Horn Farm Happenings – August 11
Learn about food, from the ground up! What does healthy soil have to do with a healthy body? Everything! notes Dr. Daphne Miller in her book, Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up. York County Libraries invite readers to visit the Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education on Saturday, August 19 from 10am – 12pm to discover the importance of having good, healthy soil to produce the food we need to thrive.
The morning’s activities include a 1-hour farm tour at 10 am. Meet at the corn barn (small barn). Produce will be for sale at the Farm Stand until noon. Children’s activities with Kreutz Creek Library include a story time and craft, a scavenger hunt, and then Music and Movement with Mark DeRose at 11 am. Admission is free.
Libraries throughout Central Pennsylvania are reading Dr. Daphne Miller’s Farmacology: Total Health from the Ground Up as part of A Summer Read, a partnership with Wellspan Health and WITF’s Transforming Health. Dr. Miller notes that agriculture has everything to do with medicine. She is convinced that a farm internship should be a required part of medical training, and vice versa. “My time spent learning from farmers and researchers has made me think beyond food as medicine to farm as medicine.” In her book, Miller discovers how healthy soil can produce a healthy immune system. Copies of Farmacology are available to borrow at participating libraries and will be available to purchase at the event. For more information on A Summer Read, visit http://transforminghealth.org.
This week two new Eagle Scout projects were installed at the Horn Farm. Dalton Keller built and installed this purple martin house.
Liam Skroly built and installed two bat boxes. Each box can house up to 400 bats! Bats are welcome at the farm because they eat insects which like to eat our vegetables.
Dalton is the boy second from the left, and Liam is the boy in the red shirt. Thank you Boy Scouts!
The Farm Stand is open Saturdays from 9 to noon. In addition to tomatoes, we’ll have onions, potatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, green beans, cantaloupe, fresh cut flowers, and more! All grown here at the Horn Farm using better than organic methods.
Upcoming events:
Foraging – August 12
Food from the Ground Up – August 19
MicroHerding Invertebrates – August 26
Hugelkultur – September 9
Cooking Venison – September 9
Roasted Vegetables – September 12
Foraging – September 18
Tending the Susquehanna Riverlands – September 22/23
Pawpaw Festival _ September 23/24
The Art of Seeing and the Science of Observation – September 24
Edible Ecosystems Emerging: Food Forestry for the 21st Century – October 13 – 22
See you at the Farm!
Happy August! Celebrate First Friday with a delicious pizza topped with Horn Farm produce at John Wright Restaurant. Remember to ask for the Horn Farm pizza.
Our woodland restoration is well underway! Here’s the crew that helped transform a section of woods from a tangle of overgrowth to an accessible corridor. In just a few hours, this stream bed went from the conditions on the left to those on the right. The volunteers on this day came from the mid-Atlantic sales team at 
Wilson Alvarez (far left in photo above) is leading these work days. Wilson is a certified permaculture designer, inventor, gardener, skilled tracker, bowyer, nature-awareness instructor, and writer from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For the past twelve years, he has studied and taught classes and workshops on bio-intensive agriculture, regenerative technology, foraging, hunting, trapping, tracking, and wilderness survival. He is teaching two series of workshops this fall: 
Born and raised along the Susquehanna River in Lancaster County, Brandon Tennis is a professional land manager and Director of Stewardship for the Lancaster County Conservancy. Brandon holds a bachelor’s degree in Social Work from Millersville University and a master’s degree in Ecological Design from the Conway School in western Massachusetts. His experience includes an array of land planning, environmental restoration, trail work, organic farming, permaculture design, outdoor education, and social work. Brandon and his wife, Abby, first circled paths with the Horn Farm Center seven years ago when they made the decision to convert their CSA into a permaculture exhibit perennial food forest. Several travels and a few years later, they now grow food on a quarter-acre residential lot in Marietta primarily for themselves and their daughter. Brandon believes in the value of farmscapes as functional ecosystems. Welcome, Brandon!