Catskills Experience Book the walk February – March
Maple syrup
Late winter
Tap, boil, bottle. The run starts when nights freeze and days thaw, so the date moves every year — we announce it about a week ahead.
Workshops
You cannot make maple syrup in July.
Every workshop we run is set by the plant, not by us. What follows is the order the forest hands things over. Free or low cost, and you go home with whatever you made.
The year
Four harvests, in the order they arrive.
June – August
Jewelweed salve
High summer
Cut the plant, render the salve, take home your jar. Jewelweed grows where poison ivy grows, which is the reason it works.
September – October
Mushroom powders & tinctures
Early fall
Identify, dry, grind, steep. Reishi and turkey tail come off the dead hemlocks after the first cool rains.
October – November
Witch hazel
Late fall
Cut and steep the bark after the leaves drop, when the shrub is flowering and nothing else is. Bottled, it keeps a year.
What's scheduled
Nothing on the calendar right now.
Dates follow the plants rather than the other way round, so we set them a week or two ahead instead of months. Tell us what you would like to make and roughly when, and we will write to you when that one comes round.
What a workshop is like.
Two hours, outdoors, standing up. We start with the plant still in the ground and end with the thing in your hands, which means there is a lot of cutting, stirring, waiting, and asking why. Nothing is pre-prepared for you except the parts that would otherwise take a week.
Take the jewelweed salve: we cut the plant together, then render it down with local beeswax, coconut or olive oil, and your choice of frankincense or rosemary. You leave with a jar of the forest's own answer to poison ivy. That one we teach in partnership with TravelSchooling.
Children are welcome and are generally the ones who finish first. Adults arrive assuming they are supervising and end up making their own.
If you would rather buy the finished article than make it, we sell a few of these from the property — see From the Land.
For schools & groups
Bring your class.
Most of what we run is arranged directly with a teacher, a scout leader, or a homeschool group — you tell us roughly when, and we find a date that suits the weather and the season. Groups of up to about twenty work best. Everything is led by the trail's official NY DEC forest steward.
Tell us the age range and rough group size and we'll come back with what we can do and what to bring.
- Who it's for
- School groups, homeschool co-ops, scouts, and families
- Group size
- Up to about 20
- Cost
- Tours and hikes are free. Workshops are free or low cost.
- Where
- Kerhonkson, NY · Ulster County