WHO WE ARE

Welcome to the Common Ground Festival

Join us for the 2nd year of our Common Ground Festival, a celebration of sustainable living and regenerative agriculture set on two beautiful farm properties in Northumberland County. Hosted by Foragers Farms and Headwaters Farm, this festival invites you to connect with the land, learn from passionate community leaders, and immerse yourself in the rhythms of nature.

What to Expect:

Activity Stations: Engage in activities like taking honey off the hive, creating art with natural dyes, learning to build a shelter, baking with a wood-fired oven. Stations are sprinkled around the property—hop on a scenic wagon ride and see what you discover!
Expert-Led Tours: Explore the diverse ecosystems of our host farms as well as the meadows, forest and wetlands that surround them. Find out how to plant and care for backyard trees, or how to plant a vegetable or flower garden. Learn about the people’s who once populated this area or ways to build with natural materials. And much more!
Local Food & Music: Enjoy meals prepared with fresh, local ingredients and relax and enjoy live performances from regional musicians.
Family-Friendly Activities: Activities suitable for all ages to learn and grow together.
Community Fair: Meet our wide-ranging collection of local organizations, artisans, environmentalists and businesses that are passionate about local sustainability solutions

Our Why!

We have seen first hand the benefits of visitors coming to our farms for various reasons such as concerts, CSA pickups, workshops, nature programs, community circles, farm store visits, tours, volunteering, and more. Many walks of life have woven their way onto our lands and we feel grateful to have met them all. Common Ground Festival is a way of bringing a lot of these folks and others together to deepen these old and new relationships, to connect them with mentors, and ultimately create a community that they feel they can rely on.

@foragersfarms@headwatersfarm.ca

Linda & Tony bought Headwaters Farm in the fall of 2012 to live a more peaceful and self-sustainable existence, closing the gap between field and table. Headwaters is an 80-acre farm which is a mixture of field, forest and wetland. They live in an eco-friendly, sustainable, straw-bale home that they designed and built for their family and business.

Our community of farms sit on land that was visited almost 9,000 years ago when the first peoples move north into Ontario. We have found artifacts that are almost twice as old as the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Tony and Linda hope that the farming techniques that they embrace will help to ensure the health of the land for many generations to come. They currently have a homestead with a member operated community garden, goats, meat birds, laying hens and a horse.

In 2017 Erin and Tyler reached out to Tony and Linda about land access. Erin had already volunteered at their farm the year before. When they decided to level up their love for gardening they decided to figure out a way to make it a career. After many meetings they came up with a plan that both Headwaters Farm and Foragers Farms could benefit from. That spring they broke ground thanks to the help of horse power tilling.

It took them years to regenerate the soil through cover crop and adding natural amendments. They felt they could finally call themselves farmers after a few seasons under their belt. Eventually Erin and Tyler purchased their portion of the land as their business kept expanding. They continue to have weekly dinners with Headwaters Farm amongst many other collaborations, along with partners @randeesbees and @marissasherbgarden