As summer arcs toward the fall, the Horn Farm’s demonstration field sings with the signs of the harvest season.

Ripening tomatoes and swelling squashes carry the melody, buttressed by the harmonies of murmuring pollinators as they flutter about the wildflower meadows. In the spaces between, seedlings of fall crops emerge from newly-prepped soil, balancing the tune like altos.

Even on the most humid days, it’s a performance to savor!

Behind this chorus, six students in the Regenerative Grower Training Program (RGTP) have become both composers and audience. As they pass the half-way point of this 22-week immersion, Tam Shertzer – co-instructor for the course – reflects on the ways the season has changed not just for the land, but for this first cohort of Regenerative Growers:

It’s been exciting for me, as a first year staff member at Horn Farm, to be a part of developing the Regenerative Grower Training Program! This year’s participants are inquisitive and enthusiastic – there have been engaging conversations and wonderful opportunities for us all to learn from each other. Over the weeks we’ve spent together, folks have taken ownership of tending the land – asking the big questions, offering their ideas, and thinking like an ecosystem – which is ultimately one of the goals of this program.

Indeed, if there’s any chorus that has carried this program from the start, it’s thinking like an ecosystem. When approaching the land, students are encouraged to ask questions like: how does nature sustain itself? How can we mirror and honor this in designing systems for growing food?

How can living ecosystems inform the questions we ask and the decisions we make as growers?

The roles of “gardener,” “grower,” and “farmer” broaden when we look through this ecological lens. Rather than simply working on the land to obtain a yield, Regenerative Growers are seeing their place in partnership with the land – co-producing abundance by harnessing the wisdom that nature’s concert sings to us.

Tending to crops is just a part of the composition. In fostering regenerative systems, we also need to tend the soil, the water, and the surrounding ecology that support these crops in growing themselves.

After all, as the instructors like to say: the crops are doing most of the work anyway!

By positioning ourselves as tenders of the whole, our interactions with the land begin to resemble how growing food has always been, at least before the rise of industrial and chemically-dependent agriculture. Students are working at a small scale, within the parameters of our human and ecological limits. This carries its own challenges, lessons, and imperfections. As students can testify, it’s certainly not the bucolic vision that back-to-the-landers would make it seem. Nor is it air tight: we’re still self-consciously reliant on industrial vehicles, tools, and plastics (albeit recycled whenever possible). But as we continue to share insights, address shortcomings, enjoy yields, and lay groundwork for next season, we’re experiencing what makes ecologically-minded growing truly regenerative for the land and for people.

Read along to glean some of the skills and lessons students (and our staff!) have learned as we spend this first season of the RGTP together.

From the Ground Up: Ecological Growing in Action

So what does the music of the growing space sound like when we step back and listen with an ecological frame of mind? For one, the bass of the symphony becomes apparent like never before. Upholding all those melodies and harmonies, the earth beneath us – the soil – now captures our attention. What is easily overlooked as the drone underlying the ensemble is actually the remarkable, resolute foundation on which everything depends.

Tuning Into to Living Soils, and Unlikely Allies

Students have prepped many growing beds this season, learning how to use the resources that the land provides to build soil vitality in both the near-term and over time. The best advice, as ecological thinking would have it, comes from the forest next door. Here, living, layered soils build themselves. With this model in mind, we’ve identified some basic tenants of soil health and applied them, including aeration, coverage, and foregoing the tiller to minimize disturbance (or maintain the bass line, so to speak. Ever heard a tune without a bass line? Eerie!).

Digging deep into soil ecology, students are becoming acquainted with some surprising allies for our soil-building efforts: weeds.

Gardeners are no strangers to the frustration of a weedy plot, but so-called “weeds” are what we make them, and for the regenerative grower, weeds can be a resource rather than a hinderance.

In natural systems, the opportunistic plants that take residence in disturbed and exposed soils are founding members of an unfolding story. “Weeds” literally lay the groundwork for soil fertility. These plants are so persistent not because they’re pernicious, but because they are prodigious at mining nutrients from soils where other plants would struggle to grow. When these nutrient-miners die back each growing season – which is the case for most plants we consider “weeds,” being annuals – they deposit their bounty onto the surface. Over time, mounting stocks of reclaimed nutrients fuel an increasingly complex soil food web, priming the ground for new plant communities to move in.

With this process in mind, students have applied a few techniques for prepping beds by incorporating rather than antagonizing weeds. Green mulching is one example, which entails pulling and cutting plants before they go to seed and laying them in place as nutrient-rich biomass. The benefits of green mulching are themselves layered – not only will decomposing plant matter feed soil microbiota and the plants we intend to grow, but the litter keeps the soil covered, maintaining moisture and temperature.

As a proponent of rethinking the role of weeds in the growing system, co-instructor and Farm Manager Jon Darby encourages everyone to know each weed and the services they provide.

For students, pulling a weed isn’t encouraged unless they can identify it first. Hence, weeding in the ecological growing space is a selective, mindful, and even meditative practice.

Many plants conventionally victimized by the trowel, the mower, or worse – the herbicide – are spared in this ethic, because their “weediness” is nullified by oft-overlooked benefits like feeding the soil, creating dappled shade, attracting beneficial insects, and, of course, providing free food and medicine (purslane, anyone?).

Harmony in Complexity: Mimicking Biodiversity

A symphony is a mosaic of sounds. As listeners, we’re captivated not by individual players, but by intentional groupings of instruments that dance with one another. Much the same can be said for healthy plant communities. Nature isn’t a stranger to monocrops – ecological succession, or natural changes in ecosystems over time, teaches us that plant communities can take many forms. But by and large, high diversity fosters productivity and a resilient whole.

With this frame of mind, RGTP students are learning how ecosystems can inspire how we map our crop systems. This doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning order. Rows and structures promote efficient harvests, and as members of the ecological community ourselves, it’s important to weigh our needs in the system. But even within limits, we can design plant communities that mirror how ecosystems are structured. In doing so, we also replicate the benefits of ecosystem structures, which buffer against weather, pest and disease pressure, and other unpredictable disturbances.

A classic example of this ecological planting style has deep roots on this continent. Testifying to the vast exchanges of knowledge and resources that traversed what we now call North America, countess Indigenous communities from the southwest to the Susquehanna Riverlands developed a method for planting three staple crops – corn, beans, and squash – in tight-knit groupings known as the Three Sisters. Many Indigenous farmers and growers continue to honor this legacy today, serving as leaders in ecological food production.

In a Three Sisters plot, each sister uplifts her two companions, enriching all three while creating a more resilient whole.

Towering corn provides sturdy scaffolding for vining beans to climb. In turn, the beans bring nourishment to the soil by increasing the availability of nitrogen. You may be familiar with beans as “nitrogen-fixers”; thanks to beneficial bacteria in their roots, beans and other legumes convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into a form that can be absorbed by plants, making them a choice cover crop in sustainable planting systems.

While beans and corn dance skyward in this way, their sibling, squash, delivers her own benefits on the ground below. Squash spreads horizontally, creating a dense and spiny understory that offers protection from herbivores while creating ample shade for the soil. She maintains everyone’s water reserves, even through the driest spells of summer, and her sisters return the favor: a nitrogen boost from beans, and gradual trickles of water from corn after rain.

The three sisters are just one time-tested example of what we can call plant guilds, or communities that, by virtue of their their togetherness, offer services for each of their members. RGTP students continue to engage with guilds and companionships that are informed by our our goals as growers. These goals can include soil-building (incorporating legumes), pest deterrence (alliums and brassicas), partitioning resources, and making the most of small spaces. Even aesthetics and “just for experiment’s sake” are valid goals for the playful fringes of the field (proving, for example, that fennel and peppers can indeed grow together!).

When it comes to companion planting, you’ll find no shortage of resources peddling overstated claims about which plants can and cannot go together. RGTP students take the extra steps of investigating the “whys” behind these claims, tracing plants back to the functions they serve within each mini-ecosystem we’re growing.

Critical thinking is another refrain that threads the course, as we interrogate commonly-held assumptions in gardening and farming that we often take for granted without knowing why. Why do we eradicate weeds and remove them from the planting space? Why do we till the soil? Do the benefits we presume outweigh the cons or create missed opportunities? What assumptions – ecological, generational, cultural, industrial – underlie conventional scripts about how food ought to be grown, or how we ought to handle problems like pests and diseases? What information, though conveyed to us as universal, is actually quite contextual to time, place, and growing conditions?

On that last query: working in such a place-based, context-specific medium as ecological growing, RGTP students are justifiably exhausted (and equally spurred!) by the same answer around every corner: “it depends …” It’s important to glean what we can from observable patterns across nature, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge the specific conditions of where we are growing to move forward with ecological sensibility and tact.

Orchestrating Perennials: Future Resilience from the Garden to the Farm

Most of the plants that take root across today’s farms and gardens are short-lived. Those that complete their entire life cycle in one growing season–germinating in the spring and dropping seeds by the fall–are called annuals. Think of tomatoes and all three sisters: corn, beans, and squashes. Biennials, you might then guess, complete their life cycle over two growing seasons, usually by producing hearty leaves in their first year and offspring in their second. Swiss chard, beets, and brassicas like kale and broccoli fall into this camp.

As the self-sustaining ecosystems neighboring our farms and gardens show us, however, nature tends toward perennials. These plants will live for multiple, even hundreds, of years, producing flowers, fruits, or other harvestable materials over many growing seasons without the need for re-planting or heavy intervention.

Let’s get back to thinking like an ecosystem here. Thinking in this way can only take us so far if we keep our sights fixed on the familiar archetypes of farming and gardening culture: the annuals and biennials.

The RGTP shows students how we can reimagine these conventional systems through ecological design, but ultimately, perennial gardens bring us closer than ever to the self-sufficiency and integration modeled by ecology.

So, while students have spent much of this season among the veggies, we’ve also taken time to dip our toes in the budding network of perennial growing systems taking root across the Horn Farm.

Tam shares how this element of the course brings not just new energy, but increasing importance to the course. After all, the RGTP is about equipping growers with versatile and adaptable skills, not just to foster healthy food ecosystems, but to do so through an uncertain future:

In the time that remains, I’m really looking forward to establishing (and re-establishing!) more perennial food spaces in our demo field. As the season progresses, and we’ve already seen some intense heat waves, the value of perennial systems has become more and more apparent. (Annuals are certainly worth the time and effort, but who doesn’t love a trusty mulberry tree that produces reliably every spring?!) I can’t wait to see what kinds of designs the RGTP participants create once they have the opportunity to put their brains into design mode. I’m expecting that some truly beautiful, diverse, and abundant spaces will take shape this year at Horn Farm!

On the ground at the Horn Farm Center, perennial growing systems are becoming increasingly common. Dense plantings of American black elderberries (Sambucus canadensis) line the edges of our demonstration field. Beneath alleys of mulberry (Morus alba), American plum (Prunus americana), and nut-bearing trees, herbaceous perennials like sochan (Rudbeckia laciniata) and bee balm (Monarda spp.) grace the soil. Even fallow plots awaiting new designs are arguably perennial, with their preponderance of edible “weeds” like nettles, dandelions, and violets regaling our foraging programs with enlarged notions of food.

As Tam mentions, long-lived perennial growing systems like these offer greater resilience in the face of an increasingly mercurial environment. Human-caused climate change has vexed our summers with extremes of heat, rain, and disease, but tree and shrub systems are better equipped for handling these pressures because they already do what we work so hard to replicate in the annual and biennial gardens. Their tenacious root systems keep the soil from eroding while managing inconsistent water inputs; their copious shade keeps soil cool on relentlessly sunny days; constant leaf debris and woody prunings feed soil biota continuously; and the crops they produce – especially nuts – offer us more calories, more versatility, and better storability than conventional crops.

Students in the RGTP have gotten a taste of agroforestry through engaging with growing spaces that incorporate trees, shrubs, and other long-lived plants at the Horn Farm. They’ve also glimpsed ways to design these kinds of systems, learning about food forests and forest gardening. As Tam mentions, they’ll soon be turning design into action, supporting the creation of demonstration forest gardens that will serve future iterations of the RGTP, classes for the general public, and, undoubtedly, the ecological web we’re creating across the Horn Farm’s educational landscape.

Perennial plants, agroforestry, and concepts like forest gardening sound newfangled to many, but they constitute some of the oldest agricultural interactions between humans and the land. What we today call agroforestry systems predate the advent of annual-based agriculture the world over. So while the thrust of the RGTP is about thinking like an ecosystem to rethink our roles as growers, a more accurate verb for our relationship with the land might be one rekindling, reigniting, even reintegrating. Returning to our roots as custodians of wellbeing and longevity, and in so doing, becoming perennial ourselves.

Cadence: Regenerative Pathways for Food and Community

Nestled among the demonstration gardens, one Three Sister’s plot conceals something peculiar. Peer through the squash leaves and you’ll see finger-like structures protruding from the bases of some of the corn. Bendy and blunted with gel-caked tips, these structures look like something out of a Seussical forest.

One of our students – an enthusiast for rare seeds – gifted us with kernels from a variety of corn known to fix nitrogen. Like the root nodules of legumes that host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, these structures – which are actually above-ground roots – perform a similar dance. They attract bacteria with sugar-rich mucilage in order to farm nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Upon planting this curious corn, the RGTP crew coined it “The People’s Corn.” The name stuck – a fond term of endearment for an experimental plot that, we hope, will yield nitrogen-fixing corn seed for future seasons. The People’s Corn is always on students’ minds: “How’s The People’s Corn?” “Let’s go check on The People’s Corn,” “Squash isn’t looking so hot in The People’s Corn.” “Ants are farming aphids in The People’s Corn!”

We’re all familiar with giving a namesake to something you love. For the Horn Farm, this makes The People’s Corn an emblem of the RGTP’s greater vision.

The least we can do is empower folks to regenerate the land and our relationship to it; in the grand scheme, we’re striving to regenerate peoples’ sense of connection with one another. Slowly but surely, by nurturing a healthier landscape together, we’re growing food, fodder, and well-(g)rounded community.

History shows us that food grown ecologically has always carried community. In fact, to work regeneratively with the land, we need community. The long game of rekindling an ecologically-imaginable food system demands as many tending and curious hands as we can muster. It’s a bold about-face to the trajectory that industrial agriculture has taken, severing more and more of us from the sources of our lives.

So when we lead with thinking like an ecosystem, mimicking ecology in the growing space is just part of the symphony. A thriving ecosystem is itself a network of players, each contributing to the whole.

Thus, through tending ecological food systems, nature also teaches us to tend and grow our communities.

We’re grateful to this year’s first RGTP for moving in that spirit with us; we’re just a small collective of caretakers dedicated to learning and growing with the land, but with resilient community-creation in the works – from the plants to the people – we’re sowing seeds for a regenerative future.