Horn Farm Happenings – March 3, 2023

Downstream: The Bigger Picture Behind the Buffer

“Nearly half of the freshwater flow into the Chesapeake comes from the Susquehanna River, making it the largest water contributor to the bay. This means that Pennsylvanians, not one of us in viewing distance of the Bay, have a surprisingly crucial role to play in addressing the degradation of downstream ecologies in the Chesapeake.”

Part 2 of “For the Whole Streamour blog feature spotlighting the Horn Farm Center’s riparian buffersis live! In “Downstream, we illustrate how our efforts to protect land and water extend well beyond the boundaries of the Center, and how ecology teaches us to pay attention to impacts that will outdistance and outlive us.

“For the Whole Stream” is the first installment of a new series called the Horn Farm Ecosystem. Through monthly articles, we’ll walk the land in writing: visiting the forests, regenerative fields, and ecological action sites of the Horn Farm Center to explain our stewardship work, uplift nature, and inspire love for the land. Visit our February 17th, 2023 newsletter for more information about this blog series.

Click here to read the blog: Downstream


Volunteers Wanted: Spring Tree Plantings

Since 2018, we’ve planted over 15,000 trees thanks to our dedicated volunteers. This year, we are planting the final 2 acres of multifunctional riparian buffers at the Horn Farm – and we need your help! Join us for a few volunteer workdays this spring:

Planting days:

Tending/upkeep days:

Volunteers will help us plant and stake tree saplings, manage non-natives, and install protective tree tubes to help our saplings succeed. See you at the farm!

Click here to learn more and sign up to volunteer!


Training for the Future

On February 13th, we kicked-off the 2023 Land Steward & Ecological Gardener Training Programs! We welcomed 21 new students, who are eager to become practitioners of ecological land care.

Over the past 3 weeks, training program instructors Wilson Alvarez, Elyse Jurgen, and Andrew Horn laid the groundwork for understanding the natural history, ecology, and ongoing environmental challenges of our bio-region. Participants are exploring foundational knowledge in both the values and practices that generate impactful restorative earth work.

Their learning experience will continue as they begin hands-on training over the next 13 weeks. We are absolutely honored to guide our new students in their journeys to earth care. And, we are thrilled to be teaching the next generation of land stewards here in York County!


Claim Your Share: Horn Farm CSA

From June to October, CSA members receive a weekly box of seasonal, organically-grown produce. Fill your plate with local flavor this year! Become a member of the Horn Farm CSA to support local, regenerative farmers and the Horn Farm Center’s land-healing mission.

To help make our CSA more accessible, we are offering payment plans this year. Register by March 15th to pay in installments.

Click here to Register.


 

Learn the Miyawaki Method!

A forest from scratch? Learn this unique method for bringing a new forest to life!

In this class, we’ll tour Horn Farm’s Miyawaki test plots to showcase the ecological underpinnings of the Miyawaki method, its benefits to the ecosystem, and then demonstrate the process for building your own Miyawaki mini-forest.

Each participant will leave with their own Miyawaki starter kit including seven unique, native tree seedlings and the knowledge to bring rewilding home or wherever the land can benefit from this innovative planting technique.

Join us on Sunday, March 19th from 9:00am-1:00pm for Miyawaki 101, led by Woodland Steward, Wilson Alvarez at the Horn Farm Center.

Click here for more information and to register.

For the Whole Stream: Riparian Buffers

Part 2: Downstream

Read For the Whole Stream Part 1: Upstream here.

For the Whole Stream is the first installment of a new series called the Horn Farm Ecosystem. Through monthly articles, we’ll walk the land in writing: visiting the forests, regenerative fields, and ecological action sites of the Horn Farm Center to explain our stewardship work, uplift nature, and inspire love for the land. To learn more about the Horn Farm Ecosystem blog series, check out our February 17th, 2023 newsletter.


Like a drop of water in a stream, ecology ripples outward.

Actions taken (or neglected) in one place have resounding impacts elsewhere over time. Non-native introductions that did not start at the Horn Farm Center have given us the likes, tests, and uses (note the paradox) of multiflora rose, Japanese honeysuckle, garlic mustard, Japanese stiltgrass, and tree of heaven. Each of these plants–without a native niche or co-evolutionary partnership to balance its influence–was once a newcomer here in some seemingly innocuous form. And now, they’ve all reshaped the ecology of our landscape, in many ways monopolizing our land tending energies. Once a drop, now pervasive, plucked from a place beyond the scope of what we can see.

The same story of compounding impacts unfolds for beneficial engagement with the land. Replanting natives where non-natives have been removed reverberates outward to support the species they host, the plants those species pollinate, and the food chains they underpin. Stopping the cycle of tilling soils in farming bolsters soil stability, improves water infiltration, replenishes soil nutrients and microbiology, enhances crop vitality, and contributes to carbon drawdown from the atmosphere, not to mention the benefits of reduced stormwater runoff on neighboring waterways and habitats. Over time, one lever releases many, and the catalyst of change can begin small. The humble backyard, the wayward farm, the thin edge of a streamside … if you haven’t already taken Douglas Tallamy’s hint about bringing habitat home here, this is your cue. As we work to rebuild ecological balance in one place, that act of recovery may well be exported along the world’s energy flows–carried by the wind, water, seeds, scat, and human messaging. Our riparian buffer, of course, is no exception.

How exactly? As noted in Part 1 of this blog set, our eroded stream deposits into Kreutz Creek, which flows into the Susquehanna River. Kreutz Creek is one vein among thousands tethered to a crucial ecological artery. The Susquehanna River meanders 444 miles south from its headwaters in central New York, carving down Pennsylvania before cutting briefly into Maryland and emptying into the Chesapeake Bay. Given its size and might, the Susquehanna River is one of the primary water channels of the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

All of the creeks, streams, and rivers encompassed in the highlighted area eventually drain into the Chesapeake Bay. Source: PA Department of Environmental Protection.

In fact, nearly half of the freshwater flow into the Chesapeake comes from the Susquehanna River, making it the largest water contributor to the bay. This means that Pennsylvanians, not one of us in viewing distance of the Bay, have a surprisingly crucial role to play in addressing the degradation of downstream ecologies in the Chesapeake.

As the environmental pressures of development and agriculture continue across the watershed, the Chesapeake Bay has become a collecting ground for chemical and nutrient pollution, excess sediments, and other waste carried away by the exposed waterways that feed it.

Indeed, it’s estimated that 65% of the nitrogen and phosphorous polluting the Chesapeake have come from Pennsylvania.

Carried by stormwater runoff, most of this pollution originates from bufferless, steam-adjacent farms that rely on nutrient inputs to feed large-scale crop production on ailing soils (manure is a part of this problem as well). Nutrient pollution at this scale, alongside sedimentation, has spelled existential trouble for the Chesapeake over time. Biodiversity has suffered with seagrasses, shellfish, and fish succumbing to depleted oxygen levels in the water, caused by both over-sedimentation and unchecked algae blooms fueled by nutrient pollution. (Note: algal blooms can cause direct harm beyond aquatic life, potentially harboring toxins that threaten human health). Loss of biodiversity to this degree, echoing the stream habitats in our backyards, has implications that ripple out: destabilizing food chains, upsetting local economies, and undercutting the Bay’s resilience as a storm buffer against increasingly powerful weather.

Since the EPA’s heightened attention to the Bay in 2010, PA farmers and property owners have responded increasingly to statewide calls (and incentives) for waterway protection using riparian buffers. The state fell short of conservation targets in 2017 and recommitted through robust riparian programs emphasizing agroforestry in buffer design–an angle taken up at the Horn Farm Center (more to come on that!).

Between this growing movement, increasingly common torrential rains, and a keen interest in ecological land stewardship, the Horn Farm Center broke ground on our first riparian buffer planting in 2018.

As the planting and learning continues, we’ve come to see the riparian buffer not just as an enactment of our responsibility to ailing lands and waters around us, but as a teaching tool–a window perhaps–into how ecology works. That is: how ecology teaches us that small changes can bring about resonant impacts, and to recognize that our proactivity (or neglect) in one area determines outcomes for areas and systems even beyond our scope. For every upstream, there is an innumerable family of downstreams.

Volunteers planting trees and installing tree tubes in support of our water protection efforts (10/2021).

As beneficiaries of the soils, lands, and waters nourished by the Susquehanna, the Chesapeake, and the generations that tended this landscape before dominant culture abandoned the caretaker lifeway, it’s only right for us to lean back, reacquaint ourselves with the ground, and work to bring back balance in whatever capacity we can. Because when we nurture and bolster an ecosystem at home, we hold the key to rebalancing it elsewhere, and restoring humility to ourselves in the process.

Click here to read For the Whole Stream Part 3: Beyond the Stream


About the Author: Andrew Leahy

Growing up in the foothills of Ricketts Glen State Park, Andrew spent his early life in the embrace of Northeastern PA forests, sowing the seeds for his ongoing enchantment with the natural world and its stewardship. While studying English and Music Composition at Muhlenberg College, he gravitated toward nonprofit engagement as a work study student in the college’s Office of Community Engagement. Now, at the Horn Farm Center, Andrew manages social media, develops educational programs, coordinates volunteer events, and collaborates on marketing projects, large events, and organizational capacity-building. Through all of this, he is a dedicated student of the land, with a life’s mission of learning (and providing spaces for others to learn) about bioregional ecology, regenerative agriculture, permaculture, foraging, and locally-focused ways of living in reciprocal relationship with nature.

Horn Farm Happenings – February 17, 2023

More Ways to Learn: Horn Farm Ecosystem

At the Horn Farm Center, nature is our teacher, our companion, and our collaborator. By working alongside the natural world, we recognize how we, like the networked soils of our fields and forests, are rooted in a constellation of relationships.

With this ecological understanding, we see how everything we do ripples across an unbreakable fabric, human and more-than-human, biotic and abiotic, such that the health of one system is integral to the health of the whole.

That’s our birds-eye perspective on the work of the Horn Farm Center. But what does it look like on the ground, across the wild, semi-wild, and gardened spaces that weave the tapestry of our ecosystem? How are we leveraging nature’s interconnectedness in our stewardship practices? And, why are we so committed to ecology-based stewardship on the farm?

To give you the groundwork and share the story of this relationship with nature, we’re launching a new blog series called the Horn Farm Ecosystem.

This blog will offer monthly articles spotlighting different project areas at the Center. With each installment, we’ll walk the land in writing: visiting places like our forests, our regenerative fields, and our riparian buffers to contextualize, demystify, and address the seriousness of this work in a world that needs human hands as part of its healing.

Through a combination of science, history, and our own learning experiences, we’ll convey the bigger picture of our commitment to environmental stewardship, and why we constantly ask ourselves: what would nature do? 

This week’s blog explores our work with multifunctional riparian buffers on the farm. We hope you enjoy it!

Click here to read the blog: Upstream


Final Riparian Buffer Plantings This Spring

Since 2018, with the help of dozens of visiting groups and hundreds of volunteers, we’ve planted over 15,000 trees and reclaimed 14–soon to be 16–acres of farmland, transforming them into multifunction riparian buffers.

This year, we are planting our final 2 acres – and we need your help! Join us for a few volunteer workdays this spring.

Volunteers will help us plant and stake tree saplings, manage invasives, and install protective tree tubes to help our saplings succeed. Hope to see you at the farm!

Click here to learn more and sign up to volunteer!


What Do You Want to Dig Into?

As we look to expand and diversify our programs this year, we want your input! Let us know what kinds of classes or workshops you’d like to see in the future at the Horn Farm. Give us your input by taking a short, 3-5 minute survey.

Click here to give us your feedback!


Horn Farm CSA: New Members Welcome

From June to October, CSA members receive a weekly box of seasonal, organically-grown produce. Fill your plate with local flavor this year. Become a member of the Horn Farm CSA to support local, regenerative farmers and the Horn Farm Center’s land-healing mission.

To help make our CSA more accessible, we are offering payment plans this year. Register by March 15th to pay in installments.

Click here to Register.


Susquehanna River in PA, USA on a summer autumn day. It is the longest river on the East Coast of the United States that drains into the Atlantic Ocean, via the Chesapeake Bay.

Origins of the Susquehanna Valley Landscape 

Are you interested in the natural forces and human activities that have shaped our unique region? Learn to think in “deep time,” like geologists, to explore the landforms of the Lower Susquehanna Valley. This class will focus on the influence of plate tectonics and other geological processes that created our landscape.

We’ll also devote special attention to the ancient river at its heart and the influence of the massive ice sheets which, just moments ago in geological time, approached the region but never quite reached it.

Join us on Thursday, March 9th at 6pm-8pm for “Origins of the Landscape,” part one of the four part Land & Peoples of the Lower Susquehanna Valley program series with the Horn Farm Center. This session is led by Dr. Ed Wilson and Dr. Jay Parrish, former State Geologist of Pennsylvania.

Click here for more information and to register.


New Series: Windows to Wild Lands

Exploring primitive skills invites us to connect more closely with nature and our human ancestry. On the first Sunday of every month from 1 to 3pm, Horn Farm Center’s new introductory classes offer a glimpse of distinct skills that echo the resourcefulness, simple ingenuity, and nature-based lifestyles of our past.

By attuning our hands and minds to these tactile skills, we not only learn survival strategies, but the values of patience, attention, and respect that come with immersing ourselves in our natural surroundings.

The spring Windows to Wildlands class topics are:

  • Wild Basket Making – March 5th, 2023
  • Making Natural Cordage – April 2nd, 2023
  • Animal Tracking – May 7th, 2023
  • Alternative Uses of Plants – June 4th, 2023
  • Assembling Primitive Traps – July 2nd, 2023

Click here for Windows to Wild Lands


Upcoming Classes & Workshops:
February 16th: Baking Bread: White & Wheat
February 25, 2023: Maple Sugaring
February 25, 2023: Maple Sugaring
March 3, 2023: Wild Basket Making
March 5, 2023: March Foraging Walk
March 9, 2023: Land & Peoples Series: Origins of the Landscape
March 16, 2023: Flatbread
March 23, 2023: Land & People Series: The Indigenous Peoples
March 25, 2023: Hugelkultur Workshop
March 26, 2023: Bio-Intensive Garden Primer
April 2, 2023: Making Natural Cordage
April 6, 2023: Backyard Composting
April 6, 2023: Land & People Series: European Settlement
April 8, 2023: Regenerative Foraging
April 13, 2023: Spring Garden Prep & Planning
April 15-16, 2023: Foraging Foundations Weekend
April 20, 2023: Backyard Composting
April 20, 2023: Land & People Series: The Contemporary Landscape
April 20, 2023: Baking Bread: Sourdough & Flatbread
May 7, 2023: Animal Tracking
May 10, 2023: Sweet Potatoes 101
May 11, 2023: Understanding Your Garden Q&A
May 20, 2023: Botany for Gardeners
June 4, 2023: Alternative Uses of Plants
June 10-11, 2023: Foraging Foundations Weekend
June 15, 2023: Gardener’s Guide to Weeds
July 2, 2023: Assembling Primitive Traps
July 6, 2023: Insect Identification for Gardeners
September 9-10, 2023: Foraging Foundations Weekend

Upcoming Events:

February 25, 2023: Public Disco Porch Benefit Show
April 22, 2023: Go Green in the City
May 4-5, 2023: Give Local York
May 7, 2023: 11th Annual Plant Sale
September 23 & 24, 2023: 19th Annual York County Pawpaw Festival

Volunteer Opportunities & Work Days:

April 2, 2023: Tree Planting
April 15, 2023: Tree Planting
May 20, 2023: Riparian Buffer Upkeep
June 17, 2023: Riparian Buffer Upkeep
General Volunteer Information