubs, and native grasses, herbaceous perennials, and vines.

We invite a handful of volunteers to help our event run smoothly each year. Areas of need include set-up and clean-up, parking, and plant sales.

Kitchen Event Support:

The Horn Farm’s historic Summer Kitchen is rooted in volunteer support. Without the generosity of community members who fundraised and completed major renovations in 2018, it wouldn’t be the certified commercial and teaching kitchen that it is today! Summer Kitchen volunteers assist with set-up, clean-up, supervision, and any dishwashing, ingredient organizing, and other tasks that need to take place during a class.

Summer Kitchen volunteers are expected to help at numerous classes throughout the year and must complete a basic food and kitchen safety course offered virtually through the Penn State Extension. Horn Farm Center covers the course cost so long as volunteers are able to commit to numerous Summer Kitchen classes.

Contact education@hornfarmcenter.org to learn more and get certified. If you have prior professional kitchen experience, the certification requirement may be waived.