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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
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.
Explore Classes: hornfarmcenter.org/classes/
Explore Training Programs: hornfarmcenter.org/training-programs/
Explore Tours: hornfarmcenter.org/tours/
Explore Volunteering: hornfarmcenter.org/volunteer/
Explore the Land: hornfarmcenter.org/virtual-tour/
Explore Business Sponsorships: hornfarmcenter.org/sponsorship/
Donate: hornfarmcenter.org/donate/
About the Author:
Andrew Leahy (Community Engagement Coordinator)
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.