Who We Are

Please contact us at the following

Wellspring Forest Farm
Elizabeth & Steve Gabriel
6164 Deer Run Lane
Trumansburg, NY 14886

607-342-2825

email: farmers@wellspringforestfarm.com
(send us an email if you want to join our e-list for updates on blog posts, events, and more!)

 About us

Wellspring Forest Farm, managed by Elizabeth and Steve Gabriel, is a farm and homestead where we are committed to regenerating the landscape to be healthy, diverse and resilient. We believe that trees, forests, and animals form the base of a regenerative agricultural system. We actively promote the long-term health of our land with multifunctional species that benefit the ecosystem while yielding a variety of products.


In practice, we grow gourmet mushrooms (shiitake, oysters, lions mane, and stropharia), tap trees for maple syrup, garden annual and perennial veggies and fruits, plant trees as wind buffers, coppice material, food and fodder, establish ponds and waterways, and graze heritage breed animals (ducks, and soon pigs and sheep). Our work is inspired by the concepts, ethics and practices of Permaculture and Agroforestry. See our systems page for more details.

Our farm is perched on a Southwest facing slope in the small town of Mecklenburg, which sits almost exactly between lakes Cayuga and Seneca in the Finger Lakes region of New York.

Elizabeth and Steve are both avid lover's of nature, being outside, and sharing and learning from each other and our friends and community. We both work part-time at Cornell University in the Cooperative Extension, sharing the research-based knowledge of the college with the greater public.

Elizabeth is also a part-time Yoga teacher and prior to moving to Ithaca spent 5 years co-founding and directing Common Good City Farm, an innovative urban farm project in Washington, DC. She was raised in Rochester, NY.

Steve has lived in the Ithaca area for almost his whole life. He is co-founder of the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute and also wrote a book on Forest Farming with Ken Mudge. He currently works for the Cornell Small Farms Program as Extension Agroforestry Specialist.

Also on the farm are the tag-team duo of Vida and Sadie, who together comprise everything that is the canine species - Vida is mellow and highly loyal, Sadie is high energy and has a mind of her own. In addition to being a pair of devoted and loving companions, they are avid rodent hunters and predator deterrents on the farm.