About us

Benedictine Farm is a working farm with a barn, flower fields, honey bees, chickens, walking paths, a 50-foot greenhouse, a private potager, and a partially walled garden for “pick your own” vegetables, herbs, and flowers. We will be open by appointment in Spring of 2025 and to the public in Spring 2026 for you to experience the cultivated gardens, greenhouse sales, and walking the paths.

In 2013, Cassandra and her son found a small, condemned farmhouse with a plot of land in Worthington, Pennsylvania. With determination and hard work, the foundation of the house was built into a home. The first garden surrounding the cottage was established in 2015. The design of the environment and plants chosen were based on the early Christian monasteries of the Middle Ages. Immersive study and travel have informed the project, with gardens and structures depicted from literature, paintings, historical sites and manuscripts. In 2023, Benedictine Farm was able to expand with the addition of Carpenter/Beekeeper Adam and a new son, Isaac. The gardens of Benedictine Farm are planted to evoke the gardens that provided sustenance and spiritual refreshment within the early monastery. To understand the meaning of the garden in Middle Ages Christendom, one must consider, safety, beauty, knowledge, and utility.

Although nature was indeed revered as God’s artwork (poiema), it was not always perceived as something in which to indulge. This was due, partly to the weariness of pagan worship of recent Greece and secondly because it was not physically safe, due to war and disease. Here, in this moral plight, comes a unique relationship between beauty and nature. The walled garden, or ’garden room’ acted as a utopia, an Eden, in which one could be with God in a ‘controlled’ environment. The beauty that derives from the flora, was perceived as a Divine Beauty, not lavish and adorned by the hand of man, but a fragrant vehicle to connect their spirits to the heavens. Furthering knowledge was an integral part of the Benedictine order. Today, we are indebted to them for recording invaluable knowledge from the Middle East on plants, medicine, and garden design, meticulously documented in illuminated manuscripts. New plant specimens were brought to the monasteries in pursuit of beauty and knowledge. At Benedictine Farm, we have been inspired by these aspects of The Benedictine order and value the beauty, utility, self-sufficiency and sustainability that they have been practicing for 1,500 years.