Horn Farm Center for Agricultural Education

Tag Archive: Agriculture

A Summer Symphony with the Regenerative Grower Training Program

As summer arcs toward the fall, the Horn Farm’s demonstration field sings with the signs of the harvest season.

Ripening tomatoes and swelling squashes carry the melody, buttressed by the harmonies of murmuring pollinators as they flutter about the wildflower meadows. In the spaces between, seedlings of fall crops emerge from newly-prepped soil, balancing the tune like altos.

Even on the most humid days, it’s a performance to savor!

Scenes from summer harvests in the first Regenerative Grower Training Program

Behind this chorus, six students in the Regenerative Grower Training Program (RGTP) have become both composers and audience. As they pass the half-way point of this 22-week immersion, Tam Shertzer – co-instructor for the course – reflects on the ways the season has changed not just for the land, but for this first cohort of Regenerative Growers:

It’s been exciting for me, as a first year staff member at Horn Farm, to be a part of developing the Regenerative Grower Training Program! This year’s participants are inquisitive and enthusiastic – there have been engaging conversations and wonderful opportunities for us all to learn from each other. Over the weeks we’ve spent together, folks have taken ownership of tending the land – asking the big questions, offering their ideas, and thinking like an ecosystem – which is ultimately one of the goals of this program.

Indeed, if there’s any chorus that has carried this program from the start, it’s thinking like an ecosystem. When approaching the land, students are encouraged to ask questions like: how does nature sustain itself? How can we mirror and honor this in designing systems for growing food?

How can living ecosystems inform the questions we ask and the decisions we make as growers?

Co-instructors Jon Darby (Farm Manager) and Tam Shertzer (Marketing & Production Coordinator) admiring ecology’s many wonders across the Horn Farm’s landscape: a black rat snake in the field and elderberries galore!

The roles of “gardener,” “grower,” and “farmer” broaden when we look through this ecological lens. Rather than simply working on the land to obtain a yield, Regenerative Growers are seeing their place in partnership with the land – co-producing abundance by harnessing the wisdom that nature’s concert sings to us.

Tending to crops is just a part of the composition. In fostering regenerative systems, we also need to tend the soil, the water, and the surrounding ecology that support these crops in growing themselves.

After all, as the instructors like to say: the crops are doing most of the work anyway!

By positioning ourselves as tenders of the whole, our interactions with the land begin to resemble how growing food has always been, at least before the rise of industrial and chemically-dependent agriculture. Students are working at a small scale, within the parameters of our human and ecological limits. This carries its own challenges, lessons, and imperfections. As students can testify, it’s certainly not the bucolic vision that back-to-the-landers would make it seem. Nor is it air tight: we’re still self-consciously reliant on industrial vehicles, tools, and plastics (albeit recycled whenever possible). But as we continue to share insights, address shortcomings, enjoy yields, and lay groundwork for next season, we’re experiencing what makes ecologically-minded growing truly regenerative for the land and for people.

Read along to glean some of the skills and lessons students (and our staff!) have learned as we spend this first season of the RGTP together.

From the Ground Up: Ecological Growing in Action

So what does the music of the growing space sound like when we step back and listen with an ecological frame of mind? For one, the bass of the symphony becomes apparent like never before. Upholding all those melodies and harmonies, the earth beneath us – the soil – now captures our attention. What is easily overlooked as the drone underlying the ensemble is actually the remarkable, resolute foundation on which everything depends.

Tuning Into Living Soils, and Unlikely Allies

Students have prepped many growing beds this season, learning how to use the resources that the land provides to build soil vitality in both the near-term and over time. The best advice, as ecological thinking would have it, comes from the forest next door. Here, living, layered soils build themselves. With this model in mind, we’ve identified some basic tenants of soil health and applied them, including aeration, coverage, and foregoing the tiller to minimize disturbance (or maintain the bass line, so to speak. Ever heard a tune without a bass line? Eerie!).

Students prepping DIY soil tests from different plots on the farm. Simple analyses like these help us assess soil conditions at a glance, such as the proportions of mineral components like clay, silt, and sand.

Digging deep into soil ecology, students are becoming acquainted with some surprising allies for our soil-building efforts: weeds.

Gardeners are no strangers to the frustration of a weedy plot, but so-called “weeds” are what we make them, and for the regenerative grower, weeds can be a resource rather than a hinderance.

In natural systems, the opportunistic plants that take residence in disturbed and exposed soils are founding members of an unfolding story. “Weeds” literally lay the groundwork for soil fertility. These plants are so persistent not because they’re pernicious, but because they are prodigious at mining nutrients from soils where other plants would struggle to grow. When these nutrient-miners die back each growing season – which is the case for most plants we consider “weeds,” being annuals – they deposit their bounty onto the surface. Over time, mounting stocks of reclaimed nutrients fuel an increasingly complex soil food web, priming the ground for new plant communities to move in.

Using weeds to our advantage. Biomass in this bed was left in place to re-cover the soil after decompaction.

With this process in mind, students have applied a few techniques for prepping beds by incorporating rather than antagonizing weeds. Green mulching is one example, which entails pulling and cutting plants before they go to seed and laying them in place as nutrient-rich biomass. The benefits of green mulching are themselves layered – not only will decomposing plant matter feed soil microbiota and the plants we intend to grow, but the litter keeps the soil covered, maintaining moisture and temperature.

As a proponent of rethinking the role of weeds in the growing system, co-instructor and Farm Manager Jon Darby encourages everyone to know each weed and the services they provide.

For students, pulling a weed isn’t encouraged unless they can identify it first. Hence, weeding in the ecological growing space is a selective, mindful, and even meditative practice.

Many plants conventionally victimized by the trowel, the mower, or worse – the herbicide – are spared in this ethic, because their “weediness” is nullified by oft-overlooked benefits like feeding the soil, creating dappled shade, attracting beneficial insects, and, of course, providing free food and medicine (purslane, anyone?).

There’s no shortage of weed-redemption around the farm, from the RGTP to other programs like the Horn Farm’s foraging classes and Forager Training Program.

Harmony in Complexity: Mimicking Biodiversity

A symphony is a mosaic of sounds. As listeners, we’re captivated not by individual players, but by intentional groupings of instruments that dance with one another. Much the same can be said for healthy plant communities. Nature isn’t a stranger to monocrops – ecological succession, or natural changes in ecosystems over time, teaches us that plant communities can take many forms. But by and large, high diversity fosters productivity and a resilient whole.

With this frame of mind, RGTP students are learning how ecosystems can inspire how we map our crop systems. This doesn’t necessarily mean abandoning order. Rows and structures promote efficient harvests, and as members of the ecological community ourselves, it’s important to weigh our needs in the system. But even within limits, we can design plant communities that mirror how ecosystems are structured. In doing so, we also replicate the benefits of ecosystem structures, which buffer against weather, pest and disease pressure, and other unpredictable disturbances.

Students work among mixed-species plantings in the annual growing beds.

A classic example of this ecological planting style has deep roots on this continent. Testifying to the vast exchanges of knowledge and resources that traversed what we now call North America, countess Indigenous communities from the southwest to the Susquehanna Riverlands developed a method for planting three staple crops – corn, beans, and squash – in tight-knit groupings known as the Three Sisters. Many Indigenous farmers and growers continue to honor this legacy today, serving as leaders in ecological food production.

In a Three Sisters plot, each sister uplifts her two companions, enriching all three while creating a more resilient whole.

Towering corn provides sturdy scaffolding for vining beans to climb. In turn, the beans bring nourishment to the soil by increasing the availability of nitrogen. You may be familiar with beans as “nitrogen-fixers”; thanks to beneficial bacteria in their roots, beans and other legumes convert nitrogen from the atmosphere into a form that can be absorbed by plants, making them a choice cover crop in sustainable planting systems.

While beans and corn dance skyward in this way, their sibling, squash, delivers her own benefits on the ground below. Squash spreads horizontally, creating a dense and spiny understory that offers protection from herbivores while creating ample shade for the soil. She maintains everyone’s water reserves, even through the driest spells of summer, and her sisters return the favor: a nitrogen boost from beans, and gradual trickles of water from corn after rain.

Scenes from a three sisters demonstration plot planted at the Horn Farm Center in 2022.

The three sisters are just one time-tested example of what we can call plant guilds, or communities that, by virtue of their their togetherness, offer services for each of their members. RGTP students continue to engage with guilds and companionships that are informed by our our goals as growers. These goals can include soil-building (incorporating legumes), pest deterrence (alliums and brassicas), partitioning resources, and making the most of small spaces. Even aesthetics and “just for experiment’s sake” are valid goals for the playful fringes of the field (proving, for example, that fennel and peppers can indeed grow together!).

When it comes to companion planting, you’ll find no shortage of resources peddling overstated claims about which plants can and cannot go together. RGTP students take the extra steps of investigating the “whys” behind these claims, tracing plants back to the functions they serve within each mini-ecosystem we’re growing.

Critical thinking is another refrain that threads the course, as we interrogate commonly-held assumptions in gardening and farming that we often take for granted without knowing why. Why do we eradicate weeds and remove them from the planting space? Why do we till the soil? Do the benefits we presume outweigh the cons or create missed opportunities? What assumptions – ecological, generational, cultural, industrial – underlie conventional scripts about how food ought to be grown, or how we ought to handle problems like pests and diseases? What information, though conveyed to us as universal, is actually quite contextual to time, place, and growing conditions?

Continuous inquiry, curiosity, and record-keeping pervades in the field, especially when signs of struggle – expected and unexpected – become apparent

On that last query: working in such a place-based, context-specific medium as ecological growing, RGTP students are justifiably exhausted (and equally spurred!) by the same answer around every corner: “it depends …” It’s important to glean what we can from observable patterns across nature, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge the specific conditions of where we are growing to move forward with ecological sensibility and tact.

Scenes from a session dedicated to insect ID. Ecological thinking reminds us that 95 – 99% of insects are harmless or beneficial to human activities, so our interventions for the minority that do cause problems must be targeted in order to avoid needless harm to others that support the growing system.

From top left: Colorado potato beetles (Leptinotarsa decemlineata), cluster of beneficial parasitoid wasp eggs on cabbage seedling; harlequin cabbage bugs (Murgantia histrionica); tobacco hornworm (Manduca sexta) covered in beneficial Braconid wasp eggs

Orchestrating Perennials: Future Resilience from the Garden to the Farm

Most of the plants that take root across today’s farms and gardens are short-lived. Those that complete their entire life cycle in one growing season–germinating in the spring and dropping seeds by the fall–are called annuals. Think of tomatoes and all three sisters: corn, beans, and squashes. Biennials, you might then guess, complete their life cycle over two growing seasons, usually by producing hearty leaves in their first year and offspring in their second. Swiss chard, beets, and brassicas like kale and broccoli fall into this camp.

As the self-sustaining ecosystems neighboring our farms and gardens show us, however, nature tends toward perennials. These plants will live for multiple, even hundreds, of years, producing flowers, fruits, or other harvestable materials over many growing seasons without the need for re-planting or heavy intervention.

Let’s get back to thinking like an ecosystem here. Thinking in this way can only take us so far if we keep our sights fixed on the familiar archetypes of farming and gardening culture: the annuals and biennials.

The RGTP shows students how we can reimagine these conventional systems through ecological design, but ultimately, perennial gardens bring us closer than ever to the self-sufficiency and integration modeled by ecology.

So, while students have spent much of this season among the veggies, we’ve also taken time to dip our toes in the budding network of perennial growing systems taking root across the Horn Farm.

Establishment: prepping ground and sheet mulching for a perennial understory planting.

Tam shares how this element of the course brings not just new energy, but increasing importance to the course. After all, the RGTP is about equipping growers with versatile and adaptable skills, not just to foster healthy food ecosystems, but to do so through an uncertain future:

In the time that remains, I’m really looking forward to establishing (and re-establishing!) more perennial food spaces in our demo field. As the season progresses, and we’ve already seen some intense heat waves, the value of perennial systems has become more and more apparent. (Annuals are certainly worth the time and effort, but who doesn’t love a trusty mulberry tree that produces reliably every spring?!) I can’t wait to see what kinds of designs the RGTP participants create once they have the opportunity to put their brains into design mode. I’m expecting that some truly beautiful, diverse, and abundant spaces will take shape this year at Horn Farm!

On the ground at the Horn Farm Center, perennial growing systems are becoming increasingly common. Dense plantings of American black elderberries (Sambucus canadensis) line the edges of our demonstration field. Beneath alleys of mulberry (Morus alba), American plum (Prunus americana), and nut-bearing trees, herbaceous perennials like sochan (Rudbeckia laciniata) and bee balm (Monarda spp.) grace the soil. Even fallow plots awaiting new designs are arguably perennial, with their preponderance of edible “weeds” like nettles, dandelions, and violets regaling our foraging programs with enlarged notions of food.

As Tam mentions, long-lived perennial growing systems like these offer greater resilience in the face of an increasingly mercurial environment. Human-caused climate change has vexed our summers with extremes of heat, rain, and disease, but tree and shrub systems are better equipped for handling these pressures because they already do what we work so hard to replicate in the annual and biennial gardens. Their tenacious root systems keep the soil from eroding while managing inconsistent water inputs; their copious shade keeps soil cool on relentlessly sunny days; constant leaf debris and woody prunings feed soil biota continuously; and the crops they produce – especially nuts – offer us more calories, more versatility, and better storability than conventional crops.

Agroforestry touchpoints: from a forest garden design session to picking black raspberries (Rubus occidentalis) in June.

Students in the RGTP have gotten a taste of agroforestry through engaging with growing spaces that incorporate trees, shrubs, and other long-lived plants at the Horn Farm. They’ve also glimpsed ways to design these kinds of systems, learning about food forests and forest gardening. As Tam mentions, they’ll soon be turning design into action, supporting the creation of demonstration forest gardens that will serve future iterations of the RGTP, classes for the general public, and, undoubtedly, the ecological web we’re creating across the Horn Farm’s educational landscape.

Perennial plants, agroforestry, and concepts like forest gardening sound newfangled to many, but they constitute some of the oldest agricultural interactions between humans and the land. What we today call agroforestry systems predate the advent of annual-based agriculture the world over. So while the thrust of the RGTP is about thinking like an ecosystem to rethink our roles as growers, a more accurate verb for our relationship with the land might be one rekindling, reigniting, even reintegrating. Returning to our roots as custodians of wellbeing and longevity, and in so doing, becoming perennial ourselves.

Cadence: Regenerative Pathways for Food and Community

Nestled among the demonstration gardens, one Three Sister’s plot conceals something peculiar. Peer through the squash leaves and you’ll see finger-like structures protruding from the bases of some of the corn. Bendy and blunted with gel-caked tips, these structures look like something out of a Seussical forest.

One of our students – an enthusiast for rare seeds – gifted us with kernels from a variety of corn known to fix nitrogen. Like the root nodules of legumes that host nitrogen-fixing bacteria, these structures – which are actually above-ground roots – perform a similar dance. They attract bacteria with sugar-rich mucilage in order to farm nitrogen from the atmosphere.

Upon planting this curious corn, the RGTP crew coined it “The People’s Corn.” The name stuck – a fond term of endearment for an experimental plot that, we hope, will yield nitrogen-fixing corn seed for future seasons. The People’s Corn is always on students’ minds: “How’s The People’s Corn?” “Let’s go check on The People’s Corn,” “Squash isn’t looking so hot in The People’s Corn.” “Ants are farming aphids in The People’s Corn!”

We’re all familiar with giving a namesake to something you love. For the Horn Farm, this makes The People’s Corn an emblem of the RGTP’s greater vision.

The least we can do is empower folks to regenerate the land and our relationship to it; in the grand scheme, we’re striving to regenerate peoples’ sense of connection with one another. Slowly but surely, by nurturing a healthier landscape together, we’re growing food, fodder, and well-(g)rounded community.

History shows us that food grown ecologically has always carried community. In fact, to work regeneratively with the land, we need community. The long game of rekindling an ecologically-imaginable food system demands as many tending and curious hands as we can muster. It’s a bold about-face to the trajectory that industrial agriculture has taken, severing more and more of us from the sources of our lives.

So when we lead with thinking like an ecosystem, mimicking ecology in the growing space is just part of the symphony. A thriving ecosystem is itself a network of players, each contributing to the whole.

Thus, through tending ecological food systems, nature also teaches us to tend and grow our communities.

We’re grateful to this year’s first RGTP for moving in that spirit with us; we’re just a small collective of caretakers dedicated to learning and growing with the land, but with resilient community-creation in the works – from the plants to the people – we’re sowing seeds for a regenerative future.

For the Whole Stream: Riparian Buffers

Part 3: Beyond the Stream

Click the links to read For the Whole Stream Part 1: Upstream and Part 2: Downstream

For the Whole Stream is the first installment of a new series called the Horn Farm Ecosystem. Through periodic 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.

“… riparian buffers represent another example of an agroforestry system that’s a win-win for ecological outcomes and community well-being and livelihoods.”

– Sarah Derouin (2021)

Our visits to the Horn Farm’s riparian buffer in this blog series have covered the extensive environmental benefits of restoring plant life in streamside areas. From capturing sediments, pollutants, and carbon upstream to healing water and habitat downstream, it’s apparent that our impetus for bringing 17,000 trees and shrubs to the Horn Farm Center comes from the awareness of a beneficial feedback loop that ripples outward. At home, we can do our part to slow erosion, uptake more water, create more shade, and support a myriad of birds, insects, and aquatic life; at the same time, by helping lands and waters at home, we take the responsibility necessary to address an ailing Susquehanna River and Chesapeake Bay. Land care travels like water: fluid and pooling. In time, the small becomes sweeping.

But while the ecological benefits of buffer planting are promising, it’s important for us to avoid positioning ourselves as sidelined observers of these benefits. We are, of course, not just nature sentimentalists: we are embedded in and dependent on the land that we are restoring. Capturing water and mitigating pollutants directly impacts our wellbeing; our breathing sways in time with the respiration of the green life around us; insects pollinate our food and nurture these soils. The land right around us has always provided more materials for humans than our modern imaginations can fathom. It’s essential that we recognize these facts as climate change pushes us into increasingly unfamiliar terrain and challenges the standard of living we’ve taken for granted. Recognizing the services of our local landscapes, and RE-localizing our impacts, are the steps we need to take to secure a livable future.

With this vision of a functioning ecosystem that thrives not in our absence, but in our presence, the Horn Farm’s riparian buffers become more than healing spaces for the land.

They’re learning spaces too. We’re learning (or better, re-learning) ways to unite the needs of natural cycles with the material and caloric needs of people nearby. It’s a vision reconciling abundance in a world where ecological and societal wellbeing are often polarized: we CAN prioritize the protection of water, soil, and habitat while supplying goods for people, with annual harvests that actually promote the health of the buffer. Luckily for us, there is a word predating our work that describes this mosaic of purposes: multifunctional.

Volunteers helping out at a buffer planting workday in in the spring of 2021.
View of a vegetated area in the riparian buffer, July 2023.

The What and Why of Multifunctional Riparian Buffers

Generally speaking, a multifunctional riparian buffer is a vegetated streamside zone that improves and maintains stream health while providing direct and material benefits for the people who interact with them. These benefits often include perennial fruit and nut crops, raw natural goods like lumber and fiber, and other products that can be harvested year after year for use on site or to garner additional income.

Pennsylvania has a history of state-wide initiatives to incentivize riparian buffer planting on stream-adjacent agricultural lands, but the multifunctional appeal is a relatively new addition. In many ways, it’s strategic. One of the state’s original programs for funding buffer installations–the Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program, or CREP–prohibits farmers from generating income from the buffers it finances. While this is positive for the wild spaces it compensates, it’s a tough sell. Many farmers, especially those that operate on a small-scale, are reluctant to sacrifice acreage that could be used for crop yields. Additionally, while some to all of the planting costs are covered by the program, farmers are expected to handle the upkeep required for their riparian areas to succeed–a tall ask for folks who are already juggling demands. Taking farmland out of production like this easily sours the taste of ecological restoration despite its virtues, partly contributing to the decline in enrollment that has recently pressured the state to explore other possibilities for meeting its targets.*

So, in PA’s latest efforts to “reboot” riparian restoration, multifunctional buffer design has catapulted to the front of incentives available to streamside farmers. At the very least, it’s having a moment. From a purely economic standpoint, allowing landowners to monetize areas set aside for ecological restoration is more attractive than restoration alone. Fruit and nut crops from woody plants and florals can be lucrative, even exceeding profits of conventional row crops. Design inspiration that simultaneously favors stream health and harvest capacity is out there, primarily focused on the creation of “zones” for certain uses, with the least “touched”/most protected area residing nearest the stream, and diverse production areas spanning the periphery–hosting crops like nut trees, fruit trees, berry bushes, and ornamentals.

As we hope to capture through the Horn Farm’s buffer, the selection and placement of plants can be creative, ecologically sensible, and economically viable, not to mention restorative for us: reawakening an awareness of our material and emotional relationship to the local and natural.

Assessing a row of willows planted in our riparian buffer in advance of a volunteer workday, where we spent the morning coppicing (taking cuttings) from these plantings for basketry and brushwood bundles (December 2022).

Indeed, with design schemes, management manuals, and news features abounding (this blog being no exception), it can be easy to forget that the ideas underpinning multifunctional riparian buffers are not new. Take the entire human history of land tending, and farming land with this holistic approach becomes prominent, not peripheral. In fact, we might consider Pennsylvania’s shift to multifunctional buffer planting an echo of land use strategies and ethics that pre-date the state.

Prior to the onslaught of forest clearing for colonial monocropping, Indigenous peoples in this bioregion altered landscapes and tended forests in ways that demanded much less of the soils and waters. Versed in ecology, they engaged in the  “ … deliberate maintenance of trees and other woody perennials in fields and pastures [ … ] help(ing) meet the demand for a variety of goods and services, while ensuring the forest was not destroyed” (Alcorn, 1990). Fire ecology was one approach that spanned the area where we live. Folks leveraged routine controlled burns to supply nutrient-rich ash to soils and favor the plant types that provided food for themselves and the wildlife they hunted. The aim of this and other indigenous land practices resembles the refrains we see in the programs and articles justifying multifunctional buffers: actually building soil and ecological richness while providing for people.

These modern buffers are the outcome of land degradation and agricultural overreach, so they certainly don’t mirror the ways indigenous peoples managed landscapes as a continuous and proactive practice; but they are a way of re-remembering interactions where the land is a subject, not an object. Even as we partly impose human will on the land, our labors foster ecological well being in the long term. The land moves from a pantry to an exchange: a “give and take” rather than an unfulfilled borrowing, and what’s given is more diverse in utility and nutrition.

Multifunctionality defies the notion that regenerating ecosystems and producing a harvest are inherently at odds.

The buffer is a new collaboration of old ideas, applied with the urgency the ailing land asks of us.

Woodland Steward Wilson Alvarez teaching a class in the riparian buffer (March 2023).

Meeting the Horn Farm’s Multifunctional Buffer

So who are the flora animating our particular buffer? Before exploring some examples of what they may do for us and the ecosystem, it’s worth noting their commonalities. From the dogwoods to the willows to the sycamores, all are native, perennial, and capable of withstanding periods of extended moisture. This means that human hands in the buffer–and even human vehicles as need-be–will not compromise the integrity of the soil, water, and habitat that our planting primarily addresses. Perennial plants, once established, require less management and are therefore less intensive from an agricultural standpoint. Because of their longer staying time and adaptability (being rooted in the ground year after year instead of half a year!), they are better capable of reducing soil erosion, absorbing and diverting superfluous chemicals, conserving soil water, providing above- and below-ground habitat, withstanding weather impacts, and curbing our dependence on fossil fuels for management. Long story short, they fulfill the ecological goals of buffer planting to such a degree that visitation and harvest themselves still protect the stream.

It’s also worth noting that, to many, these perennial trees and shrubs are less familiar than the cereals, oilseeds, and vegetables of annual agriculture, and many are surprised to learn about their diverse uses. Therefore, the buffer contributes to local knowledge about what native plants have to offer us, and over time, it can be an incubator for new “markets” of raw materials that are currently outsourced because they are not locally available at scale. Sourcing local food is becoming increasingly common, but the buffer offers even more: things like medicine, oils, craft materials, timber, and biofuel–all seemingly beyond the realm of local availability, as our globalized economy would have us think.

“Human use” need not even be exclusive to our bodies and households. Most of the plants that make up the Horn Farm’s riparian buffer are capable of “live staking,” or producing shoots that can be pruned and “staked” into the ground to develop into an entirely new plant. This is an evolved characteristic of wetland- and streamside-dwelling plants: an ability to sprout from severed stems and branches as a response to living in shifting and unpredictable wet environments. For renewing natural lands at the Horn Farm Center, the implications are exciting. The landscape provides us with a place-based restoration nursery that will support future planting and rewilding, both on our 186 acres and in the places our students, volunteers, and community supporters are working to bolster nature. It should go without saying that ecological restoration falls under that header of “human use.”

Cuttings arranged for different uses during a willow coppicing volunteer workday in January 2023. The cuttings on the right are suitable for live staking. This means that they’ll bud and grow if inserted into the ground in early spring. The cuttings on the left were taken home for decoration and weaving experiments.

A sampling of the native plants that are making a home in our multifunctional riparian buffer are described in the drop-downs below:

American Hazelnut (Corylus americana)

The American hazelnut, which flourishes in disturbed sites, not only provides shelter and highly nutritious food for wildlife, but its nuts can be sold and eaten as well as used to make flours, candies, butters, oils, moisturizers, tinctures, and essential oils, all of which provide a great source of income.

Black Willow (Salix nigra)

Black willows thrive in moist, streamside soils and have fibrous roots that mitigate stream bank erosion. They contain salicylic acid with fever-reducing and pain-killing properties. Like many other shrub willows, dried and rehydrated stems can be used for weaving. For examples of willow baskets, check out Foggy Blossom Farm (Western PA) and Living Willow Farm (OH).

Elderberry (Sambucus canadensis)

Known as “Nature’s Medicine Chest,” in addition to providing fruits consumed by wildlife and flowers that beckon birds and butterflies, elderberry berries are used to make juice, pies, syrup, jellies, cough drops, and wine. Its flowers can be used in herbal tea or to flavor jellies and candies. Elderberry is also a source of vitamin C, fiber, and antioxidants, and its products sell for high prices.

American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis)

Sycamore, one of the largest tree species in eastern North America, is exceptionally well-suited for rehabilitating degraded sites and can withstand the compacted soils and air pollution prevalent in suburban and urban areas. Its large stump provides shelter for diverse animal species, and with its grandeur, sycamore is valued for providing shade and beauty. Increasingly, like black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia), sycamore is planted in silvopasture: systems designed to incorporate trees and livestock on grazing land to help sequester carbon and improve ecological and animal wellneing.

Dozens of additional species occupy our multifunctional riparian buffer, making whole the diverse interactions that are possible in the space: food, crafts, medicine, infrastructure, live staking, habitat for nesting, breeding, feeding, and more. A full listing of these plants and their personalities may be on its way, but for now, it’s worth mentioning a few others: Arrowwood Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum), Black Raspberry (Rubus occidentalis), Black Walnut (Juglans nigra), Common Buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis), Pawpaw (Asimina triloba), Pussy Willow (Salix discolor), Red Osier and Silky Dogwoods (Cornus sericea and Cornus amomum), Sandbar Willow (Salix interior), Serviceberry (Amelanchier laevis), and Smooth Alder (Alnus serrulata).

Hand-drawn map of the Horn Farm’s 6-acre multifunctional riparian buffer, created by Seasonal Land Steward Rue Sterner in summer 2022 and labeled by Education and Communications Intern Mel Beans in summer 2023. Plantings in the top left and center are differentiated by species, while the rowed plantings on the right are randomized to maximize biodiversity–a component of the Miyawaki planting method (blog forthcoming!).

Hands and Hearts on the Land

Conservation has a way of suggesting that the removal of human influence is the key requirement for the renewal of fully-functioning ecosystems. This may be true to some extent, but it leaves us with a dichotomy: where nature is preserved over “there” and we proceed with our business over “here.” What if the philosophy of conservation was applied to “here” too? What if, rather than treating our needs as sacrifices for the health of the land, we worked to temper those needs and fulfill them with sensitivity to the cycles, limitations, and teachings of the land? It may seem like a bold proposition, but our human record tells us that the way we’re living now is the exception: that living for the benefit of soil, water, and biodiversity is rooted in the human story.

Community members practicing the fundamentals of basket weaving using cuttings from willows grown at the Horn Farm Center (March 2023).

The proposition also becomes less daunting when we approach “we” locally. From the black locust tree’s durability for building materials to the medicinal offerings of elderberry, black willow, black raspberry, and others, we can recognize that biodiversity provides far more in abundance than ecosystem services and the joy of time spent in nature (though these are deeply valuable in their own right). By embracing tending and harvest as companions of land renewal, we can reacquaint ourselves with the true extent of the land’s bounty and grow in our self-sufficiency. Altogether, we can redefine our sense of home. In envisioning a relationship between land and people where both can thrive in harmony and reciprocity, our riparian buffer is a model-in-progress.

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

– Aldo Leopold

*In 2016, the PA Department of Conservation and Natural Resources set a goal of planting 95,000 acres of riparian forest buffers by 2025, in line with deadlines for federal and state Chesapeake Bay cleanup programs. Pennsylvania is currently behind on its commitments.

Sycamores, black willows, and black locusts basking in the summer sun (July 2023).

Stay tuned for our next blog on planting trees using the Miyawaki forest method, publishing in August!

We’re grateful for the funding partners who have sponsored our riparian buffer efforts:

6 acre restoration (2018):

10 acre restoration (2020):

Our heartfelt gratitude also extends to the hundreds of volunteers who have attended planting, tending, and harvest workdays between 2018 and today.

About the Authors:

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.

Mel Beans

Mel is a rising junior at Franklin & Marshall College pursuing a B.A. in environmental studies and public policy. After taking an environmental justice course and diving into research on “forever chemicals,” she realized that she wanted to pursue a career that actively acknowledges and addresses the ways in which the environment is deeply interconnected with and integral to our wellbeing. She jumped on the opportunity to intern at Horn Farm Center, seeing how our mission aligns with her passions and career goals. As the Education & Communications Intern, she’s grateful to contribute to HFC’s essential role in demonstrating not only sustainable, but regenerative and resilient agriculture by assisting with research and outreach. In her free time, she enjoys being with friends and family and in nature, thrifting, listening to music, and watching video essays. On campus, she is a house advisor and the president of Catastrophic Relief Alliance, an F&M organization that addresses housing needs locally and nationally, especially in the wake of natural disasters.

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 periodic 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.