Our Workplaces

The farm cares for a herd of twenty dairy cows and their youngstock, a small flock of sheep, and herd of pigs. The cows are milked by hand twice daily by our dedicated team of farmers.

The work of the farmers follows the demands of the seasons: hay making, fencing, mucking out barns and stalls, tending compost heaps, servicing machinery, and maintaining field boundaries. Following the principles of Biodynamic agriculture, the farm seeks to holistically enliven and maintain the soils, grasslands, and marginal lands of its 260 plus acres with regular application of the Biodynamic spray and compost preparations.

The seeds that are sown in our gardens were grown and cleaned by the dedicated members of the Turtle Tree Seed Biodynamic Seed Initiative. Our crew operates with a level of expertise and precision that is uniquely required of seed growers, all the while maintaining strict adherence to the standards of our organic and Demeter Biodynamic certifications.

We tend to our many crops throughout the growing season before harvesting them when they go to seed and performing several rounds of cleaning and quality control.

Turtle Tree Seed sells our vegetable, fruit, herb, and flower seeds online at turtletreeseed.org.

The Weavery is a light-filled social space where we create stunning one-of-a-kind textiles on wooden looms. These include colorful aprons, napkins, and placemats that we use in our households, as well as the tote bags our bakers fill with bread loaves for their daily deliveries.

Some of us are “master” level weavers who have been honing the craft for decades, and some of us are beginning our weaving journey and fine-tuning our motor skills. Each piece belongs to a single weaver, who is able to return and continue their project daily.

Like our other workplaces, our Bakery is built around an image of the complete process: from grain grown to loaf offered. Our households rely on our bakers to provide sourdoughs and other loaves, as well as rolls for our weekly Bible evenings.

We mix and weigh our doughs, and proof and score them before they’re baked in our beloved wood-fired bread oven. Our bakers also package and sell our granola and cookies to local retailers, and we’re always experimenting in the search for a new community favorite, be it bagels or baguettes.

From tender greenhouse lettuces to hardy root crops, our gardeners feed our community. We tend to our vegetable beds daily throughout the growing season, growing flavorful squash, eggplant, garlic, beets, brassicas, tomatoes, and more. And each week, we stock the shelves of our garden shed, where everyone in Camphill Village is welcome to pick up the fresh ingredients they need for the wholesome meals we prepare and serve in our households.

Foods grown in the Village are also prepared and served in our Coffee Shop and in the Café, which are open to the public.

The sweet aroma of beeswax invites you into our Candleshop before you reach the door. Our all-natural beeswax candles burn brighter, longer, and require no additional perfumes. We cut our wicks to size and prepare our dipping boards before adding layer upon colorful layer of wax to our hand-dipped taper candles of all sizes.

We also pour melted wax into candle molds to create pine cones, autumn pumpkins, flowers, spring lambs, bunnies and more.

Our candles are used in every household in Camphill Village, as well as sold nationwide to Waldorf schools, Camphill communities, and through our online shop.

Our activities in the Bookbindery are ever evolving. We spend hours creating hand-sewn journals from scratch—an art that requires patience and skill.

We create many other items using scraps from our journals. These include the matchboxes that adorn our dining tables, as well as a line of origami and paper beaded jewelry. We also work with many different colors, shapes, and textures to create seasonal greeting cards, where the creativity of each person in our studio really shines. We enjoy exploring new processes together, and we appreciate the creative input of our peers in this space.

Our woodworkers take great pride in creating attractive and functional cutting boards, furniture, children’s toys, and more. We’re all able to contribute in different ways, whether it’s sanding our interlocking wooden children’s blocks, or drilling holes to accommodate their wooden pegs. Our Woodshop contains all the machinery we need to make beautiful beds and other furniture for our households. We use lumber from our own property and we’re fortunate to receive hardwood donations from a local flooring manufacturer.

With many years of experience among the members of our Woodshop crew, this is a knowledge sharing space, where we experiment often.

The Healing Plant Garden is a peaceful place, where honeybees buzz around blooms of lavender, mallow, and other plants that are prized for their medicinal benefits. Flowers and herbs are grown and harvested by the Healing Plant crew and are transformed into lotions, culinary mixes, and teas, all of which are enjoyed by our community.

Decades of experience among members of our garden crew inform the way we care for our soil and plants, as well as how we dry and sift through our aromatic herbs. The Healing Plant is Demeter certified, the highly respected standard for biodynamic agriculture.

Managing our acreage is no small undertaking. Unlike our community’s other workspaces that are generally in one place, the Estate Crew is an efficient team that operates all over the Village, taking care of us. They clear tree limbs and other debris from our roads and foot paths, they responsibly manage our forests to make sure we all have enough firewood for the winter, they shovel snow so our walkways are safe and accessible, and they perform the sweetest task of all: tapping the Village maple trees and making hundreds of gallons of fresh maple syrup in the spring.

We are living life to the fullest in our community, which means our 22 lifesharing households require steady upkeep and wholesome meals. We vacuum, fold laundry, and prepare lunch together all morning—learning how to cut and roast vegetables and devise new creative dishes. After a morning of homemaking, we return to our own households (or a friend’s house) where our home and lunch have been prepared for us in a similar way. We might then spend the afternoon in a craft studio or outside on the land, or help in a different household for the remainder of the day.

Our Café crew spends the week preparing fresh wholesome dishes for our twice weekly community meals. We so enjoy serving the many members of our community the menus we create using fresh ingredients from our gardens and from the raised beds just outside the Café kitchen. We also make the soups for our friends in the Coffee Shop next door, as well as quiches and sweet confections that go great with a cup of coffee or tea. Our awesome Café meals are open to the public. Learn how to buy a ticket here.

Whether it’s keeping track of library cards or making sure we’re stocked with plenty of mugs for hot cocoa, there’s much to do in our Coffee Shop & Gift Shop space. The Coffee Shop & Gift Shop shares our Village Green building with the Café and Bakery, and is an important social destination for our community and a popular lunch spot for locals. We serve fresh lunches and specialty coffees, and keep our Gift Shop shelves stocked and looking sharp.

The Village Co-op is where we go for great olive oil and cheeses, fruits, bulk grains, and lots of organic body products. The Co-op crew spends their days making sure inventory is up to date, items are weighed out properly, and peanut butter is made. Many visitors enter this sweet market each morning in need of some assistance, and our helpful Co-op staff are ready to find the items their households need before sending them on their way with groceries in hand.