Don’t miss your chance to indulge in the flavors of the pawpaw season during Wild & Uncommon Weekend!
Join us on Sunday, September 29th for the Horn Farm Center’s new Pawpaw Brunch & Learn, held at Columbia Crossing River Trail Center. Enjoy a delicious, pawpaw-themed boxed brunch and beverage station while overlooking the iconic Susquehanna riverfront in Columbia, PA.
During the brunch, we will explore the history, culture, and lore of the pawpaw fruit with educator, Dale Hendricks. Learn about establishing other productive perennial crops like honey locust, persimmon, mulberry and more while building an excitingly diverse farm landscape that is water friendly, carbon negative, and presents a hopeful vision for the future.
The York County Pawpaw Festival will be held on Saturday, September 28th from 9am to 5pm at the Horn Farm Center!
In addition to pawpaw fruit and other unique seasonal foods, the event will feature local vendors, food trucks, plant nurseries, and educational activities at the Horn Farm Center.
To attend, purchase your tickets online today. Tickets will not be available for purchase at the door.
This year, you may choose from 3 ticket options, including Premium Early Entry and VIP Tickets for parking on-site:
$7 General Admission – parking off-site with shuttle
$15 VIP Ticket – parking on-site
$20 Premium Early Entry – from 9am-10am only – parking on-site, priority access before the crowds
While the York County Pawpaw Festival is ONE DAY ONLY on Saturday, September 28th, you can explore the wider ecosystem of foods, makers, and experiences across the Lower Susquehanna Region by participating in our FIRST EVER Wild & Uncommon Weekend, taking place September 26-29th!
Don your inner amateur chef hat on Saturday, October 26th from 10:30am-1:30pm in the Horn Farm Summer Kitchen. Enjoy a guided cooking session and learn to prepare a 4-course, healthy, plant-based meal featuring local, fresh, and in-season produce. Our autumn offering is sure to be nourishing and delicious!
Each aspiring chef will make enough for two meals which they can either enjoy at the end of class or take home with them to wow their family, friends, and social media following. But the best meals are better together…so bring a friend or special someone to share this unique and tasty experience.
Join us in the Horn Farm Summer kitchen as we put into practice the saying “Eat fresh! Eat local!”
Seeking VolunTREEers! Riparian Buffer Tending Days
With a forest of support from volunteers and community partners, the Horn Farm Center has planted over 17,000 trees across 16 acres of streamside land, contributing to the health of our watershed and local ecology.But getting roots into the ground is just the beginning. Restoration is not only about building soil, protecting water, and bolstering biodiversity–it’s about reawakening our relationship with the natural landscape and reclaiming our roles as tenders and partners in nature’s wellbeing. Like any relationship, time, patience, and dedication are needed for mutual flourishing.
Thus, the story of our growing riparian buffer continues this fall with our Tree Tending Workdays. We’re seeking individuals and groups to help ensure the health of our plantings by monitoring trees, planting new saplings, managing aggressive species, and more. By joining us “in the field,” you’ll learn about ecological restoration, native plants, agroforestry, and what makes a thriving riparian buffer (plus what makes ours “multifunctional!”).
See if you can lend a hand by joining an upcoming workday:
Interested in getting your class, office, or community together for a group volunteer day? Email us at education@hornfarmcenter.org to coordinate a visit, and check out our Tours and Group Visits page for custom educational experiences in and beyond our riparian buffer!
Curious about the Horn Farm’s streamside restoration work? Check out our riparian buffer series in the Horn Farm Center blog: For the Whole Stream.
Speaking of fostering relationship with the land, we’re excited to announce a new learning experience in collaboration with Waxwing EcoWorks and Reviving Wisdom!
Join us this winter for our Ecological Restoration Certificate: a three-week, hands-on workshop series where you’ll learn how to partner with nature and assist in the recovery of degraded ecosystems.
The skills and frameworks explored in this program are useful for practitioners seeking professional development, volunteers and community members assisting local conservation efforts, and landowners looking to revive ecological health at home.
You’ll learn practical skills for impactful stewardship while exploring new lenses for seeing our place in the landscape. Topics covered include assessing site conditions, taking inspiration from nature, planning and implementing restoration projects, and building a sustainable practice for a lifetime of earth care.
Discover or strengthen your role as an active, compassionate steward of the local landscape! Spaces in this program are limited, so we encourage you to register soon.
This program runs for 6-8 hours on three Saturdays in winter:
Free admission to the full day of the festival with on-site parking;
Priority access to purchase pawpaw fruit;
Free beverages, snacks, and a local pizza lunch, PLUS …
A special invite to a volunteer-only educational get-together in the spring!
Enjoy the festivities while lending a hand with admissions, pawpaw sales, parking patrol, and more: consider attending as a volunteer!
Whether or not you plan to volunteer, don’t forget to check out all of the Wild & Uncommon weekend happenings taking place across the region: September 26-29, 2024. It’s all a part of our newly expanded Pawpaw Festival! Full details and event registration links can be found at our Weekend Guide.
Wild & Uncommon Weekend: Tastes, Tours, Talks, and More!
With events spread out across the Lower Susquehanna Region from September 26-29, 2024, the Horn Farm’s NEW Wild & Uncommon Weekend celebrates our diverse ecosystem of local foods, makers, and nature-based experiences!
But the Pawpaw Festival is not the only way to connect with this fascinating fruit! Many of our Wild & Uncommon satellite events feature new ways to enjoy and learn about pawpaws, including a pawpaw cooking class, pawpaw desserts and mocktails, a hike through pawpaw habitat, biodynamic farm tours, and our special Pawpaw Brunch & Learn on Sunday, September 29th.
We’re also celebrating the greater ecosystem that pawpaws call home, featuring new local tastes, educational experiences, and plenty of family fun!
So while you purchase your tickets for the Pawpaw Festival on September 28th, be sure to check out our Wild & Uncommon Weekend Guide to see how you can extend the festivities across the Lower Susquehanna landscape: September 26-29, 2024!
Each year, the Horn Farm Center hosts a popular festival for a strange and fleeting native fruit–“America’s forgotten” pawpaw. The Pawpaw Festival is just one of the many ways we connect people with the natural landscape.
Ever tasted, or even heard of, a pawpaw?
This unusual native fruit–a northern outlier of an otherwise tropical fruit family–grows in abundance across forests and hillsides in the Lower Susquehanna Riverlands. With a shelf life that lasts in the blink of an eye, pawpaws are a tantalizing treat of the late summer for locals and visitors alike, which is why the York County Pawpaw Festival, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2024, is now a 4-day extravaganza highlighting all the “Wild & Uncommon” offerings of our vibrant landscape.
Pawpaw fruit from the Horn Farm Center’s pawpaw orchard, which grows over 20 cultivated varieties. The vast majority of pawpaws occur in wild habitats–forested river hills and valley bottoms–across the Lower Susquehanna Region.
Bringing together unique local foods, native plants, nature-based education, and the iconic pawpaw that started it all, the 2024 Wild & Uncommon Weekend will take place from September 26th to 29th. At the center of these festivities, the Horn Farm Center is hosting the annual Pawpaw Festival on September 28th from 9am to 5pm. Pre-purchased tickets are required to attend.
This popular event is often the first thing that comes to mind for locals who’ve heard of the Horn Farm Center. For many curious visitors, too, the Horn Farm is a one-day nexus for sampling the alluring pawpaw. In fact, many festival-goers over the years hail from New England, the Midwest, Florida and Georgia, and even as far as Canada, all drawn to the region by this peculiar fruit! The event features pawpaws for sale alongside local environmental organizations, native plant nurseries, nature-focused activities, and regional food vendors, many offering special pawpaw-inspired goodies!
Vendors and patrons at the 2023 Pawpaw Festival.Volunteer selling fresh pawpaw fruit (2023).Locally Seasoned, who will be offering a special pawpaw cooking class as part of the 2024 Wild & Uncommon Weekend.Orchard manager Dick Bono providing a tour of the pawpaw orchard (2022).
But unlike the pawpaw, with its seasonal limits and notoriously fleeting shelf life, the Horn Farm Center offers an abundance of learning opportunities all year around. If you’re planning to join the fun for the Horn Farm’s 2024 Wild & Uncommon Weekend, it’s worth getting to know a bit more about the small, resilient, and locally-rooted nonprofit behind this big event!
Connecting People with the Land
The Horn Farm Center’s mission is to foster ecological learning through land stewardship, community partnership, and hands-on experiences. Established as a nonprofit in 2004 after locals came together to halt development on historic farmland, the 186 acres that make up the Horn Farm Center are forever protected under the York County Farm and Natural Lands Trust. This preserves over 250 years of agricultural and natural heritage; moreover, it provides a space for visitors from York County and beyond to grow in connection with the local landscape.
Educational & Transformational
The Horn Farm Center cultivates that connection in many ways. Classes held throughout the year help people explore diverse pathways for deepening their relationship with the natural world. Popular examples include foraging walks, composting workshops, rustic cooking and fermentation classes, and multi-week training programs on topics like regenerative land stewardship, ecological gardening, foraging, and sustainable beekeeping. Next to the Center’s historic farmhouse and summer kitchen, dozens of community garden plots quilt the land, providing a valuable resource for local green thumbs to grow food for family and neighbors.
Foraging ClassesKitchen ClassesEco Gardener Training Program
Innovative & Inspiring
Across the wider landscape, the Horn Farm demonstrates innovative approaches to restoration and agriculture. Plots supporting local farm businesses rub shoulders with active restoration areas promoting biodiversity and ecological health. Prolific rows of elderberry, American hazelnut, willows, and other perennial crops provide food, medicine, and materials while also bolstering stream health along the farm’s margins. Many of these spaces have been planted and continue to be tended with the support of volunteers.
Some areas are even intentionally progressing toward total wildness. As part of restoration efforts in over 16 acres of riparian (streamside) zones, the Horn Farm has planted dozens of high-density, biodiverse “mini-forests.” These Miyawaki forests, named after the Japanese botanist who pioneered them, are the first plantings of their kind on the east coast!
Volunteers helping to restore a riparian buffer by planting a Miyawaki “mini-forest” with native trees and shrubs.Volunteers harvesting ripe elderberries from the Horn Farm’s regenerative farmscape.A mature Miyawaki “mini-forest” planted in 2018
The common thread across the Horn Farm’s agricultural and natural spaces is one of unity: bringing together what are often considered divergent approaches to land management. The Center demonstrates how farming and health ecology can work in harmony to promote the long-term wellbeing of people and place.
Thinking Like an Ecosystem: Ways to Grow Connected
So, while the Wild & Uncommon Pawpaw Festival brought over 2000 visitors to the farm in recent years, the Horn Farm is always a busy ecosystem–buzzing with class participants, pollinators, tour groups, volunteers, beneficial soil microbes, community gardeners, migratory birds, patrons of local businesses, and all the members of our regional ecological food webs.
Everyone is connected by a love for working with and learning from the earth: an essential part of growing greater ecological and community wellbeing.
Volunteers creating “brushwood bundles” of harvested willow during the Horn Farm’s Winter Willow Workdays.
Interested in exploring the many ways you can join the Horn Farm ecosystem? Consider registering for a class, volunteering, donating, or scheduling a tour with your school or community group. And of course, don’t forget to save the date for the York County Pawpaw Festival and Wild & Uncommon Weekend, happening September 26-29, 2024.
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 Literature and Music Composition at Muhlenberg College, he gravitated toward nonprofit engagement as a work study student. Now, at the Horn Farm Center, Andrew develops and leads educational programs, coordinates volunteer events, manages social media, 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, ethical foraging, ethnobotany, and locally-focused ways of living in reciprocal relationship with nature.
Outside of the Horn Farm Center, Andrew enjoys spending his time hiking the trails of York and Lancaster Counties, going for bike rides, cooking nourishing local (and oftentimes foraged!) meals, reading, journaling, and frequenting York County gems like Leg Up Farmers Market, Refillism, and York Central Market.
