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: