Are You Ready for Gardening Season?
Monarda, mountain mints, milkweed, and more, the first seed starts of the growing season are now flourishing in the greenhouse. It’s hard to believe that in just one month, over 10,000 organic veggies, herbs, flowers, and native plants will be ready for planting at the 14th Annual Horn Farm Plant Sale!
SAVE THE DATE: Saturday, May 2nd, 9am-3pm
But the greenhouse isn’t just a space for growing plants. This year, students in the Regenerative Grower Training Program, alongside our greenhouse interns, are growing their knowledge and skills.
From sowing seeds and dividing roots to monitoring and managing young plants, the greenhouse is a classroom for propagation, agriculture, ecology, botany, and more. For students in the training program, it’s a place to set their own educational roots by nurturing the plants that they’ll continue to tend in the demonstration field this summer and fall!
Purchasing plants at the Horn Farm Plant Sale supports and enriches this educational community. We hope to see you at the Horn Farm on May 2nd!
Horn Farm Plant Sale
Agroforestry in Action with Elderberries
What does it look like to destem 50 pounds of elderberry in under a minute?
This week, our staff had a chance to test out a new piece of equipment that will transform agroforestry education at the Horn Farm Center. Thanks to a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service through the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture (NASDA) Foundation, we purchased a highly efficient elderberry de-stemmer this winter!
Elderberries play a major role in the Horn Farm’s learning landscape. Exemplifying the practice of agroforestry, they bring together farming and conservation. That’s why elderberries are a hallmark of streamside buffers, forest gardens, and other perennial systems at the Horn Farm. They produce an abundant crop, but not at the cost of healthy soil, clean water, and biodiversity.
Separating fruit from the stems is an important step in processing elderberries for market, but it’s tedious and time-consuming by hand. With this machine, we’ll grow our capacity to provide the fruits of our educational landscape to the community! After all, in order to support agroforestry in Pennsylvania and the Mid-Atlantic, we can’t just grow the plants. We need to reach consumers, and in doing so, educate more and more people about the value of small-scale, ecological farming.
We’re grateful to elderberry crop consultant, Andrea Ferich of Ironwood Forestry (pictured bottom left above), for helping our team develop best practices to prepare our elderberry crop for market. Through a new strategic plan, Andrea is also providing market research to help guide future production and sales.
Interested in collaborating? We are looking to connect with other elderberry growers and customers in our region, so please reach out!
There’s much more to this grant project and its impact on the Horn Farm Center’s agroforestry program, including hazelnuts! We look forward to sharing additional updates in the months ahead.
Funding for this project was made possible by a grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Agricultural Marketing Service. Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the USDA.
Summer Kitchen: Learning Trail Preview
If you’ve attended a cooking or foraging class at the Horn Farm, you may have spent time in our Summer Kitchen. But do you know where this little building next to the farmhouse gets its name?
During summer months in the 19th century, the Summer Kitchen was the hub for cooking. This kept open fires out of the farmhouse, helping maintain more comfortable temperatures in the family’s main living quarters. In the winter, cooking returned to the home as a way to generate warmth, while the Summer Kitchen went into a “hibernation” of-sorts by becoming a storage space for preserved fruit, vegetables, and grains.
Even though we use the Summer Kitchen for cooking demonstrations in all seasons today, this unique building offers a taste of the Horn Farm’s agricultural history.
Thanks to a grant from the Susquehanna National Heritage Area’s Heritage Partner Program, new interpretative signage arriving at the Horn Farm this summer will help tell more of this story! We’ll be sharing more previews as this project continues to unfold over the coming weeks.
Avary Sassaman: Wildlife Warrior
Recently, our Community Engagement Coordinator, Avary Sassaman, had the chance to put her passion for wildlife rescue into action right here in our neighborhood. When a nearby property owner reached out with questions about a distressed juvenile eastern screech owl, Avary stepped in, equipped and ready, to safely transport the tiny bird to a local wildlife rescue. Moments like these remind us how care for the land extends to all who call it home.
Want to learn more about Wildlife Rescue and how you can be a wildlife warrior like Avary? Join us on April 11th at 10AM for Backyard Wildlife: Safety & Rehabilitation with Raven Ridge at the Horn Farm!